Reviews, Video & Pics of Wiek

During this years edition of Zeeland Nazomer Festival the location performance Wiek was being restaged. Besides that, at the opening night of the festival we did a live version of Music for Wiek. Read the reviews below. 

Gijs Haak from Studio Haak & Visser made a beautiful full-length video of the concert-version of Music for Wiek, performed by Slagwerk Den Haag and Erik-Jan de With. Leo van Oostrum, Michiel van Dijk & Andy Scott on saxophones. Here it is !! 

Here's the review about the concert, appearing in the Provinciale Zeeuwse Courant
Rain can’t stop the Wiek on the Abbey Square

MIDDELBURG - The fact that the Zeeland Nazomer Festival offered the stage of the opening concert on the Abbey Sqauare on Friday evening completely to Douwe Eisenga, is more than justified. The Middelburger can be seen as the house composer of the festival.

by Rolf Bosboom  
In recent years he has written the music for several location performances, such as Kabaal (2001, adapted in 2007 to Bestevaer) and The Writer, his Wife, her Mistress (2014). Two years ago, the short work Bliss premiered, also during the opening night at Abdijplein.

 

A selection from this music, in new arrangements was played in the section before the break on this Friday evening. Under a threatening cloudy sky and watched by several hundred visitors, Eisenga himself sat at the piano. In varying combinations he presented together with the saxophone quartet of the Blazers Collectief WEST a beautiful cross-section of his work. Culminating in the intense musical in memoriam For Mattia, performed solo.

 

Once seized by the music of Eisenga, one recognizes it immediately. Accessible, expressive, floating between many styles, often inexorably rhythmic but also emotionally charged. A listener who lets himself be carried away discovers new worlds.

 

The main element of the evening was Eisenga's Music for Wiek, written in 2009 for the dance performance Wiek (Rotor). The production can be seen again this year at the festival and, thanks to the music, is again impressive.

For the live performance, Eisenga asked, besides the sax quartet the percussion ensemble Slagwerk Den Haag. A wonderful combination that made the power of Wiek even stronger, not least thanks to the marimba's and vibraphones that made the sound tingle.

 

The eleven musicians managed to exorcise the lightning and thunder, but could not prevent that it started raining heavily halfway through the spectacle. The circumstances made it more difficult for the visitors to surrender to the music. The musicians seemed to experience little inconvenience, driven forward as they were through the beat of the music. The rhythm of the rain lost from the revolving power of Wiek.

 

Some beautiful pictures shot by Tineke Boer for VPRO's 3voor12.

And from the same newspaper some quotes from the raving review of Jan van Damme about the performance Wiek:

 

Dance performance Wiek on Zeeland Nazomer Festival 'breathtakingly beautiful'

....At the foot of a wind turbine, Wiek van Boukje Schweigman wallows on music by Douwe Eisenga. Enchanting, compelling, inescapable....

 

....The performance is set to music from our own Douwe Eisenga from Middelburg. Driving rhythms, almost hallucinatory repetition - so beautiful, I have been under the spell of his music for twenty years. Logically that theater maker Boukje Schweigman embraced him. For Wiek, Eisenga rules iy all, he governs the dance and determines how quickly the wick revolves......

 

(note by the composer : mmm, that is flattering but also a bit to much, it is the combination that makes Wiek so powerful, the sound and the image, the dancers, the sand, the stage-design, the concept)

 

Also great pictures  by Jochem Jurgens en Lex de Meester


a last picture of - guess who (photo by Marc Machielse).


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