Makawao concert poster and CD

A framed poster of our first public concert in the USA hangs on my mother’s wall. It’s the only one that survives today.

Bekkers Piano Guitar Duo concert at Makawao Union Church, December 2007

The CD will soon be available on CDBaby and at all concerts that Robert Bekkers plays on his solo concert tour. Our hope is that it will sell out to enable us to reinvest in arranging more music for piano guitar, collaborate with other enthusiastic music lovers and musicians, and encourage more composers to write for this combination.

The piano and the guitar are rarely heard today as a classical duo. At this concert in December 2007, which has been recorded and released on CD Live in Makawao, you can hear original music written for piano and guitar from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

While we have to research the origins of the earlier works, we have only to e-mail or speak to the composers in the 21st century.

Haarlem-based guitarist and composer Erik Otte was the first person to write for our duo. He dedicated the 4-part Rio de la Plata to us. With South American influences, the music is about love. The first movement opens with a bang, symbolising a break-up. The fourth movement is very energetic (below).

We invited Amsterdam-based composer Allan Segall to the premiere of Rio de la Plata at the “Mustard Seed” in Santpoort for he could not believe that a piano and guitar could be a feasible duo. After hearing Otte’s piece, Allan stood up and announced that he would write something for us.

Segall’s “When JS Bach, Igor Stravinsky, and the Who Met” is a challenging and terribly exciting piece. It’s extremely demanding to get it together. Segall suggested that we watch “Tommy” to get the feel of the rock musical which is embedded in the piece. It’s the only work in which the guitar overpowers the piano.

Once these pieces were added to our repertoire, we started actively looking for composers to write for our duo. Utrecht-based Henk Alkema wrote “Sailor Talk” on a programmatic subject he knew well for he loves sailing. We premiered it at the Cortona Contemporary Music Festival in 2007.

At the same festival, we played Toronto-based Lan Chee Lam’s “Drizzle.” The Dutch audience especially love this piece — kind of oriental and exotic. Lan Chee is the youngest composer to have written for our duo. She finally came to the Netherlands in January 2010, for the premiere of another work of hers.

Lan Chee Lam, composer of "Drizzle" in Utrecht, January 2010

Piano Guitar Duo CD Makawao Live! on CDBABY

To prepare for Robert Bekkers’ solo guitar tour (2-page PDF) in mid-February, we are releasing two CDs of live recordings of concerts in Hawaii and North Carolina.

We will release our next CD first online in digital format for download (as entire album or individual tracks). The physical album will only be available at the forthcoming concerts of Robert Bekkers in Massachusetts, Maine, New York, Texas, and Arizona. [Correction: the physical album will also be available by ordering through CDBaby.]

Release date: Tuesday 25 January 2011

Where? On CDBABY.COM [the exact link is http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bekkerspianoguitarduo2]

What’s inside? 70 minutes of music from our first public concert in the USA.

Album cover art: Piano Guitar in Acryllic by Rob Judkins, January 2011

Bekkers Piano Guitar Duo Live in Makawao CD

Ebb and Flow Arts presented this free concert on 29th December 2007, preceded by a lot of publicity (colour posters, radio clips, newspaper mentions and listings, etc). One of the sponsors was the Hawaiian Tourism Authority.

We had not had the time in these past 3 years of marathon-like existence to review the live recording until we returned to Maui again. Otherwise this CD would have been released much earlier. The public would have then heard music of living composers Lan-Chee Lam in Toronto, Allan Segall in Amsterdam, Erik Otte in Haarlem, and Henk Alkema in Utrecht.

Makawao means “edge of the forest.”  The Makawao Union Church is located on Baldwin Avenue on the way to Maui’s famous volcano, the Haleakala. As I recall, its wooden interior and architecture provided excellent acoustics for the Baldwin grand piano that stood below the stage. We had stayed in a yoga master’s cottage in nearby Paia (a hippy town) to be within the vicinity of the church.

Over the next few days, we will blog about the works on the CD.

For a preview, download the programme notes (164 kB PDF).

Pull, pluck, strum, bang! on 13 September in Utrecht

The brand new building of Muziekhuis Utrecht (Music House Utrecht), called Centrum Muziek XXI, at Loevenhoutsedijk 103 beckons. It’s a new venue for contemporary music, which, like contemporary art, speaks of the age we live in.

Yet, unlike contemporary art, new music requires more effort to reach listeners. Could it be that visual appreciation is easier than audio? Or is the time element? That is, one can stand in front of a painting for an indefinite amount of time to familiarise and appreciate. On the other hand, live music is delivered in real-time. Unless there’s a recording, you won’t hear it again. And why would you buy a CD of music you’ve only heard once? ….not even sure that you’d appreciate it?

There lies the rub.

Who would risk going to a concert of unfamiliar works? You might not enjoy it. When the composers are also unfamiliar, you may wonder why bother at all. In our case, it’s a quadruple whammy because the venue is completely new and our duo isn’t world famous. But if you like our “Mediterranean Summer” programme on the previous day, you will definitely enjoy “Pull, Pluck, Strum, Bang!” on 13th September 2009.

Why would you go to Centrum XXI in Utrecht on a Sunday afternoon in September? 

Curiosity perhaps.

Adventure?

Inspiration?

Education?

New music on a rare combination of instruments (piano and guitar) invites you to new possibilities. Think outside the box as the composers have. What can you do with a piano and a guitar other than play them the way they have always been played in the past three centuries?

I visited the Museum of Modern Art in Paris twice this past August to find out why modern art seems so much more appreciated than modern music. Perhaps I should ask the audience at our contemporary music concert this Sunday afternoon.

Walking through the misty shower on the strand in Paris in August

“Pull, pluck, strum bang!” Concert Programme

Abstract and Dance (2007)           
Gijs van Dijk (b. 1954)

When Bach, Stravinsky and The Who Met (2005)           
Allan Segall (b. 1959)

Drizzle (2007)           
Lan-Chee Lam (b. 1982)

Suite Rio de la Plata (2004)           (last two movements only)
Erik Otte (b. 1955)

Danza de la pareja enamorada, lento ma non troppo

Candombe del amor recuperado, allegro giusto

 Programme Notes

Abstract and Dance (2007)             Gijs van Dijk (b. 1954)

Born in Delft, Gijs van Dijk studied composition and music theory with Tristan Keuris at the Hilversum and Utrecht Conservatory. He works as a composer, an improvising musician, a classical & jazz guitar player and teacher in Amsterdam. van Dijk has worked with many leading Dutch musicians, mainly as a composer for chamber music ensembles but also in various improvised music ensembles.

“Abstract and Dance” is a kind of rendered piece. The first movement develops in the direction of twelve tone music which suddenly changes into a stylized Spanish dance in the second part.

When Bach, Stravinsky and The Who Met (2005)            Allan Segall (b. 1959)

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Dutch/American composer Allan Segall grew up in Denver, Colorado, and has most recently served as Concert Director at the Engelse Kerk in Amsterdam where he lives. He received his Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He acquired Dutch citizenship in 2007.

Segall wrote “When JS Bach, Igor Stravinsky and The Who Met” for the Baby Boomer Generation and and those young at heart who love The Who. This amazing work is a synthesis of art music and rock, a work where the guitar actually surpasses the piano in volume as guitarist demonically strums to an exhilarating climax that recalls Segall’s favorite Who album, Tommy.

Drizzle (2007)            Lan-Chee Lam (b. 1982)

Born in Hong Kong, Lan-Chee Lam’s music often combines traditional Chinese and contemporary Western techniques, exploring new dimensions of the sound world. Her works have been performed in Hong Kong, Canada, United States and Italy. She is currently pursuing a DMA at University of Toronto.

Drizzle, as in light rain, makes use of guitar harmonics and the insides of a grand piano. There are pentatonic passages which make the piano sound like a Chinese instrument.  Lam wrote, “The main challenge of writing for guitar and piano is the balance issue. In order to let people hear the guitar part more clearly, the piano can’t always plays too loud or busy figures. Therefore, I try to use more high register from the piano which has a thinner sound. It surprisingly works well with the guitar harmonics, as well as the inside piano plucking. This sounds like the bell. The main idea for writing Drizzle is to reflect the beauty of light rain with its transparent texture, with reference to guitar tremolos.”

Suite Rio de la Plata (2004)            Erik Otte (b. 1955)

Born in Leiden, home to the oldest university in the Netherlands, Erik Otte played the violin as a child but made his final choice for guitar at age 16. After graduating from the Royal Conservatory (The Hague) and the Conservatory of Rotterdam, he followed an international performance career before settling into composing for chamber music in recent years.

Suite Rio de la Plata, which consists of four dance movements about the various stages of love (from heart break to new love), was written for Anne Ku and Robert Bekkers as a present. It is the first work dedicated to the duo.