“Creativity is an unconscious act of insanity, in a burst of which the truth is born. No matter how beautiful or disgusting it may seem to people far from madness, its value is beyond doubt, both for the author and for those able to sense its invisible beauty. After all, gratitude for endless trials and suffering brings joy and blissful emptiness …”
Maxim Shalygin
pop-up concert
Friday 2 July 2021, 19:30 & 21:30
The Hague: Paleiskerk
Maxim shalygin’s
percussion Marathon
Daniel Rowland violin
Konstantyn Napolov percussion
Christian Smith percussion
Ryoko Imai percussion
Mervyn Groot percussion
Ricardo Oliveira percussion
Maxim Shalygin percussion
Programme
Maxim Shalygin
The Phaeacians
Musique de Fer
Red Bells of Joan Miró
Octopus (première)
Concerto for solo violin and five percussionists
Maxim Shalygin’s Percussion Marathon is a co-production with the Shapeshift Ensemble and was made possible through a grant from the Dutch Performing Arts Fund and thanks to the support of Adams Percussion and Pustjens Percussion.
An enormous battery of percussion
As a soloist, the well-known percussionist Konstantyn Napolov combines the world premiere of the brand new solo piece Octopus with the previously written Musique de fer for Thai gongs. In Red Bells of Joan Miró, he is joined by three fellow percussionists. In the Violin Concerto, five percussionists create a hallucinatory rich palette of colours – with a varied array of instruments, including exotic flexatones and Caribbean steel drums. They accompany the lyrical solo part, for which none other than Daniel Rowland comes to The Hague.
About Maxim Shalygin
Maxim Shalygin studied in Kyiv, St. Petersburg, and The Hague, where he lives now. He sees his music as a spiritual quest for something that exists below the surface of the material world: behind the horizon, beyond the boundaries of the visible. Averse to trends, he creates music with an unmistakable signature of his own. His work has been successful at festivals such as Dag in de Branding and November Music. His compositions appear on the much-praised CD label TRPTK.
In his view, a composer can express his most intimate and profound ideas in solo pieces, especially with soloists with whom he has built up a close relationship. He has been working with the percussionist Konstantyn Napolov for a long time. He wrote the solo pieces Musique de fer and Octopus for him, here performed during the Percussion Marathon.
Past concert
The Phaeacians for percussion quartet from Maxim Shalygin’s ballet Odyssee.
Maxim Shalygin in the media
"A self-conducting Shalygin finished the job with flying colours, in an idiom in which the most diverse stylistic elements enter into a wonderful symbiosis ... Assisted by a phenomenally playing Keuris and Amstel Quartet, Shalygin moulded it all into a perfectly logical and determined discourse (NRC on Shalygin’s Todos los fuegos el fuego).”
"Breathtaking (De Volkskrant on Canto d'inizio e fine, chosen as one of the best CDs of 2019).”
"Crushing. Breathtaking. It is not difficult to point out the most impressive concert in November Music. That was Maxim Shalygin’s fiery Todos los Fuegos el Fuego, written for eight saxophones. For more than an hour, they played with almost superhuman dedication and control... The music was intense, changing from subdued beauty to dry, rattling rhythms and savage, brutal harmonies. A gripping experience, the audience agreed (Brabants Dagblad).
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