“Heimwee”

Nothing is more human than longing for the distance. In Heimwee everything revolves around the great homesickness, as the Russian Alexander Glazunov felt when he wrote his grandiose saxophone quartet in Paris. Like the composer Aftab Darvishi who feels like her homeland Iran, which she left to study in the Netherlands. And just like writer and master storyteller Jan Brokken feels like the Dutch East Indies of his ancestors.

Together with the Berlage Saxophone Quartet, Brokken explores homesickness in a melancholy, theatrically designed storytelling concert.

In addition to melancholy, it is mainly French multi-colouredness à la Claude Debussy that characterizes Glazunov’s quartet. It is one of the first major works for saxophone, a relatively new instrument at the time.

Aftab Darvishi has been impressing for years with her original, often theatrical music. She wrote her latest work “Arghavan”especially for the Berlage Quartet.

And György Ligeti needed only one string, the lowest string of a viola, to sound a fathomless deep lament in Hora lunga.

Program: