New European Ensemble, Vocaal Ensemble Consorte conducted by Imre Ploeg, Jonas Bisquert, Randa Awad; poetry by Edzard Mik, Hans Lodeizen, Randa Awad, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Jonas Bisquert

The twelve-member Vocaal ensemble Consorte, brings a program about rivers and oceans. Water has a quality of stillness. It is the nocturnal world, the stilled, the world behind our world, through which we wade. The inside of things. But it is also the world of the storm, where everything originates and ends:
Tomás Luis de Victoria – Super flumina Babilonis
Ralph Vaughan Williams – Silence and music

New European Ensemble will present:

Kinan Abou-afach – Chronicles I (à la samā’ī) – for string quartet, is a contemporary reflection on the middle-eastern sama’i music, loosely following the form where multiple sections (Khana) are introduced and followed by a refrain (Tasilm). But the deconstructed form in the piece allows the Taslim to reappear as a motivic fragment throughout the multiple sections. The mood of this work moves between melancholic, to pensive, to hankering for Abou-afach’s homeland, Syria.

Wassim Ibrahim – Syriac Fantasy
The life in the Syriac – Aramaic Church has a feeling of emancipation of time. It consists of a constant motion, in an attempt to dive into the inner life of Man, unleash the imagination in a purely spiritual life. Syriac fantasy is one of various Syriac Aramaic stories.

Together Consorte and New European Ensemble will perform Nocturne in European Waters is a new composition by Jonas Bisquert. Bisquert explains that water is full of contradictions: a river can bring people together, but also divide them. An ocean is an enormous barrier between different continents, but also the bridge. On a more metaphorical level there is also a contradiction between the poetic and political aspect of water. In his preparations for this piece he did an extensive study of poetry about water. He made a selection of four poems by a Syrian, a Portuguese and two Dutch poets, in which the poetic and the political are united. For example in the poem of the Palestinian-Syrian Randa Awad, who is present as a vocalist during the performance, her experience of water symbolizes her journey to Europe.

This project is made in cooperation by Gaudeamus and was presented September 2019 at their festival

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