Guus JANSSEN
2nd String Quartet Streepjes; Voetnoot 1
for piccolo; Temet (flute, violin, cello, Harp); Octet;
Klotz (violin, high-hat & ensemble);
Veranderingen (Gerard Bouwhuis & Cees van Zeeland pianos)
Various artists.
Donemus Composers' Voice
CV 61 [73.37]
(PGW)
Amazon US $16.99
Here is a splendidly entertaining and thought provoking CD to introduce Guus
Janssen (b.1951), a Dutch composer featured at
Huddersfield Festival
in a portrait concert, which featured several of the works played in
this collection by some of the same artists as here, the Mondrian String
Quartet with members of the Nieuw Ensemble. Janssen is a good natured
iconoclast, neither minimalist nor ever sentimental. His quirkiness is something
of the same order as our Jonathan Lloyd, who tends to get his pieces played
once or twice but afterwards passed over by establishment programme planners.
Janssen re-invents familiar instruments and ensembles for his compositions
and avoids repeating himself.
For Streepjes he tunes the sixteen strings of a string quartet so
as to make a newly-created overtone instrument, and he reserves the 'rounded
violin sound' of non-harmonics played ordinario, (forte with
molto vibrato) as a special effect, overturning normality.
Temet ('almost') is a quest for a true octave for a harp with one
string mistuned a quartertone sharp and flute, violin & cello, and it
scrunches even more agonisingly as recorded here than when cushioned by the
sympathetic acoustic of St Paul's Hall at Huddersfield. Janssen's
Octet has wrong notes, which retrospectively become right ones. In
the concert for one item Guus Janssen on piano accompanied violin & cello
modestly; here he contents himself by playing high-hat (foot-operated cymbals)
in Klotz with a hesitant violinist -a part tailor-made for Gidon Kremer
who commissioned it. The largest work here is a set of two-piano variations,
Veranderingen, nine of them on a chordal sequence, teeming with
inventiveness and given a compelling account by Gerard Bouwhuis & Cees
van Zeeland.
The booklet cover has problems with its orientation, with a windmill on its
side and a river going up or down - or is it the titles which are misaligned?
Nothing straightforward with Janssen, yet nor is anything too obscure to
grasp readily.
Peter Grahame Woolf
