The pianist, composer, producer and renaissance musician Jeroen van Veen has played many concerts with both his wife Sandra and his brother Maarten, and has recorded with both of them for Brilliant Classics. The present compilation brings together a unique sequence of masterpieces for the genre in live and studio performances, made between 1992 and 2008, and given by the brothers as Piano Duo Van Veen.

This pocket history of the piano duo opens – as it must – with the F minor Fantasy of Schubert. All elements of Schubert's art can be found in the Fantasy: his gift for a sublime, gently unfolding melody; melancholy harmonic turns from major to minor; high drama within a spacious symphonic design; intricate counterpoint in the finale. Less well known but no less accomplished in its way is the set of Beethoven variations by Camille Saint-Saëns, a polished transformation of a minuet theme. This 1992 studio recording concludes with a pair of 20th-century pieces which capitalize on the energy and momentum of the piano duo genre as a whole: La valse of Ravel and the Paganini Variations of Lutoslawski, which never fail to raise the pulse and receive here barnstorming performances. The adrenaline level increases further with a sequence of live performances on album 2, opening with Rachmaninov’s gorgeous Russian Rhapsody and continuing with The Rite of Spring in the version which Stravinsky first performed with his friends in Paris prior to the ballet’s notorious public premiere in 1911. In his Monologue of 1964, Zimmermann developed the thread of his Dialogue for two pianos and orchestra with a collage technique which quotes from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven in which the two pianists muse almost to themselves at times. Rounding off this collection in epic style is the apotheosis of Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen.

REVIEW:

This is a spectacular piano duo release. Of the 2 discs one was recorded in the studio (one piano) and the other in concert (two pianos). The repertoire here is mostly “famous works”, but the Zimmermann falls outside of the title’s range. There are a lot of brilliant, virtuosic pieces here, and the Ravel and Stravinsky are best known in their orchestral guises. Among people who listen to a lot of 4-hand repertoire, everything here, except perhaps the Zimmermann, will be in our libraries. This is a release I’ll keep on my active listening stack for quite some time.

-- American Record Guide (James Harrington)

Canto Ostinato is the work that defines the legacy of the composer Simeon ten Holt, who died in 2012 at the age of 89. There are 106 sections of repeating five-beat patterns whose patterned, repetitive but gradually evolving repetition produce a mesmerizing effect on the listener – a dance-like sense of even unevenness – akin to masterpieces from the US minimalist school such as Steve Reich’s Music for 16 Musicians and Philip Glass’s Music in 12 Parts. However, the sections need not be repeated literally, and the performers can vary the dynamics, the manner of playing (legato vs. staccato, for example), and the octave in which the material is played.

Ten Holt completed Canto Ostinato in 1979 for an instrumentation of three pianos and electronic organ, but the cycle has proved itself adaptable to several different combinations of keyboard instruments, and these versions were brought together by Jeroen van Veen on a compendium produced by Brilliant Classics in 2014. ‘Canto Ostinato XL’ (9453) included this two-piano scoring as well as versions for prepared pianos, organ and marimbas, but Jeroen and Sandra van Veen have re-recorded it in 2021; the fourth version they have produced, which brings together all the varieties of arrangement and articulation developed through the course of concert performances given across the world. ‘Tonality after the death of tonality’, Ten Holt described the language of Canto Ostinato, and Jeroen van Veen compares its style to the music of Chopin: tranquil, immersive, melancholic and romantic. He worked closely with the composer over many years and can justly be regarded as the most authoritative living performer of his music.

REVIEW:

For listeners coming to this music for the first time, you don’t know what you have been missing. I think a two-piano performance that lasts a little more or less than 120 minutes is a good place to start. (In his introduction to the score, ten Holt actually expressed a preference for four pianos, although the premiere was played by three pianos and an electronic organ.) The two van Veens recorded it together for the first time in 1996, and have recorded it on two pianos at least one other time (in 2008) before this new version from 2021. I think some of their earlier versions (alone or with other musicians) have been more dramatic (with an imaginative performer or performers, ten Holt’s works can be hair-raising, at times), but no one, least of all the composer, said that Canto Ostinato needs to be dramatic. With this new version, one is newly impressed by the music’s ability to maintain its core identity no matter how much the details change, and the details this time make the music sound a little more contemporary and a little less Romantic. Your mileage may vary. As for me, I am glad to add this version to my already not minimal ten Holt collection. 

-- Fanfare

An audiophile LP transfer for an
immersive tribute to a remote island
off the coast of Brittany.
Having become celebrated for his score
to Amélie (2001), the French composer
moved to the island of Ushant
(Ouessant/Eusa), and this album is a
musical tribute to his home, comprising
ten pieces about ten specific places on
the island. In 2016, Tiersen published a
collection of pieces called Eusa, which
Jeroen van Veen has combined with his
2021 collection, Kerber, named after a
chapel on the island, to produce Island.
The album has been a best-seller on CD
for its contemplative mood and beauty.
Among the 10 tracks, some offer the
perfect soundtrack for contemplation on
a long walk or staring out of a window on
a train journey. Others seem predestined
to be background music for study or
relaxation. The pieces sound at times
dreamy and wistful, at times bittersweet,
at other times happily playful. With each
song, your imagination can easily conjure
a scene from a movie: a breakup after a
fight in a cosy café or a nature
documentary showing two baby birds
opening their eyes for the very first
time.
This isn’t a collection about isolation;
it’s more an expression of awareness of
your own environment and your place
within it: a sonic encapsulation of the
hyper-local. Tiersen relates this
approach to a night spent studying the
stars – which he himself does. ‘You can
look at things that are thousands of
light years away and relate your own
existence to this really cosmic element,’
he says. ‘But you get that same feeling
with the things all around you.’

A half-speed mastered, new LP transfer of a best-selling album in the acclaimed series of minimalist piano music recorded by Jeroen van Veen for Brilliant Classics.
‘Throughout, the playing’s brilliant, confident, and sonorous’: this album of the piano output of John Adams won glowing reviews when it was first released in 2017. As an indefatigable champion of minimalist music from both sides of the Atlantic, Jeroen van Veen had recorded some of these pieces before, within his compendious ‘Minimal Piano Collection’ which became an essential acquisition for collectors of the most influential classical style in music during the last 60 years.

The 2017 remake of China Gates is even more opulent as a performance, superbly engineered to catch van Veen’s subtleties of touch at the piano, and thus eminently suitable for a high-spec vinyl transfer. ‘There’s something quite nice about encountering interpretations of these perennial Adams favourites that sound so comfortable,’ continued the Arts Fuse review: ‘a pianist enjoying himself, freely exploring the enveloping diatonicism of the music.’

Adams regards Phrygian Gates (1977) as his ‘first mature composition’, and it may seem strange that he has not since written more for solo piano than the four pieces gathered here, but as Jeroen van Veen argues in his sleeve-note essay, these pieces between them say all that needs to be said in terms of the composer’s piano style.
Mostly composed in a West Coast beach hut, the gentle flow, rolling swells and thundering breakers of Phrygian Gates add up to a half-hour, overpowering analogy for melodic waves. From the same year, China Gates distils this energy into a five-minute work of memorably concentrated stillness. Adams left off the piano for another 20 years until writing Hallelujah Junction for two pianos in 1996. Van Veen gave the Dutch premiere, and he remains an outstanding, authoritative advocate of Adams’s music.