I am afraid that I am little behind on my blog posts. Still it has been a really exciting spring so here’s a quick update:

27 March: after returning in early March from Portugal, Nadar flew into their next project: The Night of the Unexpected II for Klara Festival 2019 at the Kanal in Brussels. We performed an incredibly diverse and virtuoso program that included Wettl’s Nocturne for 16 lamps and Michael Beil’s Key Jack for solo pianist. I was lucky enough to be able to repeat two really cool solo-conductor pieces: Alexander Khubeev’s Ghost of Dystopia and Alexander Schubert’s Point Ones. 

6 April: Being a member of Nadar ensemble means getting to take on true challenges, such as Exit F by Michael Maierhof. The piece, which were performed at the Bijloke’s annual “Ear to the Ground,” is for 4 hot air balloons and 8 musicians. I got to play one of the percussion parts. How about that! In one season I debuted on horn and also as a  percussionist!

1 and 2 May: Stefan Prins and Daniel Linehan created a really interesting piece for 10 musicians and 7 dancers called Third Space. When the show came to deSingel (Antwerp) in May, Nadar was invited to join the production. Having performed quite a bit of Stefan Prins’s music, it was really interesting to see his work from the perspective of a dance performance. For me, it added a new layer of drama to his music.

25 May: German composer, Alexander Schubert, was featured at the Musica Electronica Nova festival in Wroclaw, Poland, in a portrait concert titled: A Private Room – Alexander Schubert. Schubert is an important composer for our ensemble and apparently we are important to him, as well, because he invited us to come to Poland to perform his portrait. Personally, it was nice to be able to do the Alexander’s solo-conductor piece, Point Ones, with the composer present, offering very helpful feedback and, in his own words, “really enjoying my interpretation.”

30 May: Rounding off an incredible month, Nadar ensemble premiered Bernhard Lang’s Hermetika IX, at Concertgebouw Brugge. This evening-length performance was written specifically for our ensemble and for the building in which we premiered it. The audience was led on a parcours throughout the beautiful halls, walkways and hidden nooks and crannies of this incredible concert hall, ending in their Angel Room with Lang’s Angels Song.

The month of June sees performances with SPECTRA in Dusseldorf and quite a few shows conducting Soldaat van Oranje, de musical in the Netherlands. In July, I am off to the Time of Music festival in Finland to once again suit up and launch into Signale zur Invasion from Stockhausen.