Amsterdam Sinfonietta & Karsu

Amsterdam Sinfonietta

Amsterdam Sinfonietta brings together 23 gifted chamber musicians, embodying ensemble-playing at the highest level. Led by artistic director Candida Thompson, the orchestra tours the world with adventurous programmes and crossovers with other music genres and art forms. Nostalgia for Italy runs through this evening: „The sun shines in all its splendour… at last, I feel a magical change within me,“ Tchaikovsky wrote while visiting the Italian city of Florence. „Souvenir de Florence“ is a tribute to the city he adored, music brimming over with love and joy. The young pianist Bruce Liu, who won first prize at the Chopin Competition in 2021, makes his debut with Amsterdam Sinfonietta, performing works by Chopin – his second piano concerto and the virtuosic Polonaise brillante – both in versions for piano and string orchestra.

Amsterdam in Concert - 'Geef mij maar Amsterdam' and other classics

Amsterdam in Concert - 'Geef mij maar Amsterdam' and other classics

XA4 – Amsterdam Dance Event

XA4 – Amsterdam Dance Event

LudoWic – Amsterdam Dance Event

It goes without saying that The Concertgebouw and jazz & pop music make a perfect combination. The stages of both the Main Hall and the Recital Hall have borne witness to nearly the whole of jazz history. Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald have both performed here, as have Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong. Famous pop stars and bands that have graced the stage of the Main Hall include Frank Zappa, the Doors and the Eagles, to name but a few. Legendary concerts, in the present as well as the past.

Bruce Liu / Amsterdam Sinfonietta / Candida Thompson

Mandarin, French, English? For Bruce Liu, it’s just a question for the other person – the Paris-born Canadian with Chinese roots is equally fluent in all three languages. But his best means of expression is undoubtedly music. Since winning first place at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 2021, the young pianist has been attracting crowds of new listeners with his subtle and unpretentious playing. Deutsche Grammophon hired him straight away as an exclusive artist and the doors of the great classical temples suddenly opened for the piano student, who has since surpassed the great promise that comes with such a competition win. His Chopin sounds like a language of its own – universally understandable and individually moving at the same time!

Amsterdam Sinfonietta / Candida Thompson / Bruce Liu

This is a moment everyone has been waiting for – Bruce Liu returns to NOSPR!In 2021, several days after his spectacular triumph in the 18th Chopin Competition, Bruce Liu gained 1,800 new fans as soon as he stepped onto the NOSPR stage (more people did not manage to enter the hall, even though, as we can remember, they tried!). Nevertheless, if we take into account the 300,000 online broadcast viewers, we can say that the concert sealed the Canadian pianist’s superstar status.Back then, Bruce Liu performed the Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-minor, with which he had won the competition. This time, we are going to hear the second one of Chopin’s concertos – the one in the key of F-minor. Both in the Concerto and in the Andante spianato et grande polonaise brillante in E-flat major, the latter to open the evening, he will be accompanied by theAmsterdam Sinfonietta, led by Candida Thompson. You might also remember these artists from NOSPR posters: in 2020, the ensemble and its leader were to accompany the Jussen brothers, but their performance was cancelled due to the pandemic.In the April concert, the Dutch orchestra will also present Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence and Mieczysław Weinberg’s deeply moving Aria. It will be a truly unique evening!Szymon MaliszewskiConcert duration (intermission included): approximately 120 minutes

Ud Festival: Ahmed El Maai, Amsterdam Andalusian Orchestra, Cappella Amsterdam & Matangi Quartet

It goes without saying that The Concertgebouw and jazz & pop music make a perfect combination. The stages of both the Main Hall and the Recital Hall have borne witness to nearly the whole of jazz history. Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald have both performed here, as have Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong. Famous pop stars and bands that have graced the stage of the Main Hall include Frank Zappa, the Doors and the Eagles, to name but a few. Legendary concerts, in the present as well as the past.

Joep Beving & Maarten Vos - Amsterdam Dance Event

Pianist Joep Beving and cellist Maarten Vos have announced details of their first collaborative album, vision of contentment, which will be released by Nils Frahm’s LEITER label and arrives on July 19, 2024. It follows work together on 2019’s Henosis, Beving’s third album, which came about after the two musicians shared a bill in Amsterdam in 2018. Mixed by Frahm at LEITER studio in the German capital’s famed Funkhaus complex, where Vos also has his studio, the LP contains eight brand new compositions and will be available on vinyl as well as via all digital platforms. It’s preceded by a single, ’02:07’, on May 31, 2024.While Beving’s never recorded an entire album with another artist before, Vos has regularly engaged in such activities, sharing credits with artists such as Julianna Barwick, Nicolas Godin (AIR) and Alex Smoke. “Occasionally I come across artists with whom I share a musical connection, leading to a mutual desire to collaborate,” Vos explains. “Exploring different creative approaches and learning from their workflows has been inspiring, contributing greatly to my development.”For Beving, it was a natural step to take, and arguably overdue. “Doing an album from scratch as a joint project was something Maarten and I wanted to try for a while now,” he says. “When my deal came to an end, we saw an opportunity to start making music. I’m always trying to create small worlds for the listener to temporarily live in. Working with Maarten and Nils has helped immensely in achieving this. Maarten is a sculptor of sound and Nils is, well...the master of sound!”Most of vision of contentment was written and recorded during July, 2023, after Beving and Vos unpacked their gear – recording equipment, various synths, a cello – to join the upright piano awaiting them in de berenpan, a shed hidden away in the forest outside Bilthoven, a small village in the Dutch province of Utrecht. The friends had already spent time together in Beving’s Amsterdam studio as well as Vos’ Funkhaus setup, sessions from which two further album tracks are taken, but their week in the countryside would prove particularly fruitful, if for uncomfortably poignant reasons. Out of their sometimes-sombre work emerged a universal eulogy to what the pianist calls “Finding comfort in the acceptance of the inevitable,” but the album represents far more than this. It’s also an astonishing personal tribute to Mark Brounen, their friend and, in Beving’s case, manager.Vos considers the haunting sounds of vision of contentment “a sonic landscape that encourages imaginative exploration”, and the duo talk of Morten Feldman as a musical guide, and Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto as ‘mentors’. Beving, meanwhile, says he intends to leave listeners with a simple sense of love, adding that he hopes it will also enable “a search for harmony and understanding” that also delivers “a big fuck you to fascists and fear!”