Last year a student at the Conservatory of Music in Amsterdam, Beatrice Miniaci, contacted us about performing one of our portfolio compositions, Icarus in Flight by composer Richard Festinger. Of course, we were delighted by this proposal, since our goal is to engage musicians all over the world to perform ClimateMusic.
Beatrice pulled together a quartet of young musicians, who put in a lot of work learning and rehearsing the piece, and on top of it all, Beatrice managed all of the details for two concerts, which were originally scheduled for last March in Amsterdam. But then came COVID, and they had to be cancelled.
Fast forward to earlier this fall, and Beatrice got back in touch to say that the concert was authorized to go ahead in a very small venue, a former cinema called De Roode Bioscoop, located on a canal in Amsterdam. The performance took place on October 29th before a very small local audience, but it was streamed to over 600 people in six countries. An encore concert was authorized at the main library in Amsterdam on November 1st.
We were heartened by the determination of these young artists to use their talents to engage on the climate crisis. As they wrote in the program:
With recording-breaking wildfires, droughts and floods, climate change is knocking at our door. Yet for many of us, it is easier to ignore the changing climate than engage emotionally. For one, it is too abstract, for the other, too overwhelming. This concert invites us to explore our own emotional reactions to the changing climate. What is happening to the planet, and how do we feel about it? As our emotional paralysis melts, we can be inspired to meaningful action rather than inaction.
This is exactly what we are aiming for in our work, and we thank Beatrice and her fellow musicians for their hard work and dedication to communicating the urgency of the climate crisis. We plan to take what we learned from this first experience with streaming a remote concert, and apply it to future performances around the world that can both inspire and facilitate action.
The musicians were: Beatrice Miniaci, flute; Emil Peltola, violin; Seamus Hickey, viola; Dominika Kaczmarczyk, cello; Martin Vera Guerra, oboe; Giuseppe Sapienza, clarinet; Alvaro Artime Jimenez, trumpet; Pieter Bogaert, piano. The concerts also included a composition by British composer Kate Honey, Earth’s Gift, and Dutch visual artist Emma van der Steen. This latter piece was very beautiful, but was not associated with The ClimateMusic Project.
