Underrated Classical Musicians 2/18/20

So for the last few days I've been pondering how to memorialize Reinbert de Leeuw, who died Friday. He's possibly the most consequential performer and advocate of new classical music of the last generation, and consequently, perhaps the very definition of underrated. Do you link to his compositions? Do you link to his conducting? His piano playing? Do you link to the various works he advocated for? The other musicians he mentored?

My sense is that, over time, one has to do all of that. But to start with, we'll just go with the composer he will be linked to for all time. The world of new classical music is roughly ten or twenty thousand people at most. I suspect that if you polled them about who the greatest living composer is who does not happen to be a friend of theirs..., the plurality would say Louis Andriessen. 

I always had trouble warming to Andriessen's music for many of the same reasons I suspect others loved it. Andriessen is the perfect meeting place between new music's two largest camps, atonalists cannot accuse Andriessen of being overly simple, and minimalists cannot accuse Andriessen of being overly complex. So much of Andriessen is minimalism refracted through the lens of Schoenberg and Bauhaus, and then refracted again through German art-rock like Kraftwerk and Faust. If Glass and Reich grew up in the remnants of a hollowed out continent, this is the sort of abrasive music one might expect them to write. To me, it always seemed neither fish nor fowl. It neither had the pleasing sonorities of most minimalism nor the complex form and texture of most atonality to draw one in. 

But last night, I put on Andriessen's de Staat (based on Plato's Republic, though for the life of me I can't see the connection of the music to the philosophy) in a de Leeuw performance I'd never heard before, and for the first time ever, I was absolutely riveted. This rocked. 

Andriessen and de Leeuw were part of a new wind blowing through European music. Marxists though they may have been, they were part of the generation who grew up in the fruits of the Marshall Plan, and there is something deeply American that touched their Amsterdam-grown aesthetic. When Pierre Boulez, a killjoy even at twenty, wanted to draw attention to himself and the new generation who had so much trouble getting noticed, he simply had his cadre boo a Stravinsky concert. A generation later, when Andriessen and de Leeuw wanted to draw attention the same way, they didn't boo, they brought nutcrackers, rattles, bicycle horns, to disrupt a concert at the Concertgebouw. de Leeuw and Andriessen represented ia very different modernism, more fun, more inclusive, more democratic.