Tristan Keuris at 80

Tristan Keuris (Amersfoort 1946 – Amsterdam 1996) would have turned eighty this year. A composer of international stature and a unique voice in Dutch music: intense, colourful and uncompromising, and still very much alive. On 2 October, the eve of his birthday, the Animato Quartet and clarinettist Jelmer de Moed celebrate at Classical NOW! with a festive evening devoted to his chamber music. During the concert, the musicians present their new album of Keuris’s chamber works, released on Challenge Records.

A story in sound

‘An infernal jealousy of beautiful things’ – that is how Keuris described the impulse behind his composing. Hear his music and you understand at once what he meant. While many of his contemporaries lost themselves in systems and theories, Keuris wanted one thing only: to tell a story in sound. His idols were not Boulez or Stockhausen, but Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Stravinsky. The result is music that sounds unmistakably modern yet sweeps you along: full of sudden contrasts, glowing colours and melodic lines that linger.

The First String Quartet (1982) shows Keuris’s art in full: three movements conceived as a single great arc. A masterpiece. He wrote the Clarinet Quintet (1988) for the centenary of the Concertgebouw. Across its four movements, the clarinet conducts a dialogue with the strings that deliberately harks back to the two great models in the genre: the quintets of Mozart and Brahms. The Canzone for solo clarinet (1990) was written as the set piece for the Tromp Music Competition: seven minutes in which virtuosity is never an end in itself. As its title promises, this piece sings: from the first note to the last.

And then Mozart himself

Keuris considered Mozart one of his favourite composers. Which is why this celebratory evening also features Mozart himself: the String Quartet No. 22 in B flat major, K. 589. Mozart completed it in Vienna in May 1790, the second of his three ‘Prussian’ quartets, intended for King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, himself an accomplished amateur cellist. That explains the strikingly songful cello part, which regularly climbs above the viola. This is late Mozart at his richest. He wrote the quartet shortly after his own Clarinet Quintet (1789), precisely the sound world to which Keuris would pay homage two centuries later.

The musicians

The Animato Quartet is widely regarded as the most promising young string quartet in the Netherlands and received the Kersjes Prize, the country’s foremost award for chamber music talent, in 2023. In early 2025 the quartet won first prize at the international Irene Steels-Wilsing Foundation Competition. Clarinettist Jelmer de Moed has been a welcome ‘fifth member’ of the quartet for more than a decade. At Classical NOW! they are by now regular guests who surprise time and again with imaginative programmes.