DUTCH TREAT AT CHAMBERFEST
Improvisational cellist to perform
A major focus of this year’s Chamberfest centres on the cello.
On Wednesday, July 27, patrons can see performances of J.S. Bach’s complete cello suites. And, on the same day, the festival’s resident musicologist Rob Kapilow will examine in detail what makes Beethoven’s A major cello sonata great.
As well, the cello will be central to performances that feature the Dutch improvisational cellist Ernst Reijseger.
Reijseger was scheduled to attend last year’s Chamberfest, but a death in his family prompted a cancellation. He’s back on the bill for this year’s festival, where he will perform a children’s concert, take part in a trio with baritone saxophonist David Mott and Ottawa’s own improvisational percussionist Jesse Stewart and perform some of his compositions with 11 other cellists in an evening concert dubbed fittingly Cellobration!
Reijseger’s affair with the instrument started early.
“I became involved in music (when) I was four years old. I chose the cello, it was not forced upon me.”
He was also exposed early on to different musical forms and that eclecticism has marked his career.
“I was very fortunate … to hear different (kinds of ) music.” By age 13, he was going to jazz concerts and in his mid-teens, he was listening to music from around the world. In multi-cultural Amsterdam he was exposed to musical influences from former Dutch colonies in Asia and in Latin America.
“At the same time, I was going to the conservatory, where new music and the pressure to perform on the instrument was an issue.”
Reijseger says he was not a great student because he did not want to be bound by just one musical influence. And that was recognized by his teacher, who urged the young man to leave the conservatory because he recognized that Reijseger was not going to be content with just learning classical repertoire.
“I took the advice. I didn’t have the vision. I was just hooked on music. I couldn’t distinguish the difference between classical and jazz and new music and folk music or hard core African or Inuit music or whatever. It went on like that. So I’m confused,” he said self-deprecatingly, “but I have been that way all my life.
“In this day and age it becomes ridiculous to distinguish yourself by (musical) genres. At the same time, I’ve been able to listen to ethnic music not by recording so much, but by meeting the real people and also by coincidence.
“It’s not that I had a direction in my life. I just met these people and they just blew my mind. I’ve learned to recognize quality in different genres.”
That openness is evident in Reijseger’s compositions for film — especially the movies of the German director Werner Herzog, for whom he has provided scores for several films, the latest being the eco-thriller Salt and Fire (2016).
One of the best known of his cinematic projects with Herzog is the haunting soundtrack for The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), the multi-award winning documentary about ancient cave paintings in southern France.
Reijseger, when he is working with Herzog, says: “I try to give him alternatives to what he is saying. I really try to be a counterpoint.
“You get inspired by the subject, you get inspired by the idea to work in a certain direction and you start to think what you want to have and you start to think about the havenots. There can be really interesting counterpoints.”
For a man who likes to be in direct contact with his subject, Reijseger was not allowed in the cave. That’s because access is limited to protect the 32,000-year-old drawings, which can be destroyed by the humidity in too much human breath.
“I just got footage, the first footage. When I saw it for the first time I formed the first musical impression. I wanted to have a choir singing an archaic language.”
It’s where he found that language that says much about Reijseger’s thought process.
“My daughter was five months old at the time. She was blabbering every morning and I started to record that.”
Out of the mouth of a baby, Reijseger drew what sounded like identifiable phrases that he made the choir sing.
“They (the choir) were not amused.” But they sang it.
“The French call this an “objet trouvé. I tell you, sometimes you are just lucky.”