[sold out] Belgian National Orchestra & Brad Mehldau

A very warm welcome to Klarafestival!

Flanders Festival Brussels, Klara and our partners are delighted to greet you once again. “I believe audiences aren’t just listening. They are actively contributing”, festival artist Barbara Hannigan remarked in an interview. Concerts are an interaction between the audience, artists and anyone who is contributing to those magic moments in front of or behind the scenes. Together we ‘become’ music. 

As a conductor and soprano, Hannigan is a global reference point. With her, classical music becomes a contemporary and unique experience. This is an inspiration to Klarafestival as the largest broadcast festival in Belgium. Her versatile talent is sure to enrapture you, as is that of the many Belgian and international artists who connect past and present with musical stories.

Klarafestival opens in style with Hannigan as conductor of and soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra. After that, you will hear and see her with young musicians from her mentorship project Equilibrium Young Artists. In no fewer than 25 concerts, we present top talent including Les Talens Lyriques, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and Vilde Frang, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with Víkingur Ólafsson. Klarafestival also treasures creation. The film concert Reich/Richter as a symbiosis of Gerhard Richter’s paintings and the music of Steve Reich; the creation Counterforces by composer Frederik Croene to text by poet Dominique de Groen; and the music theatre production Prey by Kris Verdonck with a composition by Annelies Van Parys will surprise you!

This and all other concerts are possible thanks to the collaboration with our cultural partners: Bozar, Flagey, Kaaitheater, Théâtre Varia, Muntpunt, Concertgebouw Brugge and DE SINGEL. Thanks to our private partners KPMG, Proximus, Brewery Omer Vander Ghinste, Belfius, Interparking and the players of Belgium’s National Lottery. We are grateful for the support of the Flemish Community and the Brussels Capital Region. And finally, thanks to Klara and VRT: there would be no broadcast festival without their valued collaboration.

Joost Fonteyne

Intendant Klarafestival

Brad Mehldau: A Musical Portrait

In Playing Changes, jazz critic Nate Chinen’s New York Times book on contemporary jazz, he dedicates an entire chapter to Brad Mehldau. It was given the title From This Moment On, in reference to Cole Porter’s famous jazz standard which featured on Mehldau’s 1995 debut on the Warner Bros label. It affirms both how strongly the pianist is rooted in the Great American Songbook and jazz tradition, and his firm intention to bend these traditions to his own will by contemporary means. In fact, his influence is so far-reaching that we could consider there to be a “before Mehldau” and an “after Mehldau” in jazz history.

In the early 1990s, the jazz world was still dominated and shaped by the Young Lions - promising young musicians producing a neoclassical form of jazz in the slipstream of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis’ overwhelming critical acclaim and commercial success. One such wunderkind was alto saxophonist Christopher Hollyday, who was just seven months older than Mehldau but was responsible for both the pianist’s first recording session in 1990 and his first European tour in 1991. Joshua Redman was a musician of greater fame at the time (and would eventually prove to be one of greater longevity as well) and in 1993 decided to form a quartet with Mehldau, bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade. After moving to New York City, Mehldau soon became a popular sideman, performing with guitarist Peter Bernstein, alto saxophonist Jesse Davis and Miles Davis’ legendary drummer Jimmy Cobb. But it was Mehldau's contribution to Redman’s MoodSwing (Warner Bros.) that first truly caught the attention of the jazz world.

He, too, was signed by Warner Bros. His first release on the label was Introducing Brad Mehldau, an album that clearly established the path Mehldau had mapped out for himself and for the trio that would become the main focus of his creativity over the next few decades. As Chinen notes, the album opens with a penetrating staccato that sounds like someone impatiently knocking at the door to the future. It introduces an unusual variation on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “It Might As Well Be Spring”, a jazz standard already in the repertoires of legendary singers like Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, and made famous by instrumentalists like pianist Bill Evans and trumpeter Clifford Brown as well. The regular 4/4 pulse – so de rigueur in jazz - was transformed into a penetrating and rhythmically unstable 7/8. Mehldau kept one foot in the jazz piano tradition with a way of playing that was deeply embedded in post-bop, but at the same time developed a new, idiosyncratic dialect of advanced rhythmic adaptations and a seemingly effortless two-handed piano technique. A finely-balanced consensus with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy (who was later replaced by Jeff Ballard) resulted in a kind of collective consciousness that was more free than and notably different to the trios headed by famous predecessors like Bill Evans or Keith Jarrett.

