Jeroen Van Veen

This unusual collection is dedicated to the very popular style: minimal music. Over the years this has evolved from austere, almost strict repetition with tiny movements to a more varied and free approach to material and technique. This set includes works for piano solo by most of the famous minimal composers. Starting with initiator, if you will, Cage, and followed by the first generation entirely devoting itself to this style: Riley and Glass. The next generation is represented by John Adams and Michael Nyman. Dutch pianist Jeroen van Veen is fascinated by minimal music.

Having made a gradual switch during the 15 years since his first album was published from electronica to instrumental variations on ambient and minimalism, Max Richter is among the most commercially successful composers of our time. This album of his solo piano music belongs in the genre explored so thoroughly for Brilliant Classics by Jeroen van Veen, whose prolific recording history includes hugely popular albums of Philip Glass (BC9419) and Michael Nyman (BC95112), Ludovico Einaudi (BC94910) and Yann Tiersen (BC95129) and his fellow Dutch musician Jakob ter Veldhuis (BC94873) and himself (BC9454). The appetite for slowly moving, unchallenging, post-Minimalist music is apparently infinite, and so this new album is sure to be a success.

French composer Yann Tiersen (born 1970) is one of the most popular and successful film music writers of today. His soulful and melancholic music finds its traces in folk music, French chansons, musette waltzes, street music, but also in the minimalism of Satie, Glass and Nyman. His international breakthrough came with the music for the French blockbuster 'Amélie', later followed 'Goodbye Lenin' and others. Dutch pianist, pioneer and champion of Minimalism Jeroen van Veen has recorded Tiersen’s most popular melodies, playing the piano in his inimitable way: focussed, serene and hypnotising.

“Eleven discs, fourteen hours of music. After the successful issue of Minimal Piano Collection I-IX Jeroen van Veen & friends have recorded works for 2 to 6 pianos, from - among others - Ten Holt, Eisenga, Meijering, Glass, Pärt, and Reich. With swinging effects, transformations and challenging rhythms…."

udovico Einaudi's aesthetic of emptiness has won him legions of fans worldwide, and Jeroen van Veen's survey of the piano music which is central to Einaudi's style belongs with his survey of minimalists including Glass and Nyman who are less concerned in music as an expressive language than as a commercial artefact. Likewise, his listeners absorb the music less in the sense of engaging with meaning than as backdrop to activity or release from stress. The works on this compendious collection are nearly all 'songs' of between 3 and 7 minutes, with the influence from pop culture that this brevity implies, and sharing with the pop world an economically aware employment of simplicity and repetition so as not unduly to tax the attention-span of the consumer. As Jeroen van Veen remarks, 'Contrary to ordinary classical music, minimal music demands little of the listener but to escape life's troubles for a moment; no comprehensive musical structures ask their full attention.'

This 8CD set bring the listener back to the roots of Minimalism, all works were written in the seventies of the 20th century, a time when the new aesthetics and perception of music, sound, repetition and time experience were creating a new chapter in music history. The longest piece is the 5 hour “November” by Dennis Johnson, a work in which the player is free to build the intervals and chords according to his own timing and spacing. The other composers in this set are Philip Glass, Tom Johnson, Peter Garland, Terry Riley, Harold Budd and La Monte Young.