Every work of art has a story. The story of this cd started when I had just finished my previous cd “Letter to the World” which I had made with pianist Jan Frans van Dijkhuijzen. I gave it to Jan-Peter Bast, who came to our house for a coffee. “Why don’t you play together, you’d be great”, Vincent suggested. I was embarrassed, forever doubting my own talents and admiring Jan-Peter’s so much. He said he’d listen to the cd and a few weeks later we were performing together somewhere on an outdoor stage, capturing the attention of an audience that forgot they were getting wet from the drizzle. Our teaming up has been so inspiring and encouraging from the very start. Jan-Peter understands exactly what I want my songs to sound like even though I cannot put it into words. He is such an amazing pianist and a relaxed and friendly man into the bargain.
Being a bit of drummer myself, I started to miss some percussion, so we asked my long-time friend Arthur Brenkman with whom, oddly enough, I had never played before. He gave that bit of extra to the songs that made my dreams come true. It was Jan-Peter’s idea to ask Sophie de Rijk to make the melodies even more lyrical with her beautiful tone on the violin. When she started to play on our very first rehearsal, she hit me spot-on in the heart and I forgot to sing. We did “Let beauty awake” which I really wanted as the first track on this cd, so you could have the same experience as I had then.
You could say, of course, that the story started earlier, for example, when I first heard and met Jan-Peter in Wijk aan Zee, in the Netherlands, as well as Jan-Paul van der Meij, in 2005. Or when I met Arthur when I had signed up as a volunteer reading out English books in the library for the blind after my graduation. Or when I met Sophie at university in a choir for musicology students. Or when I met Vincent and learned about love. Or when I went to university reading English literature and listening to poems set to music by such composers as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten. Or when I was a teenager and absolutely blown away by a novel called Jane Eyre.
No matter how far back you date the start of this cd, it is here and you’re holding it now. Most poems on it have been with me for a long time and I so much want to share them. Setting them to music is a way of making them more accessible to an audience that would otherwise not know about English poetry. They’re touching, eloquent, heart-breaking, dreamy, romantic, pensive, full of hope or a little ironic. Although they were written in the 19th century, we can still relate to the feelings in the poems because mankind hasn’t really changed.
This is our ode to English poetry.
Our new letter to the world. “For despite all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world” .