CD Box 20 Cd; Complete Piano Simeon Ten Holt for piano by Jeroen Van Veen
The most complete collection ever published of the Dutch minimalist master, including the famous Canto Ostinato but also many previously unreleased recordings, all made by a pianist with an international reputation in the field of minimalism. given the virtuosic demands placed on his music and its spirituality, it is tempting to call him the Franz Liszt of minimalism' This review of Simeon Ten Holt by an American critic points to Ten Holt's originality, his industriousness, and his influence on modern minimalism in the generations following its emergence in the 1960s in America. Just like with Liszt in Weimar in the 1850s and 60s, many paths have led to and from Ten Holt's music. It has long been known that Ten Holt, with Canto Ostinato, his flexible series of 92 variations on a simple bass line, has created a masterpiece that can compete with Terry Riley's In C and Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. However, this box shows how much more Ten Holt has to offer. The boy Simeon was introduced to the world of music one evening when he heard his father play the first part of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and from that moment on, he was fascinated by the possibilities of stretching time through patterns. Later in his life, he remarked: 'I am time and I have time.' This box traces his development as never before possible, from the early untitled compositions, comparable to the abstract expressionist canvases of that time, through miniatures such as series of Epigrams and Aphorisms, to the triumph of Canto Ostinato, and then much further, to the mystical cycles of Lemniscaat, Horizon, and finally the renewed strength of Eadem Sed Aliter ('The Same but Different'), a late piece that, as the composer noted, 'removes the boundaries of the concepts of 'beginning' and 'end', 'before' and 'after.' As he explains in a personal introduction, Jeroen van Veen first encountered Ten Holt's music as a child when he listened to the radio (as he discovered much later) to the premiere of Horizon: 'the notes melted together into such a rich tapestry of color.' Since then, he has performed Canto Ostinato and the rest of Van Veen's music many times and in many countries, and in 2001 he became the founding chairman of the Simeon Ten Holt Foundation. His performances, as recognized by critics in publications around the world, are beautifully recorded and bear the stamp of complete authority in this music. Kompositie I, II, III en IV (1942 -1946) Sonate (1953) 20 Bagatellen, (1954 ) 12 Korte Stukken, (1955) Allegro ex Machina, (1955) Muziek voor Pieter (1958) Sonate (diagonaal) (1959) Soloduiveldans I (1959) Epigrammen (1959) 5 etudes (1961) Cyclus aan de waanzin (1961) Sekwensen (1965) Interpolations (1969) 5 pieces (1970-1972) Aforisme nr. 2 (1972) Canto Ostinato 1976-1979) Natalon in E (1980) Lemniscaat (1982-1983) Horizon (1983-1985) Soloduiveldans II (1986) Incantatie IV (1987-1990) Soloduiveldans III (1990) Schaduw noch prooi / Neither shadow nor prey (1993-1995) Meandres (1995-1998 ) Eadem sed aliter (1995) Soloduiveldans IV (1998) My connection with Simeon ten Holt As a child, I would spend hours listening to the radio.There was this stunning song I heard one night; it had multiple pianos and a repeated tone pattern, but it was anything but monotonous. I was always impressed by the way the piano notes melted together to create such a rich tapestry of color. The whole thing was quite enjoyable for me. Unfortunately, I fell asleep about midnight and never found out who composed the beautiful music I had just heard for the first time at what turned out to be the premiere of Horizon. In 1993, after finishing my studies at the Conservatory, I finally had some free time to look into the matter of writing. I had been playing quite a bit of modern music at the time, and now I felt a natural "hunger" to perform this tonal music with my hands. Eventually I came across Simeon ten Holt, the composer I had been seeking. I sat down at the computer after placing an order with Donemus (a Dutch music publisher). My fingers were compelled to the piano keys, where I discovered a style that drew equally from Bach and Chopin. After practicing these recurring passages, I was exposed to a wide variety of piano tones for the first time. The harmonics are incredibly dense because of the numerous repetitions. The melody was considerably more powerful when my wife, Sandra, and I played it on two pianos. In comparison to a single piano, two pianos are much more stunning. Canto Ostinato changed my mind after I played it on four different