Joreon Van Veen

The pianist, composer, producer and renaissance musician Jeroen van Veen has played many concerts with both his wife Sandra and his brother Maarten, and has recorded with both of them for Brilliant Classics. The present compilation brings together a unique sequence of masterpieces for the genre in live and studio performances, made between 1992 and 2008, and given by the brothers as Piano Duo Van Veen.

‘I play with violence,’ Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) told one interviewer. ‘My bandoneon must sing and scream – I can’t conceive of pastel tones in tango.’ With an unrivalled discography of minimalist classics to his credit, from Satie to Glass to Yann Tiersen, Jeroen van Veen is ideally placed to return the raw passion and punchy rhythms that belong to the music of Piazzolla in any context.

Among the best-selling composers of our time, Ludovico Einaudi has won a following of millions through his distinctively calm, smoothly unfolding works, which spin unbroken songs from the simplest material and cast a spell of relaxed enchantment over their audience.

There's perhaps a touch of irony in the title of Dutch pianist and composer Jeroen van Veen's box set Minimal Piano Collection because at nine discs, it's a pretty massive collection. The program booklet notes that he recorded the entire set, which includes more than ten hours of music, in only six days, an astounding feat. In the program notes, van Veen offers a remarkably clear and concise history of minimalism in music. He defines it broadly enough (following the lead of composer and critic Tom Johnson) to include works by Friedrich Nietzsche and Satie. Philip Glass is the composer most widely represented, with three of the set's nine CDs devoted to his music originally for piano, as well as transcriptions from his film scores and operas. Two discs are given to van Veen's mammoth 24 Préludes, organized according to the framework of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Other composers range from the very well known, such as Michael Nyman, John Adams, Terry Riley, Arvo Pärt, and John Cage, to the familiar-to-specialists, like Tom Johnson, Wim Mertens, and Jacob ter Veldhuis, to those little-known to American audiences, like Klaas de Vries, Simeon ten Holt, John Borstlap, Yann Tiersen, and Carlos Micháns.