Above the water of the IJ, the half-river, half-canal that slices North Holland in two, sits the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ. Looking like a great glass-and-steel gantry, it echoes the storehouses that held coffee and spices shipped to Amsterdam from across the world during the Dutch Empire’s heyday. Along from the Amsterdam Conservatorium and Public Library, the futuristic NEMO Science Museum, and the Eye Filmmuseum across the water, the Muziekgebouw is situated firmly as a part of a distinctly 21st-century New Amsterdam.
The Muziekgebouw’s main programming focus is on modern and contemporary music, but this is by no means all it does – the venue’s eclectic approach to programming encompasses everything from Baroque a capella vocal music to piano recitals, string quartets, viol consorts and electronic music. Adjoining the Muziekgebouw is the BIMHUIS, which presents jazz and improvised music. Designed by architects 3XN and opening in 2005, the Muziekgebouw complex is about as adaptable as it’s possible for a modern concert hall to be.
“It originated with the IJsbreker, which opened in 1979”, Boudewijn Berentsen, the Muziekgebouw’s director tells me when we speak by video call. “It was basically a pub, with a concert hall built in.” (The café bar is still there: the Ysbreeker, on Weesperzijde, by the banks of the Amstel.) “At that time it was the hotspot for contemporary classical music in the Netherlands. Composers and musicians like John Cage, Oliver Knussen and Louis Andriessen were all premiering works there. By the middle of the 1980s we were organising 300 concerts a year, but only to an audience of around 150 people. The artistic director Jan Wolff felt there should be a bigger venue for contemporary classical music in Amsterdam.”
Wolff certainly got his wish. The Muziekgebouw’s audience capacity is 725, situating it as a large chamber-music venue, but the stage is flexible and can be arranged to accommodate a symphony orchestra without complications. “We can make around 10 to 15 different concert setups. We can place the ensemble on stage, or surround the ensemble with the audience – or have the musicians surround the audience.”
“There’s a wide variety of possibilities. The floor is also movable, which helps a lot”, Berentsen tells me. “It can be very surprising for the audience too, who have expectations about what they will find when they walk through the door – only to find something completely different.” Such sentiments might be a metaphor for the programming ethos of the Muziekgebouw itself.
“The acoustics of the main hall I think are widely acclaimed”, Berentsen adds. “Transparent, clear, very defined, but at the same time with a generous warmth.” Even the chairs are built in a way to help refine the sound, keeping it reliable and transparent with or without an audience. (Other halls pose challenges to performers in being distinctly different between rehearsal and performance.) “Our hall is something like a box in a box. It means there is hardly any outside noise at all coming into the hall. In normal concert halls you might expect 30 decibels of noise to come from the climate system – in our hall it’s 10 decibels.”
“For me that’s the main feature of the hall”, Berentsen says, “the sound of its silence. You know how important silence is in music. Here, if there’s silence in the music, and if the audience cooperates, then it’s really silent. Around 5 or 6 years ago we offered something a little strange to our subscribers: a few minutes of complete silence. They could enter the hall and sit, and enjoy the silence. A rare thing in Amsterdam! Not during the day, not at night, never!” Sitting in the hall, Berentsen says, you can hear your own blood circulate.
Choral groups are regular visitors to the Muziekgebouw – the upcoming season sees performances from Huelgas Ensemble, the Tallis Scholars, Capella Amsterdam and the SWR Vokalensemble, among others. For these types of performances, the hall’s adjustable reverb is invaluable. “We have three ceiling parts that we can adjust, changing the length of the reverb. Raising the panels above the audience, while keeping the panel above the stage, allows singers to hear each other, while creating a more resonant, church-like acoustic for the audience. But if we have amplified contemporary music – young composers, but also Stockhausen, for instance – then we can lower the ceilings and have maximum dampening.”
Dutch contemporary music is known for its assertiveness. In autumn 2024 the Muziekgebouw season kicks off with Louis Andriessen’s De Staat, premiered in 1976, perhaps the most emblematic piece of modern Dutch music. Andriessen sets texts from Plato’s Republic describing the relationship between musical scales and the ideal society. He makes use of an amplified ensemble of winds, brass, percussion and guitars, and amplified female vocalists.
