Please accept cookies to listen to the playlist

Festival

Black MIDI – Stargaze & Ceremony Gaudeamus Award 2018

This concert has already taken place. Click here for our current concert programme.

Ensemble Stargaze, this year celebrating its fifth anniversary, has during those five years worked with musicians from a wide variety of genres. With Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo, Julia Holter, Nils Frahm and many more. The Ensemble has become very skilful in assuming many guises and forms. Its artistic director André de Ridder also appears on the rostrum of many an orchestra, for example last year in front of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and with composer and Gaudeamus Award jury member Nicole Lizée. Following this first fruitful collaboration, she is now arranging her work Black MIDI especially for Stargaze.

Lizée’s work is characterized by the multi-layered nature of its music and images. With the help of electronics, she arranges both these elements with glitches included, so as to introduce imperfections. Aart Strootman (2017 Gaudeamus Award winner) and Morris Kliphuis have firm ties with Stargaze, both as performers and composers. They now pay tribute to their favourite pop group, The Beach Boys, with a suite in which material from Smile, the group’s album that assumed legendary proportions but was never released, forms the basis of a composition that is entirely Strootman’s and Kliphuis’ own.

The concert concludes with the presentation of the Gaudeamus Award to one of the six nominated music pioneers. Since 1957 Gaudeamus has presented this award annually to up-and-coming composing talent. The winner will have the opportunity to write

Photo © Emanuel Florakis

Stargaze conducted by André de Ridder

Nicole Lizée - Black MIDI
Aart Strootman & Morris Kliphuis - Beach Boys Suite

Download the programme notes