Programme note: Bow More, Bow More!

[CONCEPT] This concert is the new Flemish string quartet Bowmore’s official debut concert. The name is a reference to a quartet from 1995 by the Flemish composer Luc Brewaeys, as well as to a well-known single-malt whisky that has been made in the eponymous Scottish village since 11779. The string quartet’s goal is to highlight the string quartet literature from after 1950, as well as to commission new works by composers from Flanders and elsewhere. Logically, the musicians will start their very first concert with Brewaeys’ Bowmore, followed by the string quartet Annelies Van Parys wrote in 2016 as a tribute to her mentor, who died too young. Her work, premiered at Transit ten years ago, is being revived now at Festival 20.21. Bowmore will close with another, all too little-known gem from the Belgian string-quartet literature: Summer Dreams by Philippe Boesmans, another composer who left us not so long ago. The concert as whole is a kind of musical ‘in memoriam’.

[BOWMORE] Luc Brewaeys wrote Bowmore in 1995 for the Danel Quartet. The work is part of a series of eight independent pieces whose titles share the name of a single-malt whisky. In Bowmore, the music itself has a clear Scottish connection: Brewaeys worked several songs by the Scottish poet and song composer Robert Burns (1759-1796) into it. The recognisability of these songs differs greatly from section to section. In the first, the composer uses the song Afton Water; initially it is only present in pianissimo harmonics, but gradually comes more to the foreground. In the second and third movements, Brewaeys integrates folksongs in a fairly inconspicuous way, so that the sound of Scottish folk music only breaks though completely at the absolute end of the quartet. Brewaeys’ own notes mention two more influences: he connects the ‘motoric-repetitive element’ to Steve Reich, and the intense but carefully built up hectic quality to Pierre Boulez. Altogether, Bowmore is a work with a markedly modernist signature, but its carefree blending of different musical worlds also gives it a – admittedly extremely original – postmodern cachet.

[COME FIUME INCESSANTE] The title of Annelies Van Parys’ first string quartet describes what happens in the work extremely well: despite brief hitches here and there, the piece suggests a ‘ceaseless stream’. The flow of this stream may not be consistently even, formed as it is by an infinite number of tiny fluctuations in which the timbre continuously changes. The title of this homage also refers to the character of the person to whom it is dedicated. Or, as Van Parys herself put it, ‘Always active, thinking at improbable speeds, never still (…). Indefatigable, even when he was physically exhausted.’

[SUMMER DREAMS] The second string quartet by Tongeren-born Philippe Boesmans was written in the same period as Brewaeys’ Bowmore. The work consists of seven short movements, and as the title suggests, it has a more reflective character. As in Van Parys’ quartet, the sound is dominated by the creation of different moods, without a development towards a particular goal. It sounds more like ‘abstract programme music’ – music that clearly evokes particular moods, leaving the concrete interpretation to the listener. Almost continuously, Boesmans displays an enormous, sonorous sensuality.

Pieter Bergé