Villa Concert [home]
DVD SAMPLES (click
on the title to view) [About Villa
Concert]
Tango Classica (fragment)
01:42
min. / 17,1 MB/ MPEG Video
Gauguin: (Letters) In Two Latitudes (fragment)
0:47
min. / 8,03 MB/ MPEG Video
Strecker: On Hearing Glenn Gould Play
Bach’s Two and Three Voice Inventions (fragment)
01:06
min. / 11,2 MB/ MPEG Video
Strecker: Canale Grande: Hanging Loose (fragment)
01:43
min. / 17,2 MB/ MPEG Video
To view the
booklet accompanying the DVD, click here
(Word document).
This booklet of 46 pages contains the original poems
and their English translations,
the spoken text translated into English, articles,
background information and photos.
“Barend Schipper: Villa Concert”
This film of musician Schipper and
filmmaker Cupédo shows a classical “direct creation concert” in a villa by
composer, concert pianist, vocalist
and actor Schipper. The movie is about
beauty and humanity in our time.
It is a true music movie: Schipper and
Cupédo shared direction and editing.
The result is a special cross-over
between film and classical music, the images of the concert work as sounds.
The movie though is about much more
than music alone: it’s also the lively contact with the audience,
the singing that turns unnoticed into
acting. Music and cultures from the past and our surrounding countries
integrate in Schipper’s appealing
Romantic music.
Before the intermission Schipper plays his appealing Romantic piano
music.
After the intermission he performs poetry and prose.
Poems of the great French romantic Arthur Rimbaud come to life in all
intensity.
Letters of the painter Paul Gauguin set of a Stone Age culture in the
South Pacific against our own.
With the poem about Venice by the contemporary Canadian poet James
Strecker the movie comes to a wild climax,
leaving us behind with a sense of fulfillment, melancholic humor and
beauty.
☼
Jaap Flier, knighted dancer, choreographer, actor and former
artistic leader
and co-founder of the Netherlands Dance Theatre:
“I experienced this movie as an intense
total-experience.
Barend Schipper dances when he plays the
grand piano.
His singing turns unnoticedly into acting
and his film editing functions as a musical composition.”
Frans Westra, director
Filmhouse Images: “It’s a special and
good cross-over between movie and a classical concert.
Partly because of the special
musical editing, the beautiful lighting, Barend Schipper’s personal
presentation
and pleasant music it has become a very good film indeed.”
Frans Brüggen, conductor of
the Orchestra of the 18th Century about Barend Schipper’s music:
“Beautiful,
descriptive music, and well played too!”
Barend Schipper on the film:
The first half of the movie is a piano recital. But what a dry word! Out of the
silence and the dark of the black screen
we enter the movie as if with closed
eyes. From the Sonatine to Arthur Rimbaud the camera follows the piano music
that
leads us more and more into the world
of sounds of the Steinway.
A grand piano is an instrument that
has been created, listened to and refined during 240 years,
generation to generation.
The musical language is based on a
similar process. We travel through time in a landscape of piano music
that we experience with the view of
our own time.
Reviving the Romantic and Classical
piano culture is not merely an idea,
but a simple consequence of our
present, rich situation of life.
I felt the need to let that beautiful
culture flow through me and this way giving rise again
to the beauty of our intercultural
world.
In our time we are growing people.
Change is perhaps the only stable aspect of our period.
Growing from inside out, changing,
can be a passion, a true emotion.
All music in the movie “Barend
Schipper: Villa Concert” is subject to change. The music never ends where she
started.
The twenty years that it took me to
develop the now sounding music was worth it because the music now
has the naturalness that I longed for
for all those years.
☼
After the intermission I perform works by the three “Romantic Savages’:
Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Gauguin en James Strecker.
The poetry of Arthur Rimbaud fascinates me: direct and intense emotions lead us
‘into trance’.
Especially Rimbaud’s last and maybe
most intense, feverish work wherethe poems in the movie come from:
it forms a world in which we are led
to an intimacy in which language as we know it functions very differently:
the language is filtered through a
soul that is wide open-eyed and receptive and
ironic at the same time.
Here, language becomes a strong
magnifying glass. It leads our gaze to more intense colors: darker ánd lighter,
into an intense emotional experience
of life itself.
In ‘Villes’ all cities come
together. Rimbaud is overtaken by the many impressions
and he experiences the city as an
overwhelming vision that floods him.
The power of his poems enters me
directly and by that the music pours out straightforwardly.
In ‘Mouvement’ Rimbaud
describes a stunning scene: a society where people have taken possession
over all that lives and moves.
Science and machines count the blood, the jewellery and the measure of life.
He sees society as a ship that sails
past a dyke of study books during this decadent night on the river of time.
At the end, when the ship has almost
past, he just sees two people who truly are only human.
They have forgotten that they are on
the ship, and sing, and have found their place.
Gauguin: As a pearl
inside an oyster starts with a grain of sand and is being expelled,
cased with mother-of-pearl, so was
the half Peruvian Gauguin in his time a culturally militant personality.
This goes for all his successful
endeavours, first as a stock broker and later as a painter.
We recognize this as the utmost
consequence of someone whose temperament and untemperedly defined profile
shows us deep beauty, but also
undesired truths.
Intercultural insights and
experiences are sometimes hard to digest, both for the environment as well as
for the person himself.
Gauguin’s
search for a new oyster that will receive the pearl of his personality in all
its facets comes to an end
in the Stone Age culture of the
islands in the South Pacific. His art finds an unknown shape that fascinates
and moves us,
and that gives us new intercultural
insights.
James Strecker: Glenn Gould knew
a modest, serene and utmost powerful Bach interpretation.
In his hands Bach led to silence, the
most profound sounding of many-voiced beauty.
In the poem ‘After hearing Glenn
Gould play Bach’
James Strecker projects the music in
silent nature… on this morning James finally finds peace again with the world
we live in.
‘Canale Grande: Hanging Loose’: James visits Venice here and soon ends up in a
bistro.
The beauty of the city, his wife,
mirrors that reflect everything a hundred times, make the grappa ferment in
him.
Philosophy , religion, common plastic
souvenirs, everything is reviewed in an
unparalleled fashion until,
outside again on the street, James
with his wife imitates the Canale Grande swingingly and this way
performs the climax of the poem and
of the movie first laughing and then melancholic.
Barend Schipper
☼
About Barend Schipper: [page up]
‘Music of Barend Schipper is a movement through time’
Barend Schipper composes and plays
new forms of romantic music, which appeal by its sincerity and warmth.
Schipper goes back as far as the
roots of Romantic music, from Renaissance composers to Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart
and Haydn,
to whom also the Romantic composers
orientated themselves again in order to develop further.
He places their musical language in
our time. From here he creates on: a Rebirth of Romantic music
as a follow-up of our post modernism.
Our time is an intercultural time. Accessibility of other cultures in
the past and around us has never been so open.
It urged Barend after an
international top education to take on a twenty year’s journey through time and
space.
Dr. Nathaly Zuidema-Vainshtein,
journaliste
This concert is recorded in villa ‘de Kamp’ with a Steinway grand piano
The music is recorded with 5 Neumann microphones.
Four cameras: Arno Cupédo, Aafke Sterenberg,
TOF
Lighting: Arno Cupédo
Film editing: Barend Schipper, Arno Cupédo
Music
recording: AE Studios, Arnoud van
der Laan
Sound post-editing: Soundbase, Guido van de Kamp
Coverdesign DVD: Meyke Beekman
Producer: Music Inter Face
Tel/fax: +31 (0)50 541 76 95