Bob Hanf was a Dutch composer, painter, writer and violinist. Because of his Jewish background, he was taken to Auschwitz in 1944, where he was murdered.
There has been a lot of work done in order to share his art, and Mireia Escobar and I were lucky enough to be part of the event in which they launched his official webpage. The event took place in the ANNO Museum in Zwolle, where we played two pieces written by him in a performance that combined his music and his poems.
You can visit the webpage of Bob Hanf here.
My experience
Something that I've learnt while studying my Master's Degree in ArtEZ is that I love to create and participate in interdisciplinary projects. Music on its own is such a powerful art form, but when combined with poetry, image, dance, theater... it can be much more expressive and communicative. On this occasion, we had the chance to work with a professional actor who read some poems of Hanf in between movements of the pieces we played. Not only was this helpful to know the context in which the composer lived and wrote the pieces we played, but it also helped us understand the feelings that were portrayed in the music. The flow between the music and the text was very natural, and the way the actor expressed himself made me dig more into the music and be connected to my inner self and also to Mireia while we played.
A challenge that I had to face while working on this repertoire was that, for the first time in my career, I would have to perform in front of an audience without the previous guidance of any of my teachers. This may sound weird for someone who is about to finish a Master's, but it's my reality. Far from being afraid, it made me want to prove myself how far can I go without getting feedback. And, once again, playing with Mireia made it all much easier: she has such good ideas and a very natural playing. It was super interesting to see the differences and similarities on how we interpreted the same music, and it was fun to experiment with timing and dynamics in order to get the effect we wanted to portray.
I'm very looking forward to playing this repertoire again in May!
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