Lunch concert

Every year we commemorate the victims of the Second World War.
Not only the people, but also their stories that are in danger of being forgotten. This applies in particular to the musical memories of Dutch composers who experienced the war up close. While some survived the war, many died in the labor camps. The music of these composers remains at home, in a shed or a suitcase.
The Leo Smit Foundation tracks down these works and testimonies of the Second World War. Eighty years after the liberation of the Netherlands, flutist Leonie Wolters and pianist Ben van Daal let the music of these Dutch composers resound.
For several years now, Leonie Wolters and Ben van Daal have been performing chamber music for piano and flute from the 20th and 21st centuries as a classical duo. Today's program was specially put together for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945. In memory of war victims, they present the Sonata for flute and piano by Dick Kattenburg and Leo Smit, who both fell victim to the Holocaust.

Program:

1. Sonata for flute and piano (1937) - Dick Kattenburg           

Jewish composer Dick Kattenburg wrote his Sonata for flute and piano at the age of 17 for his childhood sweetheart Ima van Esso. This mainly cheerful music has influences from Gershwin and Ravel. This is also clearly audible in his Tempo di Blues, which he wrote at the beginning of the war when he was studying in The Hague.
After his state exam in 1941, he took lessons from composer Leo Smit. With the occupation of the Germans, Kattenburg's life changed dramatically as we can hear in his Novelette. When he went to the cinema one evening he was arrested by the Germans. He was then transported via Westerbork to Auschwitz. It is not known where his life ended. But while Kattenburg did not survive the war, his Sonata did; in the hands of Ima.

2. Sonata for flute and piano (1943) - Leo Smit

After studying piano and composition in Amsterdam, the Jewish composer Leo Smit lived in Paris from 1927 to 1936, where he had a lot of contact with the famous Groupe de Six (with Milhaud, Poulenc, among others). In 1937 he returned to Amsterdam, where after the invasion of the Germans he was forced to move to the Jewish ghetto district of Amsterdam. On 27 April 1943 he was transported to Sobibór, where he was killed 3 days later. The Lento of this flute sonata is his last work, completed earlier that same year.

3. Romance voor fagot en piano (1944) - Hans Schouwman

4. Winterlandschap voor piano solo - Hans Schouwman             

5. Sonatine for flute and piano (1953) - Jaap Geraedts              

When the war started, Geraedts was still studying in The Hague, the place where Kattenburg had also been until recently. Although he was spared the same fate as the previous composers, the war also shaped him as a person and composer. For example, in 1945 he wrote the work Memento '45 in memory of those who fell during the resistance. His best-known work, the Sonatine for flute and piano, dates from 1953. Where the war still reverberates in this work, there is also optimism about the new era that has dawned.