From the late 1960s, Andriessen, together with important peers and collaborators Reinbert de Leeuw, Peter Schat, Mischa Mengelberg and others, pushed Dutch music in a bold new direction. As well as new approaches to rhythm, harmony and texture, their works often involved radical approaches to subject matter, staging, dramatisation and multimedia. The annual Holland Festival, which maintains a strong relationship with the Muziekgebouw, keeps this spirit alive today.
“Their form of political engagement is still present in Dutch music”, Berentsen says, “though different from what it was in the 1960s. But their way of seeing music as not only ‘just music’ has been developed in recent years by composers like Michel van der Aa, who has had several works premiered here at the Muziekgebouw.” Other composers exploring multimedia include Yannis Kyriakides, whose Ask Ada, dramatising the life of Ada Lovelace, has its Dutch premiere in a semi-staged concert performance towards the end of the Muziekgebouw season.
Premieres form the backbone of the Muziekgebouw’s offering, and it presents more world premieres than any other venue in the Netherlands. “15 to 20 world premieres and around 20 to 30 Dutch premieres in our season”, Berentsen says. “Last year we had a festival of György Kurtág – he is 98 years old and still composing. We presented several world premieres with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano miniatures, some lasting only 45 seconds. The atmosphere was very special.” Aimard is a particular advocate, saying that the venue is the perfect place for “the kind of music that I devote my artistic life to. From day one I have felt at home in the Muziekgebouw.”
Upcoming premieres this season include works from Kaija Saariaho, Thomas Adès and a slew of new commissions in September, responding to symphonies of Anton Bruckner, themselves presented in new chamber arrangements. “The whole idea of doing this festival was brought to us by a member of the audience”, Berentsen tells me. “I had some hesitation! To ask several composers to respond to Bruckner symphonies with new pieces – I wasn’t sure if it could work. But eventually I was persuaded. And if it was to happen anywhere, it had to happen here: at the Muziekgebouw. We are about the tradition, but we are also very much about new music.”
“Bruckner’s symphonies are like great cathedrals,” Berentsen adds. “How do you bring such enormous pieces down to a chamber ensemble of a few persons, and build your own works out of them?” Fourteen composers, including Maxim Shalygin, Seung-Won Oh and Richard Ayres have been commissioned, with new works presented over three days September 13th–15th.
Like Cypriot Yannis Kyriakides, British composer Richard Ayres has found a home in the Netherlands for his unconventional and deeply personal music. In Ayres’ case, it is music that takes a heartfelt but also darkly ironic view on common practice classical music: this project responding to Bruckner would seem an ideal one given his compositional ethos. (In January Ayres’ beguiling violin non-concerto Trödelmarkt is also presented by the Asko|Schönberg Ensemble, the major Dutch contemporary chamber ensemble, themselves based at the Muziekgebouw.)
Ayres is also a composition tutor at the nearby Amsterdam Conservatorium, which maintains a strong relationship with the Muziekgebouw. (Kyriakides is a tutor too, at The Hague Conservatory.) Students frequently perform together with professionals, and “they have their own concert series too, featuring contemporary and Baroque music,” Berentsen says. In the series Echoes of Nothing, students are invited to create their own programmes in response to the main event series. “We give them the keys to the house and tell them, ‘do your thing’.”
Masterclasses and festivals are also frequent occurrences at the Muziekgebouw, with the venue hosting the enormous Cello Biennale this autumn, gathering together virtually every major cello soloist from around the globe from October 31st to November 10th. Alongside the masterclasses are many chamber and orchestral performances, including new cello concertos by Liza Lim and Matthias Pintscher. Other festivals at the Muziekgebouw this season include a series of concerts in November dedicated to Schoenberg (who, like Bruckner, is celebrating an anniversary this year), and festivals dedicated to Saariaho and Boulez in March and April 2025.
The Bruckner festival, kicking off the season, does seem particularly in tune with the Muziekgebouw’s revisionist and inclusive ethos – drawing fans of contemporary music to Bruckner, and drawing lovers of Bruckner towards new composition. “Even music lovers sometimes say ‘surely there’s enough music already, why do people keep composing?’ I think it’s completely wrong to think that way, but it happens,” Berentsen says. “They might listen to Stravinsky or Shostakovich, but everything that follows they won’t touch. If projects like this can show that today interesting and beautiful music is being written, that has to be a good thing.”
See all upcoming events at the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ.
This article was sponsored by the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ.