pianos. Playing on four grand pianos allowed for the clearest sound and the least amount of pedaling, allowing for the most subtle of nuances to be heard and incorporated into the performance. The issue presented by the millions of conceivable permutations when four people play four instruments is obvious. Every performance is unique in terms of tone and structure. The musicians' ability to talk to one another while performing is crucial, and it's also entertaining to see. We were invited to Simeon's residence in Bergen after we recorded our debut album, which featured Canto Ostinato, in 1996. The groundwork for a lasting connection was laid throughout our lengthy conversation. Sandra van Veen served as secretary, Ton van Asseldonk as treasurer, and I as chairman when we established the Simeon Ten Holt Foundation in 2001. We intend to spread the word about Simeon's music far and wide in the hopes of reaching a wide audience of music enthusiasts. Jeroen van Veen Simeon ten Holt 1923-2012, by Wilma de Rek When he was nine years old, Simeon heard his father play a beautiful piece on the piano. It was evening, and he was already in bed. The piano his father played was in the workshop of the house in Bergen where Simeon lived with his parents, sisters, and brother. The piece he played was the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Simeon thought to himself that he had never heard anything so beautiful. He crept out of bed, went down the stairs to the studio, and stood behind the door, listening. Simeon's father was the painter Henri ten Holt, and until that moment, Simeon knew no better than that he would become a painter himself; he was already busy practicing drawing. But now he heard something heavenly. He also wanted to be able to do this. Simeon entered the studio and asked his father to play the notes for him. That is what Henri ten Holt did. For weeks, every time a piece, which his son would diligently imitate Simeon practiced until he had mastered the entire first movement. Then he knew what he wanted to devote the rest of his life to: to the music. Fast forward to the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century. We see Ten Holt passionately experimenting with electronic music, in his studio in Bergen and at the Institute of Sonology on the Plompetorengracht in Utrecht. Using his VCS3 synthesizer, he produces compositions that you don't necessarily sit and listen to for pleasure, let's say. What brings someone who has come to music thanks to Beethoven to the crackle of a synthesizer? The answer is time. Time is a wonderful thing. When Simeon ten Holt was born in Bergen in 1923, Thomas Mann was working 500 miles east to complete his great novel The Magic Mountain, set in a sanitarium in Davos where the residents spend their days doing nothing and philosophizing about time. "What is time? A secret—unreal and omnipotent. A condition for the world of phenomena is a movement, coupled and mingled with the existence of bodies in space and their movement." We read an echo of those sentences many years later in Simeon ten Holt. He was fascinated by time. In the 1980s, he published an essay on time and space in music in the cultural magazine Wolfsmond, which began as follows: 'There is a very close relationship between music and time. Music cannot be imagined without time. Music is classified as a movement art for good reason.There is a movement. Music is conditionally bound to time and space.' In 2005, I met Ten Holt for the first time. I went to interview him for the Volkskrant; we had a theme issue about time, and I thought that Ten Holt, then 82 years old, could say all sorts of sensible things about it. It was a beautiful, but also difficult, conversation. Ten Holt frequently used words such as 'disposition' and 'happenings', spoke of his 'sacred task', quoted Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Frankfurt School, and, after some reflection, summarized his vision in the following sentence: 'I am the time, and I have the time'. When I asked what exactly he meant by that, the composer frowned irritably and answered sternly: "Exactly what I say. I am the time and I have the time; those are two things about which I have actually said everything. Seven years later, I spoke to him again, this time for the book Canto Ostinato that Sandra Mol, Jeroen van Veen, and I made with him and that would appear on his ninetieth birthday. I visited him about ten times in his little house in Bergen. There was no question of strictness or grumpiness anymore; time had softened Ten Holt. During one of those conversations, I asked what exactly he had meant at the time with his 'I am the