In many ways, Mehldau’s story is not the story of a single musician: it is the crucial challenge that since his rise to fame has confronted every thinking, self-examining jazz musician wanting to pay tribute to the language, history, tradition, repertoire and origin of music while also carving out a space for themselves. 

Mehldau was acutely aware of the artist's relationship with the past, with the musicians who preceded him and the traditions they helped to shape, as borne out by the many - and by jazz standards very elaborate - sleeve notes he has written for his albums. For Live At the Village Vanguard: The Art of the Trio Volume 2 (1997), he reflected on the originality of the artist and his indebtedness to style and tradition. 

Mehldau enjoys quoting German philosophers, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud and Anthony Burgess in his liner notes. He has written lengthy meditations on Igor Stravinsky and the emotional nullity of music, about Sehnsucht and Unheimlichkeit, about German Romanticism. His great love for the music of Brahms and Schumann always shines through. It is indicative of what Nate Chinen identifies as the earnestness of the contemporary jazz scene: jazz is now played by thinking musicians, who strive to find the meaning behind the notes, behind the form, behind the triumvirate of melody, harmony and rhythm. This makes Mehldau’s repertoire all the more remarkable, as he finds inspiration in pop and rock music that is often far removed from the jazz tradition. He is just as likely to turn to The Beatles (as he does on the brand-new album Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles, Nonesuch Records 2023) or Radiohead, Rollins or Coltrane, Brahms or Schumann. Mehldau’s improvisations appear like variations on variations on variations, which may be far removed from their original form but are always deeply personal. This example will set a legion of young jazz musicians on a path to finding their own fresh sources of inspiration. 

The Trio’s last album, Seymour Reads The Constitution!, was recorded in 2018 before COVID-19 swept the globe. But since the start of the new millennium, Mehldau’s output has taken on increasingly hybrid forms as he operates on multiple musical fronts at the same time. On the album Largo (2001), he used extensive instrumentation to create a sonorous landscape interwoven with electronic effects in a production by Jon Brion who also joined Mehldau on the latter’s 2016 release Highway Rider and has worked with the likes of Kanye West, Fiona Apple, Rufus Wainwright, David Byrne and Elliott Smith. Additional personnel were called in for Highway Rider, including a string ensemble in a narrative jazz suite that is equally indebted to pop and classical music. Mehldau has also increased his profile as a composer, becoming the first jazz artist to be appointed to Carnegie Hall’s Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair in 2010-2011. 

In addition to all this, there have also been regular solo recitals where pop music, jazz, classical music and self-composed pieces are viewed through the lens of his eminently personal kaleidoscope. For a retrospective summary, there is 2015’s box set 10 Years Solo Live, a collection of recordings covering a decade of recitals all over Europe, including in Brussels. 

His cross-genre and cross-border collaborations with musicians from wildly different backgrounds are also worth seeking out. In 2006, for example, Mehldau wrote Love Sublime, a song cycle of poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, Louise Bogan and Fleurine set to music for the classical soprano Renée Fleming. This was followed up in 2010 with Love Songs, a Carnegie Hall commission setting poems by Sara Teasdale, Philip Larkin and e. e. cummings to music for the Swedish mezzo soprano Anne Sofie von Otter.

Other idiosyncratic collaborations include Taming the Dragon from 2014, a synergistic synths-and-drums combination with star drummer Mark Guiliana, and the beautiful album Mehldau created with mandolin player Chris Thile in 2017. 

Brad Mehldau’s Trilogy at Klarafestival 

During his residence at Klarafestival, Brad Mehldau will morph into multiple different forms. On 23 March he will share the stage with tenor Ian Bostridge, 24 March will see the Belgian première of his Piano Concerto with the Belgian National Orchestra and finally, on 25 March, there will be an intimate solo recital. 

A few years ago, after a performance in Schloss Elmau in Germany, Mehldau met tenor Ian Bostridge backstage. Their shared love of Robert Schumann formed the basis of a friendship which in turn led to this collaboration. Schumann’s famous song cycle Dichterliebe was the inspiration for Mehldau's The Folly of Desire, a new cycle written specifically for Bostridge in which the composer turns to the poetry of Shakespeare, W.H. Auden, e. e. cummings, Yeats, Goethe and Blake to explore themes like love, primal desire, lust and rape, in what Mehldau himself describes as “an inquiry into the limits of post-#MeToo Romantic irony”. 

