Project Paloma - deel 3

PLEASE TAKE NOTE: This concert will take place in de Uilenburgersjoel - Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat 91

Flutist Emily Beynon will perform the third part of her Project Paloma: works for flute, written during the Second World War. This third edition features works by Dutch composers, including Leo Smit, Marius Flothuis and Dick Kattenburg.

Emily Beynon - flute
Andrew West - piano
Maarten Asscher - text

Marius Flothuis: Sonata da camera Op. 17 (1943)
Rudolf Escher: Habanera (1945) – solo piano
Marius Flothuis: Aubade (1944) – solo fluit
Leo Smit: Sonata (1943)
Hans Osieck: Varsovie Accuse (1946) – solo piano
Dick Kattenburg: Piece (1939)

The darkness of the Second World War affected composers in different ways; the collection of Dutch works from the third Project Paloma CD shows some confronting it head-on, and others choosing musical forms that appear to look aslant at its horror - though none remained untouched by it. Smit and Kattenburg both died in the camps, just two of the 102,000 Jewish, Sinti and Roma victims from the Netherlands who are known to have been killed.

Marius Flothuis wrote both his Sonata da Camera (1943) and Aubade (1944) in Nazi camps. Much of the Sonata retains a neo-Classical detachment, but the Lamento at its heart shows the composer’s pain, while the purity of the Aubade offers the hope of a new dawn.
Begun in 1939, the three movements of Leo Smit’s powerful Sonata reflect the increasing despair of his own experience; the tragic slow movement from February 1943, shortly before he was deported.
Hans Osieck’s mazurka, Varsovie accuse (1946), marked “slow, sorrowful and sinister”, is heavy with the misery of the Warsaw Ghetto; it casts the youthful exuberance of Dick Kattenburg’s Pièce (1939) in a terrible new light, for by the time Osieck wrote this work, the 24 year old Kattenburg had been murdered in Auschwitz. Even the lush Romanticism of Andriessen’s Praeludium (1942) is marked “with sadness”, and Escher’s haunting Habanera (1945) is but a ghostly flicker of how it might have sounded before the war.

In between the musical pieces performed, Dutch writer Maarten Asscher will recite several brief texts that for him put the music into a personal literary context. Apart from several poems, he will recite prose texts by writer and holocaust-survivor G.L. Durlacher, by his own father B.J. Asscher (who in 1943 was briefly interned in the Dutch transit camp Westerbork) and by the recently deceased Slovenian writer Boris Pahor.

Maarten Asscher (1957) has written novels, essays and stories. He also writes and translates poetry (by a.o. Albrecht Haushofer, Fernando Pessoa, Paul Valéry). He has previously worked as a literary publisher, as a cultural policy advisor and as a bookseller. His autobiographical book A House in England. A Grandson’s Novel (De Bezige Bij, 2020) on the wartime history of his father’s family, will be published this autumn in German translation by Luchterhand Verlag.

Emily Beynon has been principal flutist with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for almost thirty years. As a chamber musician she regularly collaborates with her sister, harpist Catherine Beynon, and pianist Andrew West. Beynon is committed to new music and has had numerous works written for him by composers such as John Woolrich, Sally Beamish, Jonathan Dove, Errollyn Wallen, Roxanna Panufnik and Maarten Ornstein. For twelve years Beynon was artistic director of the Dutch Flute Academy she founded and for eleven years she taught at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Royal Academy in London. She is regularly invited to give master classes all over the world. At the beginning of the pandemic, she started a YouTube channel with video tutorials on flute playing. Emily Beynon was born in Wales and has lived in Amsterdam for decades.

The English pianist Andrew West specialises in chamber music and song accompaniment and has performed with violinist Sarah Chang, cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras, tenor Mark Padmore and baritone Roderick Williams, among others. Together with Emily Beynon he has given concerts in the Concertgebouw, Wigmore Hall and during the Edinburgh International Festival. He has also performed solo recitals in the United States, South America and South Africa. Andrew West teaches song accompaniment and ensemble playing at the Royal Academy of Music and is a coach at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He is also part of the artistic direction of the Internationales Kammermusik Festival Nürnberg.

PLEASE TAKE NOTE: This concert will take place in de Uilenburgersjoel - Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat 91

Member concert
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