Simeon Ten Holt- Canto Ostinato for 4 piano’s – Muziekgebouw Eindhoven
When I was 8 years old I saw this magical performance on tv. It featured 4 pianists and the music was beautiful. I could not remember this occasion, until i saw it on television again when i was thirteen at my grandmother’s house. I was certain it was the same piece. I found out it was dutch and that it was called canto ostinato. Being the walking encyclopedia i am i never would forget about it.
In 2005 Kruidvat released a special 12-cd box of this composer’s works for 4 piano’s and by chance I discovered this release in an article. I bought it and have played this a lot. To me, the music is infinite. When I discovered that Canto Ostinato was being performed in Eindhoven by the Van Veen’s , who were also responsible for the studio recordings I got my hands on, i could not help but feel really excited.
The piece itself and all of Simeon ten Holt’s work for 4 piano’s falls under the modern classical nomer “serialism”. Which basically means the piece is a large book of tiny variations on a theme, with a couple of bridges and roughly the same buildup each time. The rest is up to the team of pianists’ imagination or improvisation. The first time Horizon was performed in public, the performance took 32 hours!
None of this I expected, times have changed. The cd-version was a performance of 3 hours . Still I could have the patience to sit through several hours of this, so i was hoping for that. Finally , it was saturday 2 april.
The performance started and there was a strange atmosphere, there was a lot of coughing going on. People seemed quite restless. The music started, visuals were provided by the seemingly ubiquitous NLXL. But being a designer, into design and hopefully making a living out of that soon, I guess it is impossible to ignore. However it made for a nice touch, all we needed was someone quoting Hendrik Marsman and we ‘d have a nationalistic performance to almost be proud of. Luckily this wasnt the case.
The coughing went on, I guess a lot of people were getting ill, i pondered. Slowly the piece started doing it’s magic. The coughing disappeared into the background, I closed my eyes and went into the music. This performance felt rushed, the parts not gently flowing, but almost breaking the concentration by the fast switches between movements. This seemed to wear the restless out and slowly the quality unfolded. The way the movements were arranged was very impressive. Fast switching kept mellowing and the movements became longer. The passionate playfulness of the pianists, which makes this sometimes be waved away like new age music, became much more mature by the way new clusters were grouped and prolonged. Amazingly the performance only lasted one and a half hour, yet the experience felt much more intense. The complexity increased threefold and it seemed yet again there was a new way of looking at this piece.
I enjoyed this thoroughly, felt completely mindblown afterwards. I am now definitely an addict and will try to see this as often as I can, clearly there are many possiblities still to uncover with passing time.
