Nieuwe Noten

The Orgelpark cooperates this season a few times with Nieuwe Noten, a series with contemporary chamber music, organized by Fie Schouten (bass clarinet) and Aspasia Nasopoulou (composer). Today's concert is the first one in this cooperation; the musicians are Nicolas Hodges and Guus Janssen.

 

Musicians

Nicolas Hodges, piano

Guus Janssen, organ

 

Program

Evan Johnson (1980)

- A fountain

 

Morton Feldman (1926-1987)

- Piano 

 

Guus Janssen (1951)

- Improvisatie

 

Evan Johnson on 'A fountain'

Composer Evan Johnson writes about the performance of his composition 'A fountain' today: 'The venerable Nicolas Hodges premieres the piece I've at long last written for him at the Orgelpark in Amsterdam, which coincidentally happens to be two and a half kilometers from my house.
'A fountain' is a set of four pieces floating, mostly but not entirely in an abstract sense, around the Ciconia virelai 'Sus un' fontayne'. There are parts of it with quite a lot of notes. There are also parts with almost no notes at all. There is a first-inversion F-minor triad, which I seem to be unable to avoid stumbling upon, 'Where's Waldo'-style, in almost everything I've written with piano. (This is also, in the sort of thoroughly abstracted and oblique sense I'm used to working in anyway, my homage to the late Harrison Birtwistle (1934-2022), with whom Nic's artistic life was tightly bound up, who made an arrangement of this Ciconia piece, and who had something to do, intermittently and maybe imperceptibly, with the piano writing.)