Dutch pianist to perform tonight at Erasmus Huis

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): Over the years, Erasmus Huis has proven to be one of the very few places in Jakarta where music has been able to flourish. After the successful "Duo Recital" series last year, it is now poised to feature Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam in a concert tonight.

Brautigam, born in 1954, studied the piano at the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam, in London under John Bingham, and in the U.S. under the famous Austrian-born pianist Rudolf Serkin, whose interpretations of Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart are widely revered.

Ever since he won the National Music Award (Nederlandse Muziekprijs) in 1984, he has made numerous appearances as a soloist with several European orchestras such as the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of prominent European conductors such as Bernard Haitink, Valery Gergiev and Ivan Fischer.

Brautigam has given many recitals both in and outside of the Netherlands, including a performance at the highly prestigious International Master Pianist Series at the Amsterdam Concert Hall in 1992, and a three-night concert playing all of Mozart's piano sonatas at the same venue in 1995. He is also recognized for his chamber music performances.

Together with violinist Isabelle van Keulen, he has toured Japan, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Italy and Germany.

Brautigam's recordings include an Edison award-winning CBS CD of Maurice Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin and Robert Schumman's Sonata No. 2, as well as special CDs recorded with the Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest, among which is a performance of Schostakovitch's First Piano Concerto.

Tonight's concert at Erasmus Huis will feature Felix Mendelssohn's Fantasie opus 28 in F Major, Ludwig van Beethoven's Sonata opus 22 in B flat Major, and Franz Schubert's 2 Scherzi D 593 and the famous Sonata in A Major. Although the program is brief, the pieces are very substantial and, in some ways, interrelated.

Historically, Schubert had suffered from being defined by Beethoven's concepts of the sonata form. While the music of Beethoven, a master of the classic style, is in no sense predictable, it is almost invariably self-explanatory throughout. His music always shows the listener where it is going and justifies why it is going there. Schubert's music, on the other hand, conveys a "roaming" feeling, at the mercy of powers it cannot control.

Schubert's refusal to imitate Beethoven has led to certain features such as the lengthiness of his compositions, which he felt were necessary to express himself properly and is appropriate to his musical temperament. Far from being the wandering romantic lyricist of popular imagination, he was a structural genius in his own right, just as Beethoven was.

Meanwhile, Beethoven's Sonata opus 22 in B flat Major is believed to have marked the end of his sonata writing period, in which his switch from three movements back to four movements indicated a new mastery of a certain musical manner.

Brautigam's concert starts at 7:30 p.m. and is open to the public free of charge. A master class for talented students from the Yayasan Pendidikan Musik will be held tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. at the same venue, and is also open to the public free of charge.