13/12/2023
Livestream! - Aeons by Robin de Raaff
Robin de Raaff | Aeons | 2020/2021 | 17'
Trio slagwerk, piano & cello
Performed live for the Radio Klassiek at TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Special thanks to Joost Eilert en Esther Gottschalk en team van New Music NOW NL/ Dutch Composers NOW.
Konstantyn Napolov - percussion
Laura Sandee - piano
Maya Fridman - cello
More info about The Dutch Golden Collection Foundation and "Aeons" - https://www.dutchgoldencollection.nl/nl
"When I was asked by Trio Napolov | Fridman | Sandee to compose a new work for their renowned Dutch Golden Collection project, I knew straight away which painting to use. The Dutch painter in focus was Vincent van Gogh due to the 130th anniversary of his death year. The painting I thought of was Les Chaumes de Cordeville/Cottages of Cordeville since this painting is of great symbolic importance in Frank Herbert’s Dune Saga, from the 6th book onwards where it is used as a hold on humanity and symbolises its old/primitive origins.
As a young teenager, I was obsessed with the irreversible perspective on the future and the futility of the most beautiful thing humanity has created, Art. For me personally, it was the thought of the Saint Matthew Passion being erased as our universe stops expanding, reverses, and collapses again in to a new big bang, and again and again.
In my composition Aeons, we follow Van Gogh’s Cottages of Cordeville from its very creation and its travel in time after that. The two C’s in the title create an opening gesture in the piano that, the highest C and the lowest C on the keyboard performed quickly after another. This formidable space creates a literal frame in which the painting comes to life, but in this initial emptiness, it is a window to eternity as well.
As this gesture repeats, it subdivides the surface in to smaller and smaller compositional planes. In these planes the cello and percussion stand out more and more until what they painted starts pushing the borders and dimensions of the canvas. Van Gogh painted this canvas three weeks before his death. This last period of his work is incredibly fascinating because of the urge he had to push the boundaries of conventional form by using thick paint structures that create depth, and by reshaping, distorting, and destroying shapes, as he wants to tear down the limitations of the canvas.
With this creation at the start of my composition, Aeons begins the journey of this painting in time. The work climaxes at a moment where an enormous mirror is erected to bounce back the image as a pure reflection of only light, a copy, an echo, exactly where the Glockenspiel treads beyond the piano’s and cello’s registrar limits."
- Robin de Raaff
Amsterdam, 24 October 2021