time and I have the time'. He admitted with a broad grin that he actually didn't know that himself and said, ' It sounds nice, doesn't it? Some things cannot be explained. You are the time and you have the time; that's just the way it is.' We are all children of our time, but artists are a little more so than mere mortals. All notes on this CD box also existed in Beethoven's time. And yet it is inconceivable that Ludwig van Beethoven, creator of the Moonlight Sonata who introduced Simeon ten Holt to the piano, would have put those notes behind, above, and below each other in this order. The time was simply not right for it. If you want to understand an artist's work, you have to start with the time in which that artist lived, because that time molds the artist into who he is. This applies to all artists, including the most stubborn among them, the Einzelgängers who care about nothing and nobody, to which Ten Holt undoubtedly belonged. But he too was, above all, a child of his time. Simeon ten Holt's time begins on January 24, 1923, when he comes into the world screaming at eight o'clock in the morning. The First World War is only a few years away. Millions of people who survived that war died in the years that followed, thanks to the Spanish flu. In Moscow, the tsar's family was murdered and the Soviet Union was founded. In Italy, Benito Mussolini came to power a year earlier, and in Germany, the young Weimar Republic is teetering under hyperinflation. The population seeks refuge in entertainment; the excitement of the Roaring Twenties blows from America to Europe. In France, Coco Chanel cuts her hair short, and young musicians, including Darius Milhaud, listen with fascination to the curious, innovative, and almost serial music of Erik Satie, then 57 years old. And the Netherlands? Dutch life is characterized by pillarization, which divides humanity into Catholics, Protestants, liberals, and socialists, all with their own sports clubs, bakers, and butchers. Bergen, North Holland, where Simeon ten Holt was born on January 24, 1923, is just as compartmentalized as the rest of the Netherlands. In addition to those Catholics, Protestants, liberals, and socialists, it even has a fifth pillar because a remarkable number of artists live there. In Bergen, you can see the old Herman Gorter strolling along the sea, with hat and walking stick, in the company of his much younger poet friend Adriaan Roland Holst, who will later become Simeon ten Holt's much older poet friend. Simeon's parents, the painter Henri ten Holt and his wife, Kitty Cox, are not wealthy. Their house was built a few years before Simeon's birth, with financial help from Kitty's father. It is located at Doorntjes 11, a sandy path near the forest where there are only a few houses at the time. In the Ten Holts' circle, money is considered something dirty, and it is therefore a mystery to Simeon, when he looks back on his childhood at the end of his life, what the family lived on then. Civilian existence is regarded as odious; being unsocial is the aim. Father Ten Holt is a member of De Nieuwe Kring, an artists' association that is critical of the materialism of modern society and strives for a simple way of life. In those artists' circles, the conversations are not about money or property but about spiritualism, theosophy, odern society and strives for a simple way of life. In those artists' circles, the conversations are not about money or property but about spiritualism, theosophy, philosophy, and, of course, r a simple way of life. In those artists' circles, the conversations are not about money or property but about spiritualism, theosophy, philosophy, and, of course, art—new art, art that does away with the romantic curl of the nineteenth century. From an early age, Simeon and his sisters and brother feel far superior to the ordinary children, the non-artists. This also applies to their friends, including the later poet Gerrit Kouwenaar. Most of Simeon's friendships end in fights; his childhood friend Nico Schuyt is the only one who escapes that fate. The boys swim together, walk to the sea, have Father Kouwenaar read to them, and lie for hours by their parents' suitcase gramophone, a new and mysterious device that introduces them to the music of Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, and Chopin. At the age of fourteen, Simeon and Nico Schuyt are apprenticed to the composer Jakob van Domselaer, his father's friend, whom Simeon calls 'uncle Jaap'. He stops his HBS in Alkmaar in order to devote himself fully to the piano and harmony lessons that Van Domselaer gives him. At least, if the great master has time: it often happens