This was a festival, as it had to be, with each time 2 pianists at the piano. Curator Frederik Croene builds a bridge between the music academy de Kunstbrug of Gentbrugge and the residents of Ledeberg. Contemporary classical music, improvisation, free jazz as well as classical romantic music were programmed.
Most performers had a link with the music academy either by teaching there themselves or having studied there. The professional main act was each time preceded by a promising student as a pre-program. On Friday 3 October was the first concert of this mini four-hands festival weekend with Frederik Croene & Marlies Cornelis.
Pre-program
Jordy Rombouts
As a former student of Frederik, he is driven by improvisation and now studies jazz at KASK in Gent. He opened the concert with a minimalist improvisation. Jordy started softly with 2 notes, which developed repetitively into more, flowing into a loud climax in octaves, only to fade back to the opening atmosphere. Highly commendable how a young 17-year-old pianist manages to build a beautiful dramatic arc and solo manages to move the audience from the first to the last note.
Main program
Frederik Croene
Croene graduated from the Brussels Conservatory in 1999 and has since developed an idiosyncratic style as pianist and composer. From his roots in 19th-century virtuosity, he constantly seeks new forms of expression and sometimes combines these with multimedia.
Marlies Cornelis
Marlies graduated from the Gent Conservatory in 2022. This young promising pianist specializes especially in contemporary music. The link between performer and composer is an important factor for her, as is the role of gender, sexuality and intergenerational dialogue in music.
Frederik Croene and Marlies Cornelis brought 2 compositions that are still in the making: the structure and material are already largely fixed. Within this framework, the musical elements are improvised together. The ideal recipe and framework for a successful improvisation with ever new surprising twists.
Frederik wants to go even further: to carefully notate everything so that the seemingly improvised music is completely fixed on the score, a monastic task! Marlies started standing: she used a vibrator to make the lowest bass strings in the piano produce a low drone full of overtones. Frederik plucked a few notes on this bourdon and developed them into an exciting story. At one point Marlies stood behind Frederik and played alternately in the highest and lowest register of the piano: a very original and resourceful quatre-mains technique.
In the second piece they sat neatly next to each other, as is traditionally the case. This time the bass notes were covered with a kind of putty, prepared, which resulted in a special hollow, almost percussive sound but still tonally recognizable. Frederik's hallmark, both in improvisation and in his compositions, is Beethovenian thematic development: a motif or idea is consistently continued, all possibilities are explored and worked out and he only moves on to a new element when the material is "used up". Thus we hear a well-founded dramatic arc in which the listener continues to recognize motifs, but is each time immersed in a different context. At the end, a beautiful bass motif could be heard, almost cinematically repetitive, on which was improvised.
This duo feels each other particularly well and together they merge into a captivating dialogue. The audience was attentive from beginning to end and completely caught up in their story. It was only a pity that outside there was occasional noise from young people from a local youth center, who had no idea at all that a listening concert was taking place, although that was somewhat the concept to program it right there in Ledeberg: to reach people who normally don't go to the better concert halls. They too got to experience a successful musical evening.
On 18 October Marlies Cornelis brings a solo concert at the Stuk in Leuven. On 29 January Frederik Croene brings a solo concert at the Bijloke.