Mikrokosmos and Makrokosmos

The very smallest and the very largest. Thinkers through the ages have held that each mirrors the other. With Mikrokosmos, Béla Bartók composed worlds in miniature. A generation later, George Crumb answered with Makrokosmos: music as vast as the starry sky.

An ensemble led by Daniel Rowland and Maja Bogdanović opens the evening with Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss, in the version for seven strings. Strauss was eighty when he completed it. Everything changes, everything flows, and in that change much is lost as well. Strauss captured both the momentum and the melancholy: the strings weave their lines together without pause, and at the close he quotes the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.

In Music for a Summer Evening, Crumb uses the forces of Bartók’s sonata for two pianos and two percussionists, but with a far larger arsenal of percussion. He called it a “cosmic drama” in five movements, with titles such as Nocturnal Sounds and Music of the Starry Night. We will be filling the stage of the Paleiskerk with instruments.

The Toonzetters Ensemble first plays a selection from Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, in the composer’s own version for two pianos, and ends with the source of it all: the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion of 1937, rugged, full of suspense and driven by extraordinary rhythmic energy. The ensemble consists of four musicians who each have a flourishing solo career: pianists Ramon van Engelenhoven and Shane van Neerden, and percussionists Agostinho Sequeira and Arjan Jongsma. They have been playing together since 2024, and Bartók’s sonata features on their debut album.