that Simeon stands outside the workhouse in the cold, waiting for Van Domselaer to finish his own work, and at least as often that moment never comes and the inquisitive student flops off empty-handed. Jakob van Domselaer is an interesting figure in Dutch music history. He is of Reformed descent, grew up in the Bible Belt, was a strict man who befriended Piet Mondrian, and was the only Dutch composer who tried to translate the principles of De Stijl into music. Scraping is the magic word. Bringing things back to their essence In the case of Mondrian, he created his famous horizontal and vertical lines using only the three primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. In his autobiography The forest and the citadel.In Memoirs of a Composer from 2009, Simeon ten Holt describes his old teacher as a man who was quite pleased with himself and did not tolerate any contradiction. As a piano teacher, he was worthless. When Simeon and his friend Nico Schuyt got older and applied to the Amsterdam Conservatory, it turned out that they didn't stand a chance. They were too bad. From that moment on, they started teaching each other. Ten Holt would remain an 'autodidact' for the rest of his life. In short, Simeon was formed by strict teachers. No doubt that explains a lot about his uncompromising character and compositions. Grew up in the period after the First World War, came of age during the Second World War: formed in years in which avant-garde artists fiercely opposed everything that could have led to those wars and held strong opinions about what is and is not allowed. About what is possible and what is not. And Simeon conforms to his time. His great oeuvre begins with a piece that he completes in 1942, in the middle of the Second World War. He is then 19 years old and lives in Amsterdam with his first love, Riet Dagnelie, who will become the mother of his two children, Joris and Marijn. It is a piece that is still completely marked by the influence of his teacher, Jakob van Domselaer, right down to the bare title: Composition 1. Seven years later, on October 21, 1949, Simeon leaves for Paris with his youngest sister, Sientje. His children are then five and three years old, respectively. He will never return to his family and will see little of his children later on; fatherhood interests him little. He wants to discover the world, especially France, the country he has read about in the books of Gide, Camus, and Sartre and which attracts him in a vague way. Some other pieces followed Composition 1—namely, Composition 2, Composition 3, and Composition 4—and in Paris, Ten Holt wants to devote himself further to what he has come to call 'his sacred task': music. He takes a course with the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger at the École Normale but learns little from it; uncertainty about his mediocre piano playing bothers him, and when one day he has to play for the even more famous Darius Milhaud, the composer who loved Satie so much, he panics and gives up the course. Nice follows Paris, where Simeon writes a symphonic piece that will never progress beyond a draft, and in the autumn of 1951 he and his sister Sientje return to Mons. He throws himself on the piano, which will only serve him for his own compositions, and begins his 20 Bagatellen, which are completed in 1954. In his autobiography, he writes that these trifles sprang from "a great enthusiasm," an "enthusiasm and freshness of mind which seemed to me to be the result of a newly acquired mental attitude." He would later describe them as "romantic". The 1950s saw the start of a period in Ten Holt's life that he would later often describe as 'winter'. That does not refer to his age; age-wise, he is not even in the autumn; he has yet to turn forty. Moreover, he is as virile as anything; in the diaries that he has kept meticulously since 1949, he writes about no subject as much as his girlfriends, about love, passion, and sex. In Ten Holt's philosophy, there is a straight line between libido and music. In his philosophy, good music has everything to do with the blood circulation of the body and with lust and love. But the time is still there. And that time brings with it strong opinions about what is musically acceptable and what is not. In 1954, Ten Holt moves into a new workplace, a bunker built by the Germans in a farmer's yard on Groeneweg in Bergen. There are no sanitary facilities and no electricity, but the rent is low, Simeon likes the association with a monastery cell—people often compare him to a monk anyway—and he can go about his business in complete freedom. In that bunker, Ten Holt again adapts to his time. Like