As the longest-running performing arts festival in the Netherlands, one wouldn’t expect Amsterdam’s Holland Festival to have kept up with its tradition of presenting challenging, delightfully impure programmes for as long as it has. But this year’s edition revels in that principle of intermixture, with strands dedicated to cultural crossover, technology and contemporary opera interweaving everywhere.
Anyone with an interest in spirituality will find much to explore in this year’s focus on traditional music of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. The Moroccan Ensemble Rhoum El Bakkali, an all-female vocal group from the famous “blue city” of Chefchaouen present two concerts of music with roots in their region’s brand of Sufism. In the first, they’ll perform devotional music connected to the hadra ritual, while in the second they’ll team up with Amsterdam’s own Andalusian Orchestra and the Moroccan Orchestre Temsamani for a night of music written especially for the performance by oud master Mohamed Amin El Akrami. Fans of Keith Jarrett may be familiar with the Armenian mystic and occasional composer G.I. Gurdjieff, but they are less likely to have heard the esoteric thinker’s works performed in “ethnographically authentic” settings by the folk-centric Gurdjieff Ensemble. They’ll present an evening of music largely from their own country, including Gurdjieff, the contemporary film and concert music composer Tigran Mansurian and Komitas, a priest and ethnomusicologist who was persecuted in the Armenian genocide. Joining the Gurdjieff Ensemble will be Syrian oud specialist Issam Rafea’s group Hewar, which mixes traditional Syrian and Jazz modes. A similar cross-genre collaboration will see Hilversum’s Metropole Orkest team up with members of the Syrian Big Band – a group which does exactly what it says on the tin, enfusing big band Jazz with a Syrian flavour. Though the group was forced to disband at the outbreak of the civil war in 2011, they are now for the most part reunited and living in Europe. At Holland Festival they’ll be presenting works by some of their key members.
Anyone who follows the Kronos Quartet will know that teaming up with musicians from around the world is part of their modus operandi, and last year’s well-received collaborative album with the Malian griot troupe Trio da Kali is no exception. The two groups will be presenting works from 2017’s Ladilikan in concert – part of a day-long “Kronos Sessions” event featuring a series of concerts and masterclasses by members of the quartet. Other collaborators in the Kronos Sessions include Iranian folk singer Mahsa Vahdat, US composer-songwriter Jherek Bischoff and Vietnamese-American musician Vân-Ánh Võ, who plays a kind of traditional zither called a đàn tranh. Meanwhile, there are concessions made for adventurous opera-goers in the form of Trojan Women, created by Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen in collaboration with the National Changgeuk Company of Korea. Taking Euripides’s play dealing with the fallout of the Trojan War as its narrative material, the opera employs traditional modes of Korean musical storytelling – the minimal folk style of pansori and the more elaborate changgeuk – as well as the country’s hyper-saccharine K-pop.