Very strong percussion concert with a huge chime of PET bottles

On the stage of the Amare concert hall in The Hague on Friday evening, there was an installation that was most reminiscent of a market stall with kitchen utensils. It was the setup for it Recycling Concerto by composer Gregor Mayrhofer, which had its Dutch premiere. Program booklets were not there, because like the title Make music, not trash – people and nature suggested: making as little mess as possible was the starting point of this concert. With this, the Residentie Orkest makes a welcome, but unfortunately one-off statement against the degradation of the earth.

Mayrhofers Recycling Concerto is conceptually genius. It is a solo percussion concert consisting of, among other things, second-hand kitchen utensils, glass bottles and a gigantic chimes made of PET bottles and plastic water tanks. To find the right pitches, Mayrhofer spent hours tapping dessert bowls in a thrift store. There is also plenty of recycling from a musical point of view: the first part is made up of advertising jingles (from a fast food chain, a telecom company, a coffee capsule producer and a soft drink giant). In part two, those melodies gradually degenerate into what Mayrhofer himself calls a “Trash Apocalypse”: a climax in which the advertising jingles on unorthodox percussion merge into a hellish cacophony, only to return in a new form in part three.

It is a technically challenging job for the musicians, but Friday night’s performance turned out to be a success on all counts. Percussionist Vivi Vassileva is a brilliant (and comical) performer who threw empty aluminum coffee cups and corks on the marimba keys with devotion, after which they rolled away over the instrument with a soft tap. The absolute highlight was her long, virtuoso ‘cadenza’ (solo) with two PET bottles in the leading role. The interplay between orchestra and soloist was also fun: the orchestra was also given plastic bags and some unorthodox instruments, but here it played a modest, accompanying role in the whole. Afterwards, Vassileva, between the corks and coffee cups, convinced the audience of her talent once again with an encore: the Tango Jealousy by Jacob Gade in an arrangement for marimba, which was a nice graceful contrast to Mayrhofer’s angular music.

Well done statement

After the break, Beethoven sounded Sixth Symphony, ‘Pastorale’, featuring projected nature images by photographer Tobias Melle. The Sixth tells the story of a happy gathering in nature that is disturbed by a storm. Images of fresh tree leaves and rippling water on the canvas added a layer to the first movements of the symphony conducted by conductor Anja Bihlmaier.

In the run-up to the storm, Melle portrayed the tension between man and nature in a wonderful way: with garden gnomes and rollercoasters in all shapes and sizes, to finally show the large-scale ecological destruction caused by lignite mines. In order not to send the audience out of the room depressed, it was given pictures of nature restoration in the finale.

Although the images did not miss their message, they also distracted from Bihlmaier and the Residentie Orkest. Still numb from all the percussion, you tended to stare at the screen as the music rippled past you.

The statement of Make music not trash pale with Vassileva in it Recycling Concerto finally strong enough. Beethoven had little to add to that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ1l6TH60Ew