many other composers, he says goodbye to tonal music, or, to put it bluntly, music that sounds like something. He develops a music system he calls 'the diagonal thought'. Exactly what that is, Ten Holt explains in his autobiography: “In practice, this amounted to a procedure for arranging the twelve notes of equal temperament not by tone sequences, as in serialism, but by their position on the circle of fifths. From a compositional point of view, there is bi- and/or pluritonality, with the starting point and guideline being the simultaneous sounding of complementary keys on the circle, for example, C-F sharp and A-E flat in a tritone relationship (the tritone being the distance between C and F sharp). /gees, divides the octave exactly in half)”. The Amsterdam audience to whom Ten Holt played this Diagonal Sonata in 1960 was not pleased. "After a benevolent applause, people were initially silent and then fell into general conversation," writes Ten Holt in his autobiography. When his old friend Nico Schuyt suggests discussing the music that has just been played, those present start to look at him with difficulty. No one wants to say honestly what he thinks, and Ten Holt tells himself that the opinion of others does not matter anyway because - I quote - 'the self-taught in me did not declare anyone authorized to make a remark relevant to me or my development." As an absolute autodidact, I ultimately had to invent the path I had to take.' And he does. He studies scores by experimental composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, co-founders of serialism. He immerses himself in twelve-tone technique and tonal chromaticism, which resulted in the piece Cyclus aan de Waanzin, composed in the early 1960s, and eventually throws himself fully into serialism. In 1968, A/Ta-Lon premiered a composition for mezzo-soprano and 36 'playing and talking instruments'. At the end of his life, he described himself during that period as a "pushing convert who wants to push the true faith down people's throats." He said that the compositions he had made during that period never had to be performed again. He called pieces like A/.ta-lon "the symbol of winter, barrenness, and the death of tonality." It was music written at the table and not at the piano, the place where good music always begins. Music is made with the head and not the heart. Music without soul His artistic winter the freezing night. It used to snow sometimes in January and February, and if you were lucky, you could see a tiny flower peeping above the snow. The snowdrop is a symbol of life that will not be crushed by the coldest winters. A recording has been preserved from the 1970s, in which Simeon ten Holt plays a sweet melody on the piano. An ominous beeping sounds in the background. It's a snowdrop. If the crackling and squeaking in the background represent the chilly winter, the piano is the lovely spring doing its best to rise above it. Ten Holt made the recording while improvising on his piano. In his diary, he writes this about it: 'The curious thing is that such improvisations, in their original state, are qualitatively no better than the rubbish bin, but once processed, turn out to have properties that unexpectedly take on a life of their own. ' Garbage can music, according to the creator himself. Ten Holt takes these improvisations so lightly that he doesn't even write down the notes. But he does keep the bond with the six improvisations, called aphorisms, and thanks to Jeroen van Veen, the notes are now neatly on paper. Anyone who thinks while listening to Aphorism 2: "But I know that theme, right?" is right. In Aphorism 2, you can already hear a kind of announcement of the theme of Canto Ostinato, the piece on which Ten Holt started working from 1973 onward. He first called the piece 'Perpetuum'," and only just before the premiere in April 1979 did it get its new name: Canto Ostinato: singing that is ostinato, stubborn, that is repeated. He composed Canto Ostinato more or less secretly between 1973 and 1976, in between winter music. At first, he felt great hesitation and embarrassment. Because it was so shamelessly tonal, so accessible, so musical, well, let's just say it: so beautiful. Ten Holt himself never said much about how his magical piece came about, saying little more than that it had "risen from a nebula gradually crystallizing." But there is something striking about the theme. Because on the box with the tape recording of Aphorism 2, in which the theme of Canto is already incorporated, Ten Holt wrote the following words: ‘Very old melody’. Could the theme of Canto really be a 'very old melody'? In other words, did it already