Too little room for talent due to too varied a program

One of the continuing concert series is the “AVROTROS Vrijdagconcert”, live on Radio 4 from TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht Last Friday was an evening for the talents of the road “AVROTROS Classic presents”; pianist Ramon van Engelenhoven, soprano Laetitia Gerards (in fact passed the predicate “talent”) and the Chimaera Trio.

The Chimaera Trio opened with an exciting new work that Guillermo Lago (Willem van Merwijk) composed for them: Dream dances for the trio of chimeras, introspective and chaotic piece in which Laurens de Man always seemed to keep the dialogues between clarinetist Annemiek de Bruin and cellist Irene Kok at the grand piano.

It was more of a circus show than a concert, to the detriment of the concentration of talent

With the Friday concert, the broadcaster recently wanted to get rid of the “standard” concert by trying new formats. Now that we can only watch on a screen, it worked fine. Bandages, changing lights, flowing arrangements, background projections, and a houseplant made the concert interesting for the camera.

But not to make it a “ standard ” concert, AVROTROS followed suit The girlfriend no less than 17 short parts of all kinds of parts and genres. This variety (song, western classic, cabaret, South American, oriental) was too much of a good thing. The result was more of a circus show than a concert, to the detriment of the concentration of talent. If you want everything, nothing will work.

Laetitia Gerards couldn’t be blamed for not having found peace in a song from an Edvard Grieg cycle and one by Johannes Brahms, before having to sing a cabaret song by William Bolcom. And Van Engelenhoven and De Man could only have performed a few more Hungarian dances; a real treat at the end of the evening, which, as they only played on the 20th, only lasted a few minutes.

Their versatility has been amply proven, but with longer pieces in fewer pieces, talents would have done better.