Rudi
Martinus van Dijk, who was born in Culemborg,
the Netherlands, on 27 March 1932, and died
in East Sussex, England, on 29 November 2003,
was a composer whose career spanned more than
just those two countries. He spent many years
in Canada and the United States between the
1950s and the 1980s, first as a composer and
pianist working for Canadian Broadcasting,
and later teaching both disciplines at the
Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Indiana
University in Bloomington, and Berklee College
of Music in Boston. In 1985, having meanwhile
spent an interim period in the mid-1960s working
for the BBC in London, he returned to Europe,
first spending a year in Spain, and then becoming
composer in residence at Dartington Hall in
Devon, England. Later, with his wife Jeanne,
he moved back to his native country. Frustrated,
however, both by the experience of living
in the soulless small town of Lelystad, and
by certain aspects of Dutch musical politics,
he returned to England towards the end of
the 90s. His last years were spent in a charming
cottage in the East Sussex village of Peasmarsh,
and it is in the country churchyard there
that he is now buried.
My first
professional involvement with Rudi van Dijk’s
music, which I had admired for some years,
came in 1993, when, as artistic director of
the Residentie Orkest in the Hague, I took
the opportunity to programme the Netherlands
premiere of his dynamic and often thrilling
Four Epigrams for orchestra. This was followed
up three years later, when I was serving as
artistic adviser to the North Netherlands
Orchestra, with the world premiere of his
Piano Concerto, with Geoffrey Madge as soloist.
Among Van Dijk’s other major works is a Violin
Concerto (1984) and an Irish Symphony
(1990), and his chamber music has been strongly
championed by the English violinist Anthony
Marwood, who has performed his Violin Sonata
and (as a former member of the Raphael Ensemble)
his Sextet, and who premiered Van Dijk’s Piano
Trio at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in 2001
with his colleagues of the Florestan Trio.
In all
these works, which deserve to be far more
widely known, the stamp of a creative mind
at once sensitive, rigorous, and highly individual
is to be found. Van Dijk’s music presents
an unusual blend of Austro-German expressionistic
elements, set forth with an intensity and
a chromatic complexity close at times to Berg,
with a much more Gallic-sounding clarity and
delicacy of timbre and texture. It is perhaps
in his vocal works that these qualities coalesce
most powerfully. Important among these is
The Shadowmaker (1977), commissioned
and premiered with the Toronto Symphony by
the late-lamented Canadian baritone Victor
Braun, with whom Van Dijk–an excellent pianist–collaborated
several times in recital. The last work that
Rudi, suffering over the past year from cancer
and finally laid low by a stroke, was able
to complete was Kreiten’s Passion,
a large-scale setting for baritone, chorus,
and orchestra of a text documenting the 1943
imprisonment and execution by the Nazis of
the gifted German pianist Karl Robert Kreiten.
As a young Dutchman during World War II, Van
Dijk had grim memories of the Nazi occupation.
In Kreiten’s Passion, he leavened the
grimness with passages of radiant orchestral
writing, predominantly for the strings, that
offer a kind of solace.
Kreiten’s
Passion was premiered in Düsseldorf
on 16 September 2003 by the Düsseldorf
Symphony Orchestra and Chorus; John Fiore
conducted and Andreas Schmidt was the baritone
soloist. I have been fortunate to hear a recording
made on that occasion: the work exerts a mighty
emotional impact, in a superb performance
followed on the disc by more than five minutes
of sustained and sober applause. For Rudi
van Dijk’s surviving family and friends, it
is some consolation that he was strong enough
in September to travel to Germany for the
premiere and to enjoy the greatest triumph
of his career.
Bernard Jacobson
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