Joey Roukens’ Requiem is a captivating, tightly ordered chaos

Another Roukens! Composer Joey Roukens (1982) recently went on to be very successful First Symphony premiere. Now, less than three weeks later, we get another large piece from him. Roukens composed it Bosch Requiem: the opening of the November Music music festival in Den Bosch, which is written by a different composer every year.

That premiere was on Thursday and yes: it is impressive again.

Roukens, a great lover of requiems, set his own requiem with choir, string orchestra and two percussionists. In bluish light, with a sound as if sand and water are falling, a string and whisper of the choir it begins. A pitying solo violin adds in height and falls in steps, before the full light comes on and the choir sings ‘Requiem aeternam’.

Also read the review of Roukens’ First Symphony: In his First Symphony, Joey Roukens reaches a new milestone

An hour of exciting variety follows, sometimes serene, sometimes explosive, but full of recurring themes: for example, gradually ascending lines, reminiscent of stairs going up. The more explosive parts are heated by lightning-fast time signature changes and stackings that are reminiscent of Philip Glass. In the ‘Dies irae’, for example, the strings switch between rhythms so quickly that they start to swing. Sometimes the music breaks open like heaven, even if only for a short time.

Renaissance Pastiche

“You have to be careful that it doesn’t become a Renaissance pastiche,” said Roukens in NRC about his composition. That was certainly not the requiem. In the choir small, modern-sounding (but never unfriendly) dissonances are never far apart and in the orchestra tubular bells, marimba and vibraphone keep the accompaniment far from old-fashioned. A nice moment is a roll on the marimba, where the strings begin to pluck their strings frantically, then slow down together until they are a repeating echo: plonkplonkplonk plus plukplukpluk very gradually becomes plonk-pluck plonk-pluck.

The ‘In paradisum’, on the other hand, is a hushed, a cappella highlight, which resembles old vocals in which voices echo each other’s text. Only: where many old vocal works wait a word or two before the next voice starts the text, Roukens makes his singers wait only one syllable. What is serene in tone becomes exciting again in rhythm, especially with syllables that start with an s or t sound, because they bounce back and forth like clicks. Roukens writes tight, orderly chaos; accessible and catchy.

Plonkplonkplonk plus plunkplunkplunk very gradually plonk-plunk plonk-pluck

Towards the end, when gong and bells seem to start building up again towards the highs, Roukens suddenly changes that build-up to the low cellos and basses. We see a glimpse of paradise, but now not in heaven, but on earth.

Also read the interview with Joey Roukens: “I went from healthy person to zombie.”

If there is something to be negotiated, then at the edges of the implementation. Amsterdam Sinfonietta is impressively tight in the rapid time signature changes, but it can sometimes be just a bit warmer and more glowing. The Nederlands Kamerkoor sings serenely, but sometimes just a little too modestly.

On Thursday, Roukens wondered in this newspaper whether we would not get tired of Roukens, of two such great premieres so close to each other. Not even a little.

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