Music tour to Holland

Alex Reut-Hobbs S6TRAR writes about his musical experiences during the February half-term. 

On the second day of our tour, we spent the morning seeing a sculpture copy of Rembrant’s Night Watch, before lunching in the heart of Amsterdam, enjoying the antics of a cockney fire-eater and temporarily hijacking a busker’s guitar to warm up for that night’s concert. This took place in a beautiful church just outside Amsterdam called Hervormde Kerk, where CLS played to its first very appreciative audience.  The next day we performed a matinee at Our Lady Immaculate Church, also just outside Amsterdam. The morning service finished just before our performance was scheduled to start and to our delight practically the whole congregation stayed behind to watch. The stage was big enough to accommodate all our major numbers and there was also an organ, which meant that we could break out Pachelbel’s Canon for the first time.

The refreshingly musical congregation was full of praise and seemed particularly to have enjoyed the CLS Close Harmony group – incidentally invented for this tour.  The rest of the day was taken up by a visit to Delft:particularly exciting was the precariously leaning Oude Kerk (Old Church) in the centre of the city. We returned to Delft the next day, this time to the famous Royal Delft pottery factory, before proceeding to another matinee performance at a home for older people in Delfshove.  That evening proved to be a scintillating experience for all: Mr Harrison had arranged tickets to see Wagner’s Vorspiel en Liebestod and Messiaen’s Turangalîla-symphonie (the combination of which he described as “a cross between Romanticism and Star Wars”) at the Concertgebouw – Amsterdam’s main concert hall, and quite possibly the most prestigious in the whole of Europe. No words could do the Wagner justice: the audience must have sat in total silence for at least two minutes after Yakov Kreizberg (my new favourite conductor) teased the final strains out of the immense Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest.

We were completely saturated by the music. The Messiaen followed after the interval – the Turangalîla being a particularly innovative piece of music as it incorporates the Ondes Martenot: an electric instrument for which Messiaen had a soft spot.  Though nowhere near as subtle as the Wagner, the tumultuous, thunderous, heaven-splitting cymbal crashes at the end of the fifth and tenth movements felt like God himself had stuck a fishhook in your heart and was almightily reeling you in. We walked out of the concert hall feeling like divine helium balloons.

The next day we left to see more of the sights of Amsterdam, starting with Anne Frank’s house in Keizersgracht.  At lunch, we discovered an odd looking square in the middle of a park which turned out to be a set of bells operated by stepping on any of the square’s nine pads with one’s foot. Although our concerts were officially over, this did not stop us giving an impromptu performance of a piece we had just devised especially for these curious minor pentatonic ‘foot bells’.  The crowds drew in, and once again we had the pleasure of knowing that the music of CLS – in whatever shape or form – was being propagated.  After a visit to the Van Gogh museum we set off back to the hotel for our final evening. Dinner was particularly eventful: Mr Haskew treated us to an a capella song he had written to the tune of Amazing Grace (performed by the Close Harmony Group the day before) to commemorate the trip.  There was also a CLS Music Tour quiz. Emotions ran high as it slowly dawned on us that we had just taken part in a moment of CLS history: we had successfully completed the school’s first ever tour. The future of CLS Music is assured: we have committed musicians across all the year groups who have seen how the department can galvanise and function as a whole and we have teachers prepared to spend time and, more importantly, to invest emotion in these musicians. The highly successful results will be on display at the Joint Concert on March the 11th.