If you ask pianist and composer Rembrandt Frerichs (44) for one concert, you should not be surprised when he arrives with two. Because the musician never stops. “The ideas keep flowing,” he says. “You will not see me staring blankly at a white sheet.”
For the classical Alma Quartet and double bassist Dominic Seldis – all members of the Concertgebouw Orchestra – percussionist Vinsent Planjer and himself, he started a piano concerto and ended with two. The album will be released next week and both works will premiere next Sunday in TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht. It Second Piano Concerto was a happy coincidence, as often happens to Frerichs.
“A few years ago, violinist Eva Stegeman asked me for a string quartet for her festival Classical Encounters in The Hague. “Now that you’re here, you can join in on the piano,” she said before the concert. During the performance I felt that there was more to this music. Initially I wanted to record the piece in the First Piano Concerto† But it has such a dynamic of its own that Eternal Variational Alternationsor Evagrew into a separate work.”
Twilight areas
The composer and pianist likes to move in the twilight zones of jazz, world music and classical music. During performances – always full of improvisations – a small recording device is always accompanied. “I don’t want to dissolve finds that strike me on the cutting edge. Because on stage my mind ends up in another zone. I remember the Bach Festival Dordrecht, where I improvised a prelude to a work by Bach. While playing the thought came to me: ‘This is too crazy to elaborate further.’ Later I was able to listen back and the piece was created Decemberwhich was performed with violinist Liza Ferschtman, among others.”
The piano concertos are an encounter between jazz and classical music, between black and white pages: the Alma Quartet received a score, percussionist Vinsent Planjer and Frerichs did without it, and double bassist Dominic Seldis had to navigate between the two.
“I don’t want those five guys from the Concertgebouw to deny their classical selves,” says Frerichs. “But as happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, you can challenge classical musicians to use their creative talent more. The rehearsals were an examination of what I could ask of them and what not. It won’t work if I say: ‘These are the harmonies, here I start, you hook up nicely, and we’ll see each other in about ten minutes.’ But the other extreme doesn’t work either: giving classical musicians a minimal, danger-free musical pattern to repeat 300,000 times. That’s super boring. The quest lies between those two poles.”
Musical routes
There is a lot in the piano concertos. Frerichs explores in the opening part of the First the humming lows and hysterical highs of the grand piano, then he loses himself with the strings in a Slavic theme, reminiscent of Dvorak, and later the playful spirit of Ravel also seems to come around for a while. He got this classical inspiration from his grandfather and father, both organists.
“Bach’s harmonies are in my genes. My father also played jazz. Until I was sixteen I had irregular lessons on the piano or organ. There was no line and I also saw no future for me as a musician.”
That changed when Frerichs, when he was sixteen, received a box with recordings by the American pianist Herbie Hancock. “Its non-commercial work. At home I mainly heard VVD jazz. This was different. The light of inspiration shone on: I wanted this too. Years later, while studying as a jazz pianist at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, classical music returned. It was taken very seriously there in secondary subjects. I often buy classical pocket scores to find out which path composers like Bach, Schulhoff or Ravel follow. I want to discover as many routes as possible on the piano, so that I can take a nice turn on the spot.”
Also read the interview with soprano Klaartje van Veldhoven and jazz pianist Rembrandt Frerichs: ‘Submission, we’re not good at that’