Label news: DG signs ‘one of the most listened-to living pianists in the world’

Label news: DG signs ‘one of the most listened-to living pianists in the world’

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norman lebrecht

May 14, 2017

Joep Beving, 41, has 85 million hits on Youtube.

That’s enough these days to secure the Dutch amateur a Deutsche Grammophon contract.

Read here.


Youtube description: In 2015 Amsterdam based composer Joep Beving composed and recorded his debut solo album “Solipsism” at home in the still of night. The album is filled with introspective and often filmic piano compositions. Beving’s sound could be described as the opposite to over-produced and complexly layered music styles. His ambition for “Solipsism” is to keep the music stripped back to its essence: simple sounds to express complex emotions. It represents a quest for essence and beauty, expressed in a neo-classical vocabulary. “Solipsism” refers to the philosophical idea that reality only exists in one’s mind. Everything outside of it, the external world and the minds of others, cannot truly be known and hence does not exist. Beving’s music is an experiment in existential communication, a belief in an absolute aesthetic, to prove that a universal and metaphysical reality does exist.

Comments

  • Richard Diver says:

    The way DG are going, they will be signing Eurovision contestants next…

    https://van-us.atavist.com/deutsche-grammophon

  • Ungeheuer says:

    Let’s simplify it some more: New Age pap. Or, if you like, dentist office wallpaper.

    • Edgar says:

      If I were a dentist, I would protect my patients and myself from such wallpaper.

      • John Borstlap says:

        I know of a dentist who plays Stockhausen in the waiting room, so that the treatment feels like a pleasant experience in comparison.

        • jaypee says:

          I know of a troll who constantly feels he has to remind us of his musical tastes as if they had any effect on ours.

  • Anmarie says:

    Chopin is plotzing from jealousy.

  • John Borstlap says:

    The emotions evoked by music and image in this video are not complex at all, they are instead very – let us say – straightforward. Obviously, this reality only exists in the head of the maker, as with all garden gnomes. And given the number of garden gnomes in the world, of course it will be popular, for a while. I would propose to call this music ‘Acoustical garden-decorative trumpism’.

  • Gennady says:

    The end of the road…

  • Steinway Fanatic says:

    The emperor’s new clothes – almost as shallow and vacuous as the old Philip Glass album “Glass Pieces”. But one assumes this is comforting stuff for the intellectually challenged, and DGG is out to capture the profits from this demographic.

  • Uri says:

    DG is still flailing its arms and searching for its identity after having been massacred by a litany of incompetent and clueless “leaders”, each failing as miserably as their predecessor. This destruction of a brand has been going on for nearly twenty years and it is actually a miracle that they are still standing, albeit in a rather downsized and less respectable form. So sad, that a once great label, an iconic brand, has debased itself to short-term solutions, few that will be remembered in ten years, let alone in five. I have heard that there is hardly any person working at DG who truly knows and understands the value and depth of their catalogue, who has any vision as to where their label will be in ten years, let alone five. Nothing coming out of their label is truly exciting, nothing shows any daring, any audacity and above all any taste.

  • Bo says:

    85 million?!? Not being a hater here, but I don’t even think he has 1 million, his channel has 300000 views in total.

    • John Borstlap says:

      From the garden gnome perspective, everything is big.

      • Wolfgang Amadeus Museart says:

        Right you are. Karl Kraus used to say the same: “When the sun of culture is low, even dwarves will cast long shadows.”

        However, what does Beving really want to sell/tell us by saying these are “simple sounds to express complex emotions.” I would call this more likely simple emotions. Mahler’s Adagietto for instance is a good example of complex emotions.

        • John Borstlap says:

          Indeed, and expressed very simply and nonetheless with the greatest sophistication. But if Mahler would have lived now and written that adagietto, he would have been laughed at.

  • Elizabeth Owen says:

    Never heard of him. That beard is absolutely disgusting what’s living in it eugh!

  • Tommy says:

    This is pretty much my own level of piano playing. Nice to have confirmation that I can call myself a “pianist”. Never ever crossed my mind before…

  • boringfileclerk says:

    Good lord, just when I thought DG was beginning to rebuild it’s reputation, they do this?

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