Wonderfeel was unlucky with the weather, but don’t worry: ‘Monteverdi is a winner!’

Will the rain stop in time? That is what a few hundred people thought at a quarter to two on Friday afternoon, sheltering under the few available tent cloths and food truck canopies at the Schaep en Burgh estate in ‘s-Graveland near Hilversum. One brave man in a red poncho doesn’t care and sits down on one of the soaked wooden benches right in front of the stage, on which an orchestra sound checks. And sure enough: a few minutes before the starting gun it is dry.

This weekend marks the ninth edition of the Wonderfeel festival, the largest open-air classical music festival in the Netherlands. It is a festival of well-known and new music between the trees and in open spaces. From ‘poets under the tree’, bean bag lounge corners, walks with the forester. From puppet theater, making instruments and looking for water animals for children.

Loyal visitors can be recognized by the fold-out chairs they brought themselves, which can be stuck into the earth like a flag at any random spot. And, also seen, the kitchen roll in the bag as a weapon against wet benches. It is pleasantly busy on the site, but there is always room at the tents under which the performance takes place.

Bubbles with an iron

Ensemble Black Pencil entertains enormously with early music from all over Europe on, among other things, contrabass recorder and contrabass panflute (the latter almost comes to the floor and can sound amazingly the same as a plucked double bass), but especially with the cheerful talk of Venezuelan recorder player and artistic director Jorge Isaac. Monteverdi is one thópper”, he says with a heavy accent. Not a word lied.

Neo-fanfare 9×13 also makes a big impression in the middle of a large circle of audience with their turbulent, wordless mime-clownsque performance Under NAPin which they both play and communicate with their instruments.

Theme: the world is ending. How do the players know? Because one player is called about this on his iron and speaks in Scandinavian-sounding drivel at the other end of the line. The ‘other end of the line’ is the tuba player who ‘talks’ frantically through his instrument. It is the starting point of a cacophonous, charged but also very funny performance; youth theater for adults.

But although it is dry, the opening day suffers a bit from the weather: it is quite cold. A festival like Wonderfeel, with music that blows at you in the open air in clear and less clear fragments, thrives best in a languid atmosphere. But it didn’t get lazy. The fresh temperature keeps you just too sharp. You now hear that the festival orchestra (a project orchestra led by Johannes Leerketen) is taking a bit of time to get into it. Musica Sequenza, the ensemble of the Turkish bassoonist Burak Özdemir and one of the concerts in this year’s ‘Turkish program line’, plays drowsily as if it were 30 degrees, which sounds a bit tame in the cold. Hexad, a six-piece young London choir – a nice discovery by the festival – dedicates a beautiful program to the four-hundred-year-old composer William Byrd, with his music interspersed with own compositions that nicely color the performance. But they, too, had sounded a little more dreamy in a summer breeze to compensate for the missing church reverberation.

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

“No Negativity!”

Very hot-blooded afterwards was the women’s group Bnat Timbouktou of singer and guembri player (a Moroccan lute-like instrument) Asmâa Hamzaoui, who makes a big fist to the men’s world by playing music that until recently was absolutely not allowed to be touched by women.

Despite the cold, the women get the audience into ecstasy with their melismatic singing (with several notes on a syllable), the repetitive tones of the guembri, and the qraqebs (big iron castanettes that sound like horseshoes on a cobbled street) who play them in an endless “cata-knock-cata-knock” tripletary rhythm that gets excitingly faster and faster. In the aisles and on the edges of the audience, people dance and move freely in all kinds of ways.

Where on Friday you were still insecure about whether or not there was sun, and you constantly had to put on and take off layers, Saturday was a lot clearer in that respect: only rainy. Fortunately, the one-person ‘self-help opera’ RISE that performer and singer Nienke Nasserian was not bothered by that. Nasserian reads self-help books for relaxation and wrote a mind-boggling and hilarious spoken word-sing-move act about it using the most generic sentences from the more than forty self-help books in her bookshelf. “Give yourself the gift of getting closer to yourself,” she swings repeating to beats, synths, electric vibraphone and walk station, with a cheerful flair that conveys that she believes it very much and finds it very funny. “No negativity! No negativity!” she repeats rhythmically. A wonderful chaos.

At the end of the day, when many visitors had already fled home, the four saxophonists of the Amstel Quartet sailed with the weather. Phillip Glass’ Music With Changing Partsthoroughly trance-inducing minimal music, sounded more intense due to the white noise of drops on tent cloth and umbrella.

Read also: ‘Soprano Nienke Nasserian wrote a ‘self-help opera’ with the insights of her own search for identity’