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Dutch composer dies

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norman lebrecht

May 16, 2016

The prolific Bernard van Beurden has left us, aged 82.

He wrote for all ensemble forms, as well as music theatre and a small body of works for accordion.

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Robert Adlington says:

May 16, 2016 at 12:27 pm

Van Beurden was also an important pioneer in music education in the 1960s and 1970s, founding the Musisch Lab of young musicians which specialised in experimental music performance, and authoring the pedagogical ‘Werkboek voor muziek van nu’ (1974). He and a number of members of the Lab took part in the celebrated ‘Nutcracker’ protest against the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1969. RIP.

John Borstlap says:

May 20, 2016 at 12:53 am

That ‘Nutcracker protest’ was a juvenile and very embarrassing thing and not something to be proud of, let alone to be remembered as having taken part in it. A flute concert of Quantz, with famous soloist Hubert Bahrwasser, was disrupted because the orchestra ‘did not present enough sonic art’. They duly complied and in the seventies did their Boulez, Maderna, Xenakis (I believe), and so on. They more or less stopped doing it because it does not form part of their performance culture. These Nuts tried to get their collegue Hans Kox out of the way – he was appointed artistic executive of the orchestra and wrote much better music – and when Kox’ opera Dorian Gray was successfully performed in the early seventies, there was a media hetze against him because he was suspected of hindering the avantgarde. That was the climate of those days…. and nothing has remained of the products of the Nuts.

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