Van Bueren

Soprano Lilian Farahani and pianist Maurice Lammerts van Bueren will combine their love for the music of American composer Jake Heggie (1961), with their passion for photography. They want to interpret Heggies compositions ‘Eve-Song’ and ‘At the Statue of Venus’ in both an auditory and visual way, by making an album with a corresponding photobooklet. “Women are definitely the stronger sex.

During 2021's lockdown, pianist Maurice Lammerts van Bueren and Jakko van der Heijden from Zefir Records joined forces in a special project: for more than a year, they posted one mazurka by Frédéric Chopin on their YouTube channel 'The Mazurki Project' every week. Now that the project has come to an end, all 57 mazurkas are released in a double album. Maurice Lammerts van Bueren about his passion for this particular genre: "Since my childhood, I heard Chopin's mazurkas: live, when my mother played them on our piano in the living room, and through the speakers, when Artur Rubinstein's 1967 recording enchanted my eardrums. It made me fall in love not only with Rubinstein's playing, but also with Chopin's music and the sound of a Steinway grand piano. At the age of eleven, I won my first competition with a mazurka and now, almost forty years later, the mazurkas keep fascinating me. The genre accompanied Chopin all his life: he wrote his first mazurkas as a teenager, while his last mazurka was his ultimate piece."

The album Melancholia presents songs and piano mazurkas by Polish composers, Chopin, Paderweski and Szymanowski. There are only 19 songs officially verified as Chopins works, all of them inspired by lyrics of his contemporaries poets. Most of Chopins vocal compositions were published after his death and combined as Op.74. The poetry of Adam Mickiewicz inspired Ignacy Jan Paderewski to work on a cycle regarding love, longing and passing of the time. Six songs were created between 1887-1893. Paderewski died in New York after having a remarkable European and American career as an outstanding pianist, composer, philanthropist and politician.

Paris, around 1900. A group of friends regularly meet to share their passion for art. Most of them are artists, but even an aviator and a priest join the group. They gather weekly at Paul Sordes’ apartment on the 5th floor of the ‘Villa du Phénix”, Ruedu Long, where they make music, recite their poems and discuss art until the middle of the night. ‘Les Apaches’ they call themselves after a notorious Parisian gang, prowling around the district. Word has it that the group of friends rumble the streets in an ecstatic mood after visiting the theatre, when they completely overlook a paperboy. A collision follows and the boy shouts: “Attention Les Apaches!” The friends, who regard themselves as artistic outcasts, adopt the name immediately.The group exists of, amongst others, composers such as Maurice Ravel, Déodat de Séverac, Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Delage and Manuel de Falla, pianist Ricardo Viñes, poet Tristan Klingsor and painter Paul Sordes. This release is a tribute to the group.

Humor, romance, drama, myths and fairytales: all this can be found in the poems of the collection ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’. Mahler was quite fond of these poems and used more than twenty of them in his compositions. The alternation between transcendent, sometimes religious songs, rough, poignant and jovial soldier songs, comic fables and folk tunes, all in an overarching and ever recognizable Mahlerian idiom, makes these songs so appealing to perform and to listen to. Though very famous in their orchestral versions, Mahler composed most of them originally for piano and voice. These primary versions don’t get performed as often as the orchestral ones do, but here they are performed beautifully by Esther Kuiper, Sven Weyens, and Maurice Lammerts van Bueren.