exist? When little Simeon played records with his friends in Bergen on the Kouwenaar family's magical suitcase gramophone, did little Simeon hear the notes that have always kept ringing in his head? Or did Ten Holt mean something completely different when he called his melody 'very old'? Simeon ten Holt had a very strong opinion about the creative power of the artist, which, in simple terms, boils down to the fact that all art already exists. Everything is already there; everything is present somewhere. Following his inner compass, or being essential, as Ten Holt liked to call it, boils down to an artist listening to his deepest self.If he does, the work of art will eventually reveal itself to him. Piece by piece. A work of art dictates itself. And the artist is the 'process monitor'. Sometimes you notice when things aren't going well, he said, and then you go astray. An artist must be patient. Sometimes it is better to wait a few days than to continue, because if you continue, you will express your own will, while you have to express the will of the piece itself. Time, and nothing else, is the secret of artistry. Everything is already there; we just have to make sure it is plucked from the cosmos at the right time. And so Simeon ten Holt came back to himself with his Canto Ostinato, after a long winter full of inner impoverishment in which he had to watch how his creativity was smothered by the dictation of numbers. Incidentally, he was never bitter about his atonal work; apparently, time had deemed it necessary to let him rest in that frosty night, and possibly the seed had been sown for all the beauty of later. But the canto brought him back. Back at the piano. Back to music made with the heart and not the head Back to tonality. Back to the beauty. For Simeon ten Holt, Canto Ostinato meant a new beginning; the floodgates opened. After Canto Ostinato, he wrote a number of beautiful pieces for multiple pianos: Incantation 4, Lemniscaat, Horizon, Shadow nor Prey, Méandres—all pieces in which Simeon ten Holt allows his musicians a lot of freedom when it comes to the time they allocate for their performances of his music. He does this by building in the possibility of repetition wherever possible, leaving it up to the performers when and how often to use it. Ten Holt considered time his friend. In his autobiography, he writes, "With the concept of time, I have, it seems, a secret alliance that has always enabled me to correct erroneous ways and to regain and pursue the course that applies to me." And so it happened. At the end of his career, Ten Holt found himself again. At last, we were on the same page. Wilma de Rek, 2023 Is the music by Ten Holt minimal music or repetitive music? There are some parallels between repetitive music and minimal music, but they are not the same. A musical genre known as minimal music, which first appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, is distinguished by the use of straightforward harmonic and melodic structures, frequently with an emphasis on repetitive patterns and slowly developing textures. It frequently uses repeating patterns that alter gradually over time and places a strong emphasis on the usage of both sound and quiet, as well as empty space. Including a wide variety of sounds and textures, minimal music frequently uses both conventional and electronic instruments. On the other hand, the phrase "repetitive music" is more general and applies to any music that uses repeated musical parts. Rock, pop, electronic, and classical music, among other forms and genres, are all examples of repetitive music. Repeated rhythmic or melodic patterns, frequently with little variety or development, can be used to identify repetitive music. Repetition is a common feature of minimal music; however, it is not the only thing that defines it. Focusing on simplicity, reducing the number of musical components, and bringing about change gradually through time are all characteristics of minimal music. On the other hand, repetitive music might include repetition without any of these additional qualities. Repetition is present in both minimal music and repetitive music; however, minimal music is a particular genre that also emphasizes minimalism, gradual change, and a concentration on silence and space. On the other hand, the phrase "repetitive music" is more general and can be used to describe any type of music that uses repeated melodic parts without necessarily having these additional qualities. Jeroen van Veen Jeroen van Veen Jeroen Van Veen (1969) started playing the piano at the age of 7. He studied at the Utrecht Conservatory with Alwin Bär and Hkon Austbö. In 1993, he