Mehldau’s Piano Concerto has already been performed at some of the world’s most prestigious concert venues, including the Philharmonie de Paris and the Barbican in London. The work takes the listener on a 35-minute journey into an opulent sonic universe. The audience at London’s Barbican Centre showed their appreciation with a minutes-long standing ovation. 

Mehldau will conclude his residence with a solo performance that allows the pianist to demonstrate once again that his chapter in the great book of music is a story of many twists and turns, as well as moments of indescribable beauty.

Frederik Goossens

Brad Mehldau

Brad Mehldau is a unique voice in the piano because of his surprising improvisational skills and technical mastery. Moreover, he knows how to mold jazz, classical and pop into a unity like no other. He has collaborated with such diverse musicians as Pat Metheny, Renée Fleming, and Joshua Redman, and made brilliant arrangements of songs by Paul Simon, Cole Porter, and The Beatles. He performs his own work all over the world, both solo, in trio (with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy) and with orchestra.

Clark Rundell

Clark Rundell explores a broad cultural and historical repertoire ranging from classical and romantic music to jazz, tango and avant-garde. In doing so, he does not shy away from multidimensional projects. He recently made his debut with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Barcelona, the Klangforum Wien, the Orquestra Gulbenkian and the NDR Radiophilharmonie, among others. He has previously collaborated with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Ensemble 10/10 and Asko/Schönberg. 

Belgian National Orchestra

The Belgian National Orchestra is Bozar's privileged partner. Since September 2022, the orchestra has been led by principal conductor Antony Hermus, with Roberto González-Monjas as guest conductor and Michael Schønwandt as associate conductor. The Belgian National Orchestra performs with world-class soloists such as Hilary Hahn, Thomas Hampson, Angela Gheorghiu, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Truls Mørk. Furthermore, the Belgian National Orchestra invests in the future generation of listeners and does not shy away from innovative projects, such as with pop-rock artist Ozark Henry and recently with Stromae for his new album Multitude.

Konzertmeister 

Alexei Moshkov
Misako Akama

first violin

Sophie Causanschi**
Isabelle Chardon*
Sarah Guiguet*
Maria Elena Boila
Nicolas de Harven
Françoise Gilliquet
Philip Handschoewerker
Akika Hayakawa
Ariane Plumerel
Serge Stons
Dirk Van De Moortel
Yolanda Van Puyenbroeck

second violin

Filip Suys**
Jacqueline Preys**
Nathalie Lefin*
Marie-Danielle Turner*
Sophie Demoulin
Isabelle Deschamps
Hartwich D’Haene
Pierre Hanquin
Anouk Lapaire
Ana Spanu

viola

Marc Sabbah**
Mihoko Kusama*
Dmitri Ryabinin*
Sophie Destivelle
Katelijne Onsia
Peter Pieters
Marinela Serban
Silvia Tentori Montalto
Edouard Thise

cello

Olsi Leka**
Dmitry Silvian**
Maria-Christina Muylle*
Lesya Demkovych
Philippe Lefin
Uros Nastic
Harm Van Rheeden
Taras Zanchak

double bass

Robertino Mihai**
Svetoslav Dimitriev*
Serghei Gorlenko*
Ludo Joly*
Dan Ishimoto
Miguel Meulders
Gergana Terziyska

flute

Baudoin Giaux**
Denis-Pierre Gustin*
Laurence Dubar*
Jérémie Fèvre*

oboe

Dimitri Baeteman**
Arnaud Guittet*
Bram Nolf*

clarinet

Julien Bénéteau**
Maxime Conoir*

bassoon

Gordon Fantini**
Bert Helsen*
Filip Neyens*
Bob Permentier*

horn

Anthony Devriendt**
Jan Van Duffel*
Katrien Vintioen*
Bernard Wasnaire*

trumpet

Leo Wouters**
Ward Opsteyn*
Davy Taccogna*

trombone

Luc De Vleeschhouwer**
Philippe Bourin*
Bruno De Busschere*
Guido Liveyns*

tuba

NN

timpani

Nico Schoeters**

percussion

Katia Godart*

harp

Annie Lavoisier**

** first soloist 

* soloist