| Artist | Kluster5 |
| Duration | 60 min |
| Part of | Festival Dag in de Branding |
Panorama Mesdag for your ears
What do you hear in the buffer zone between the city and the sea? Almost 150 years after the visual Panorama by H.W. Mesdag, Kluster5 presents a resounding panorama.
Plenty of things have changed since Mesdag painted the life around a fishermens town in 1881. The Pier was constructed, the Boulevard, a ferris wheel. And some things have also stayed the same, like the sound of rolling waves, the wind and a storm every now and then. The Hague ensemble Kluster5 invited six composers to create a soundtrack for this specific Scheveningen experience: an acoustic panorama.
Jan-Peter de Graaff, composer and guest curator of this years edition of Festival Dag in de Branding, created two pieces. One composition about a beach bar in the distance and one about all the patterns that erupt on the beach, made by the waves, moving masses of people or the architecture of the skyline. Max van Planten focusses on weather phenomenon’s in Kermis in de Hel, whereas titles like Beach days (Remy Alexander) and Carousel (Amarante Nat) give you a clear idea of what you’re about to hear. Finally, Molly Joyce listens to all the stuff that get’s left behind when people have left the beach in her composition Lost & Found.
Straight out of the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague in 2015, Kluster5 collaborated with the illustrious composer Louis Andriessen on the dance performance Workers Union, featuring a cross section of his life’s work. Two years later, the Dutch festival Gaudeamus, ‘presenting young music pioneers’, invited them to be Ensemble-in-Residence.
Kluster5 was spotlighted in public broadcasting by VPRO from 2016 to 2018. When Aart Strootman wrote Shambling Emerge for them, it earned the composer the prestigious Matthijs Vermeulen Prize 2019. That same year, Kluster5 presented music by Celia Swart at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in the UK.
Invited to contribute to the 2021 opening of the new concert hall and cultural encounter centre Amare in The Hague, Kluster5 surprised all with an outdoor physical workout. Freshly composed music energized the local community in spontaneous interaction.
For the ambitions of his 2022 album re;make, composer Remy Alexander considered the wide array of sonic possibilities of Kluster5 as essential. In the same year, Kluster5 launched their own visual album Perceived Reality: music accompanied by a full-length film. As initiators, writers, musicians and actors, they teamed up with director Gijs Besseling and 7 Mountain Records. Alexandre Kordzaia’s 1999 (Don’t you wanna go?) from this album is also performed in a staged version, enjoyed by thousands in the composer’s homeland of Georgia.
Korzo Zaal