passed the Performing Artists' Exam. Van Veen has played with orchestras conducted by Howard Williams (Adams), Peter Eötvös (Zimmermann), Neal Stulberg (Mozart and Bartok), and Robert Craft (Stravinsky). He has played recitals in Europe, Russia, Canada, and the USA. Van Veen attended master classes with Claude Helffer, Roberto Szidon, Ivan Klánsky, and Leonid Hambro. He was invited to several festivals: Reder Piano Festival (1988), Festival der Kunsten in Bad Gleichenberg (1992), Wien Modern (1993), Holland Dance Festival (1998, 2010), and Lek Art Festival (1996–2009). Van Veen recorded for major radio and television companies. In 1992, Van Veen recorded his first CD as Piano Duo Van Veen. In 1995, the piano duo Van Veen made their debut in the United States. They were prizewinners in the prestigious 4th International Murray Dranoff Two Piano Competition in Miami, Florida. After this achievement, they toured the United States and Canada many times. The 1996 documentary "Two Pianos, One Passion" (nominated for an Emmy Award) portrays them as a duo. In 2016, Van Veen was awarded the NPO Radio 4 2016 Award for his efforts and promotion of classical music beyond the concert halls. His lay-down (ligconcert) concerts were praised as an example of how classical music can attract new audiences. The various compositions by Van Veen may be described as minimal music with different faces: crossovers to jazz, blues, soundscapes, avant-garde, techno, trance, and pop music. His Minimal Preludes for Piano and his NLXL are some of his most played pieces worldwide. His latest minimalist piano concerto, Continuum, was a great success. In 2015, he premiered his Incanto No. 2 at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw with Sandra van Veen. His minimal preludes are being performed worldwide, and currently Van Veen is working on Books VII and VIII (numbers 80–110). His last composition, Dutch Delight for Carillon, was commissioned by 42 communities that were connected to the birth of the Netherlands in 1572. Currently Mr. Van Veen is director of Van Veen Productions, chairman of the Simeon ten Holt Foundation, president of the Pianomania Foundation, and artistic director of several music festivals. He is also active as Overseas Artistic Director in the Murray Dranoff Two Piano Competition based in Miami. Over the last 25 years, Van Veen recorded more than 230 CDs and 5 DVDs, mostly for Brilliant Classics. His discography includes Adams, Einaudi, Glass, JacobTV, Minimal Piano Collections, Nietzsche, Nyman, Pärt, Reich, Riley, Satie, Sakamoto, Stravinsky, Tiersen, Ten Holt, Van Veen, Yiruma, and many others. Van Veen is also praised for his productivity; some say he is "the man who records faster than his shadow’. "Dutch pianist and composer Jeroen van Veen, the leading exponent of minimalism today", Alan Swanson (Fanfare) "Jeroen van Veen has for many years been a powerhouse in the piano world of the Netherlands and beyond", Dominy Clements (MusicWeb-International) "The Maximal Minimalist Missionary," Raymond Tuttle (Fanfare) www.jeroenvanveen.com Sandra van Veen Sandra van Veen studied with the Norwegian pianist Hkon Austbö at the Conservatory in Utrecht, where she graduated in 1992. She made her debut with her husband Jeroen in a performance of Canto Ostinato during Lek Art (Culemborg). The concert was live recorded, and the CD has been sold in more than 40 countries worldwide. After this, many concerts and CDs followed. Sandra is very dedicated to the music of Ten Holt, but nowadays she also plays other kinds of music, ranging from classical music like Carmina Burana, The Planets, and Rhapsody in Blue to tangos and Tubular Bells for four pianos. She did the premiere of several pieces written by Dutch composers like J. Andriessen (in Russia) and Ten Holt (in Canada). Concerts and recitals brought Sandra from Miami to Novosibirsk. She takes part in many projects in Holland as well as abroad. She recorded many CDs on various labels. Several concerts and projects have been broadcast on radio, television, and the Internet. Finally, Sandra is a well-known, passionate piano teacher as well. Sandra van Veen is a co-founder of the Lek Art Foundation and the Simeon ten Holt Foundation. She runs her own company, ‘De Walnoot," based in Culemborg. www.pianoduo.org Fred Oldenburg Fred Oldenburg (1955) started playing the piano at the age of 5. He studied at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague with Theo Bruins. He continued his studies at the Juilliard School of Music in New York with Beveridge Webster and in Brussels with Eduardo del Pueyo. In 1980, he received the ‘Prix d’Excellence’.Mr. Oldenburg