Not only the Fokker organ, but also the Dutch composer takes centre stage in this final concert of the 2023-2024 season. How do celebrated contemporary Dutch composers deal with the possibilities of the Fokker organ? Several leading figures in Dutch music, including Klaas de Vries, Peter-Jan Wagemans, and earlier Guus Janssen, took up the challenge for this concert. They each spent several days behind the 31-tone manual in order to write a composition for this unique instrument, starting from improvisation. Within their own artistic signatures, they allow the Fokker organ to come fully into its own.
In his new composition, Peter-Jan Wagemans has the organ controlled entirely by a computer. He recorded the spectacular work himself, which through post-minimalist movements in roughly four parts constantly leads to new sonic worlds. Guus Janssen’s somewhat older work Fok was also recorded by the composer himself. Here, the listener is playfully tossed back and forth by his characteristic free improvisation style. By contrast, Klaas de Vries’s new piece is fully notated and will be performed by the highly experienced organist Ere Lievonen. The title Le Scale Ombrose refers to the scales and their shadows from which the work is constructed. Christina Viola Oorebeek revised her work Serpentine for this occasion, which requires virtuosic footwork from the organist. The music is based on rapid dance rhythms and many short, high notes, with the pedal providing support through bass themes, beats, and in the solo cadenza a single ascending, winding melodic line.
In addition to these works, ‘classics’ by other Dutch masters can also be heard today, namely Peter Schat and Hans Kox. Whereas Kox approached his music for the 31-tone organ in 1960 in a fairly classicist manner, Schat wrote radically different music just two years later, full of clusters and abstract lines. With these six Dutch masters, more than sixty years of Dutch musical history is brought to life on the Fokker organ, by composers born between 1930 and 1952, performed by the highly experienced Fokker organist Ere Lievonen.