Having been played in many corners of the world I met many colleagues: musicians, composers, and sometimes I wonder: where did they go? Why does one person stick to you but most of them not? Especially with contacts abroad, a friend easily fades away. It’s a special thing when a friendship abroad lasts over the years. I guess it means there’s a deep common interest.
I’m writing about Daniel Matej, we studied with the same teacher. But so did many other people. I am thinking: there might be 2 reasons we keep on seeing eachother:
First: we both are mavericks. We both are composers who go forward when most people say: let’s go backwards. We are both what we call ‘ondeugend’ in Dutch, like boys who climb into the forbidden tree to steal an apple, there is something inside of us that thinks, when someone says: “don’t do that”, “O, HOW CURIOUS I am why I shoudn’t, and I am going to try out”.
A second reason is that we are both deeply serious and idealistic. Especially nowadays you need to be something of a marathon-man to remain composing, at least in Holland the wheel turned 180 degrees: in 1990 a composer was someone to look up to, in 2024 a composer is an anachronical person, the profession unbeknownst to most people. When you explain: it’s some kind of artist who writes music, people get an image of candles and early death in great poverty, they want the artist to be Vincent van Gogh, they stand and wait for us to cut our ear off and then they would say: “ah, yes, beautiful isn’t it? True craziness an poverty, nothing beats the serious and idealistic artist.” But then alas, we leave our ears where they are and people find out we have a home, a wife and children, a cat, a car, no candles but electric light. Just normal people trying to live something of a normal life, whatever that is. Very disappointing.
So there’s the little rascal in us, and there is the almost religious serious and idealistic man. These two sides of our characters keep us in balance. That is what I recognize when I look at Daniel, we are both younger and older then we actually are.
After the Ives ensemble played a program at the ISCM days 2006 in Stuttgart with pieces by me and Daniel, which was the moment we met for the first time, I have been to Bratislawa to be a guest at the ‘evenings of new music’, which is where I met with the VENI ensemble. And especially Ivan Šiller, the pianist. He played one of my pieces that was ten years old but had never been played in Holland because no-one dared to take the risk. It was a world-premiere. I was quite nervous after having heard from Dutch musicians: it’s unplayable. And I remember clearly the first rehearsal in Bratislawa when Ivan Siller and Peter Zwiebel, the viola player, warned me beforehand: you have to excuse us but we did not have enough time to study yet, so it’s not perfect. In Holland, when a musician says this to you, you prepare for the worst, because it means: we did not study at all and we play ‘a prima vista’ and hope for the best. But when Ivan and Peter started I was flabbergasted because almost everything was there, and in a beautifully musical way too. I couldn’t speak after this first runthrough and both players thought: Help, he didn’t like it. But no, the contrary.
And ever since I experienced that the VENI ensemble is always meticulously precise and it always plays with a huge sense of urgency.
I wrote my 3d pianoconcerto “AVONDBOEK – NACHTBOEK” especially for Ivan, in 2020. The premiere was 3 years later, delayed because of corona, and I could not be present at the first performance because I was taking care of my little cat Zeep, who needed medical treatment every day. For a composer it’s totally depressing to miss a first performance, especially if it’s such a big work. You want to be there after all these months of solitary writing! But I couldn’t leave my cat and had to leave everything in the hands of Daniel, being my ears during rehearsals, to Ivan, who like always didn’t need any guidance and played all the right notes at the right moment in the right way, and to Marian Lejava, the conductor, who got the VENI ensemble to actually play quintuplets, something most orchestras and ensembles in Holland can’t do; a wonderful strict performance.
I was not able to feel the vibe of the live moment, but luckily the recording is there, on cd together with Daniels own pianoconcerto, which is an honor to me, because I know ‘quotations-rotations-variations’ means a lot to him, a special work in his oeuvre. Both his and my work written in the solitary corona period, which combined feelings of relief, because it was quiet, of anxiety, because the government forced us to stay inside, and strangeness, because we realized this was something we had never experienced before.
Luckily I was able to be present at the presentation of the first cd and meet my friends again. And how well it looks, the whole package made with the same respect and serious attitude as everything I experienced from Daniel and the VENIensemble.
Thank you for the honor to be your friend, all of you…
Piet-Jan van Rossum
