Holland
Kieron Tyler
In this context, what’s named “diamond road” is a metaphor for staying on course rather than, as the lyrics of the song “Diamond Road” put it, letting yourself go or sprawling all over the floor. Follow this route and life won’t be a mess.Barefoot On Diamond Road is the third album from the Netherlands’s Amber Arcades, the recording persona of Annelotte de Graaf. Away from music, her work as a lawyer has brought a role in the international war crimes tribunal. Previously, her music was a form of Eighties-ish indie with touches of shoegazing. Beyond her glass-like voice, guitar was a main Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite the jarring effect of having British actors speaking colloquial English while purporting to be Dutch policemen working in Amsterdam, the second series of ITV’s Van der Valk arrived at its third and final episode feeling as if it had reached its comfort zone. The culture-crossover works less jarringly than it did in ITV’s recent Murder in Provence, and by keeping the show securely locked within the streets, docks, canals and familiar landmarks of Amsterdam, it brews up a persuasively Dutch flavour. The fact that the Dutch are famously fluent English speakers (probably because Dutch is Read more ...
David Nice
Hunger for the gruesome horrors and euphoric highs of Greek tragedy seems to be stronger than ever. Yet when it comes to epic sequences, nothing in recent decades has quite had the impact of Peter Hall’s Aeschylus Oresteia at the National Theatre or John Barton’s three-night RSC journey from Aulis to Tauris The Greeks. Now Age of Rage from Ivo van Hove and his Internationaal Theater/Toneelgroep Amsterdam joins them in the pantheon of great theatre.There’s a radical reaction here against everything that seems to me to have gone wrong with often admirable UK attempts to reimagine that ancient Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1957, popular music was given a jolt when the first electronic pop record was recorded. “Song of the Second Moon” was created and composed by the Dutch musician Dick Raaijmakers who was working at NatLab, the research laboratory of the electronics company Philips.“Song of the Second Moon” was based around a rhythmic pulse, and incorporated tape manipulation and multiple Ondes Martenots. It predicted the bubbling sound which became associated with Jean-Jacques Perry and presaged the machine beat Giorgio Moroder incorporated into his Donna Summer productions. It is also echoed by the 1962 Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The fourth feature made by writer-director partners Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing is not as celebrated as the six consecutive masterworks with which they followed it. It’s nonetheless a remarkably atmospheric film that outlined the shape of things to come.It was inspired by the sacrifice of five farmworkers of the hamlet of Greup (near Oud Beijerland in South Holland), who were executed by the Germans on 19 September 1941 for attempting to spirit away the crew of an RAF Wellington bomber downed by flak. The six British airmen became POWs.Since this Read more ...
Judith van Driel
In every life there are moments of great significance. Experiences that stick with us and define our own personal story.Growing up as a young violinist, one of those defining moments for me was the first time I played a piece by Johannes Brahms. It was his Second Violin Sonata; I was sixteen years old. Of course I had heard Brahms’s music before, but by bringing his notes to life myself I discovered a whole new range of emotions I had never experienced with any other composer. Or even more than that: the music opened up a new, illuminated world to me. Playing Brahms made me feel a little Read more ...
theartsdesk
Few musicians get to stage-manage a dignified departure from the world. Among his last compositions, Richard Strauss set a poem by Eichendorff depicting an old couple looking into the sunset and asking “is this perhaps death?”, and towards the end he told his daughter-in-law that “dying is just as I composed it in [the symphonic poem] Death and Transfiguration". That great Dutchman Bernard Haitink, a peerless interpreter of Strauss’s music, knew when to retire: he withdrew from official engagements not long after his 90th birthday in March 2019, marked by two concerts with the London Symphony Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
In Klem (meaning "clamp"’), we find ourselves in the calm, ordered and ordinary world of Amsterdam-Zuid. There are parents’ evenings to be attended, school plays to be watched. The area’s many pretty parks are just perfect for the early morning jog. Tall green bins stand in neat rows. Evenings are for helping children with their homework, or for going to choir practice, at which a widowed, serious, bespectacled tax official in the tenors might notice a romantic gaze coming in his direction from a hospital doctor in the sopranos, to the strains of Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei...Except that these Read more ...
graham.rickson
Louise Farrenc; Symphonies 1&3 Insula Orchestra/Laurence Equilbey (Erato)Louise Farrenc’s music is good as you’d expect from a precocious talent who’d studied piano with Hummel and composition with Reicha. Born in 1804, Farrenc’s misfortune was to be a female composer in 19th century Paris, a city with a highly progressive musical culture but antediluvian sexual politics. She was a renowned pianist and teacher, becoming a Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire in 1842 and having to fight to receive the same salary as her male colleagues. Farrenc’s three symphonies are Read more ...
Clark Rundell
It’s taken me a day to try to find some words to share at the passing of my dear friend, mentor and guardian angel Louis Andriessen and I’m grateful to theartsdesk for giving me the space. It is such a profound loss because of the profound gifts he gave us. His fabulous music is deep, tender, highly personal and achingly beautiful but also funny, ironic, joyful and deliciously vulgar. Generations of composers will attest to the inspiration and encouragement he gave, challenging performers and creators alike to reach new heights. He was unbelievably kind to me and the faith he showed in me Read more ...
Tom Baily
Success for the Belgian-Dutch crime series Undercover has led Netflix to produce an origin story for the show’s drug lord character Ferry Bouman (Frank Lammers). While this may be a dream come true for a portion of the show’s diehard fans, this formulaic movie is stalling, predictable and riddled with every gangster cliché in the book.Before he made it big, Ferry Bouman was the right hand man to one of Amsterdam’s senior drug kings Ralph Brink. After their gang is brutally attacked and Ralph’s son is killed, Ferry is sent on a revenge mission. He finds himself in a mobile camping community Read more ...
Florence Hallett
In the gloomy splendour of Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire, the 10th Duke of Buccleuch gazes up at Rembrandt’s Old Woman Reading, 1655. The painting has belonged to the Scott family for more than 250 years, and like generations before him, the duke has known it all his life. “She is the most powerful presence in this house.” He pauses: “Do you see what I mean?”It is a statement of spine-tingling acuity, hinting at the peculiar magic that hangs like a charm around Rembrandt's paintings, and leaves its mark on this documentary by Oeke Hoogendijk, which follows on from her 2014 film The New Read more ...