The composer and musicologist Konrad Boehmer was born in Berlin in 1941. His early works were conducted by Bruno Maderna and Pierre Boulez. His dissertation on the open form in new music, which he defended in 1966 at the age of 25, made a great impression. In the same year he followed the route of his teacher Gottfried Michael Koenig to the Netherlands.
Boehmer was initially embraced by the Dutch avant-garde and began teaching at the Royal Conservatoire in 1972. From 1994 to 2006 he was head of the Institute of Sonology. Konrad Boehmer died on 4 October 2014 in Amsterdam.
As a music critic, Boehmer – often rightly, sometimes wrongly – attacked many of his colleagues at home and abroad, for example via his legendary radio programme Muziekspiegel. Perhaps because of the polemical battle in which he was regularly involved, the composer Boehmer has faded into the background in the Netherlands.
On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death, the Konrad Boehmer Foundation has therefore asked the New European Ensemble to compile a programme of instrumental compositions by Boehmer and composers he admired, Willem Breuker, Luigi Nono and Edgard Varèse. The selected works by Boehmer have never been performed in the Netherlands before. Also special is the Dutch premiere of the original version of Nono’s Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica.
The concert will be preceded by a pre-concert lecture given by Italian musicologist Veniero Rizzardi on the ongoing dialogue between Luigi Nono and Konrad Boehmer.
4 October 2024, Conservatoriumzaal
19:00, Pre-concert lecture
20:00, Concert
Konrad Boehmer – Fünf Bagatellen
Edgard Varèse – Octandre
Konrad Boehmer – Qadar
Luigi Nono – Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica
intermission
Konrad Boehmer – Da Ciri
Willem Breuker – Fidget
Konrad Boehmer – Rabioso
Admission free