performs as a soloist, chamber musician, and accompanist. He gave concerts and made radio- and TV-broadcasts in different countries over the world. Fred Oldenburg made many CD recordings, among them 12 Etudes d'exécution transcendante by Franz Liszt. Mr. Oldenburg was involved in performing the Ten Holt pieces since their premieres. Irene Russo Praised by the legendary Martha Argerich as "one of the best young musicians I ever heard in my life," the Italian pianist Irene Russo (1974) appeared on the big international stages as one of the most interesting talents of her generation. Her international career started in 1993 in Sydney. Since then, Ms. Russo has played extensively through all of Europe, the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Israel. She has performed in many important concert venues, including: Brussels’ Palais des Beaux-Arts, Bologna’s Teatro Comunale, New York’s Steinway Hall, Naples’ Teatro San Carlo, Buenos Aires’ Teatro Colon, Milan’s Auditorium Verdi, Houston, Amsterdam, Calgary, Berlin, Lisbon, Cleveland, Zurich, Tel Aviv, Freiburg, Freiburg, and Antwerp, etc. Recently, Ms. Russo has been invited to play at the Schloss-Elmau Festival, the Robert Schumann Festival, and the Beethoven Klavier Festival. Ms. Russo’s most recent engagements included highly acclaimed debuts at the La Roque d’Anthéron International Piano Festival and Munich’s de Gasteig. In recent seasons, Irene Russo has appeared as a guest soloist with leading orchestras, among which are the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, Orchestra Sinfonica del Teatro San Carlo, de Filharmonie van Vlaanderen, Münchener Kammerorchester, Craiova Symphony Orchestra, Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt, Orchestra da Camera di Mantova, Houston OrchestraX, and Klassische Philharmonie. She has collaborated with leading conductors including: Umberto Benedetti Michelangeli, David Stern, Alexander Liebreich, Marc Andreae, Misha Damev, Heribert Beissel, John Axelrod, Susanna Mälkki, Ovidiu Balan, and Michel Tilkin. In 2000, Ms. Russo impressed a very prestigious jury, from Joachim Kaiser ("Irene Russo reminds me of the young Kempff") to some of the most famous pianists in the world such as Nelson Freire, Maria Tipo, and Martha Argerich: she became the winner of the Clara Schumann International Piano Competition in Düsseldorf. Since then, Ms. Russo has been invited to play in the most important concert halls in Germany, including Bonn’s Beethovenhalle, Bremen’s die Glocke, Nürnberg’s Meistersingerhalle, Düsseldorf’s Tonhalle, Hannover’s Theater am Aegi, Hamburg’s Musikhalle, Munich’s Herkulessaal, and Vienna's Prinzregententheater, both as a soloist and with orchestra. A prize winner of the 2002 ARD International Piano Competition in Munich, where she received the Special Prize for the Best Interpretation of Contemporary Music, and First Prize Winner at the 1999 Emmanuel Durlet International Piano Competition in Antwerp, Irene Russo was also awarded the Special Mention of Honor at the 2003 Martha Argerich International Piano Competition in Buenos Aires. She has recorded live on Italian Television RAI, Belgian Radio Klara, CBC Canada, Radio Vaticana, Bayerische Rundfunk, ARD, NDR, SWR, Radio 4 Holland, and she also appeared in a music documentary on ZDF. In 2002, she was appointed professor at the "Umberto Giordano" National Music Conservatory in Italy. Ms. Russo is regularly invited to take part in the jury of international piano competitions and gives master classes throughout Europe. She has recorded for Oehms Classics and BOA Video. Among her teachers are the late Lazar Berman ("Irene Russo is one of the best students I’ve ever had") at the International Piano Academy "Incontri col Maestro" in Imola and Alicia de Larrocha ("She is absolutely fabulous!") in Barcelona. www.irenerusso.com CD 1,2,3,4,7,8,13,16, 20 Jeroen van Veen, piano Mics: DPA 4006A Piano: Yamaha Grand Piano C7 Produced by: Van Veen Productions for Brilliant Classics Photo: Jeroen van Veen; David de Haan Cover photo: Collete Noël Liner Notes: Jeroen van Veen, Wilma de Rek Publishers: Donemus Executive Producer: Jeroen van Veen Recording and Mastering: Pianomania Software: Pro Tools, Logic, and Sequoia Recording dates: January–May 2023 Recordings: Studio IV, Steffelen DE CD 5,6,9,10,11,12,14,15,18 & 19 Irene Russo, Fred Oldenburg, Sandra & Jeroen van Veen, piano Mics: SE 2000, NT5, ATM Fazioli grand pianos, 2 x 2.78 m and 2 x 2.28m. Pianos supplied by Evert Snel, Werkhoven Piano technician: Frank van Ham Recorded on ADAT, 8 tracks at 24 bit, 48 kHz. Software: Pro Tools & Samplitude Recording location: Barbara Church, Culemborg
