Jacques Bank - The End

Описание

Jacques Bank (1943)
The End (1992)
Berend Eijkhout – baritone
Panos Iliopoulos – organ
Recording Sunday 28th of May 2017 in the Orgelpark in Amsterdam

THE END (1992) consists of 7 songs for bass/baritone solo. The last song must be accompanied by one or more unspecified instruments.
The song-cycle is about 'dying'.
Song 1 is based on a story by the 17th century English author John Aubrey. A woman welcomes her lover in such a way, that he is crushed to death.
Newspaper reports about several bizarre ways of dying, taken from the English newspaper The Independent, are told in songs 2, 3, 4, and 5.
The 6th song is based on a poem about the neat and controlled way insects use to die, by the English artist David Barton from his 'drawing book' Sequences One.
In the last song the singer tells the audience that he himself is happy to be still alive. It is based on a rather strange poem by Daniel Defoe, with which he concludes his Journal of the Plague Year.

words:
SONG 1:
She leapt from the battlements into the arms of her lover, striking him dead.
John Aubrey (from Minutes of Lives)
SONG 2:
Three years later the woman , said to have a mental age of about ten and guilt-ridden at the death of her son, was overheard by her landlady threatening another child with the words: 'If you don't shut up I will do the same what I done to the other one'. She made a confession that she had drowned him in the bath.
from The Independent, February 2-1992
SONG 3:
A recluse who stopped living in a bungalow 35 years ago after being jilted at the altar, was found dead in a makeshift home built of branches and umbrellas in her front garden.
from The Independent, March 3-1992
SONG 4:
The Russian general died of a heart attack, after he had been stopped by police from visiting the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He was going to put flowers there, as he had done for as long as his family can remember on Armed Forces Day.
from The Independent, February 29-1992
SONG 5:
She accused her husband outright of having an affair, and he said he could never do such a thing because a woman with whom he had an earlier affair had killed herself. The court heard that this statement was untrue; the woman concerned is still alive.
from The Independent, February 29-1992
SONG 6:
Nothing dies so neatly as an insect.
When the wings are stilled,
the legs hook death and press it close,
pinned to the body beneath the head,
across the thorax, folded neatly.
David Barton (from Sequences One)
SONG 7:
A dreadful Plague in London was,
In the Year Sixty Five,
Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls
Away; yet I alive!
Daniel Defoe (from A Journal of the Plague Year)

Jacques Bank (http://www.jacquesbank.net/) is a Dutch composer born in 1943, who studied composition with Ton de Leeuw and Jos Kunst at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam. In 1974 he finished his studies with the Prize for Composition. After that he broke radically from his early serialistic tinted writing. Reorientation on tonality followed. From that moment on the starting-point of new compositions was the translation of an emotional stimulus, often generated by some extra-musical element, into music. Nearly always a text was the starting-point. Consequently, compositions in which the voice is used in one way or other are in the majority. He wrote numerous works, varying from operas to solo pieces. In 2011 he finished the opera Major Taylor, the fastest Bicycle Rider in the World about Marshall 'Major' Taylor, the first black sports hero of America. Performances of his compositions took place in The Netherlands and abroad, a.o. during the Gaudeamus Music Weeks, the Holland Festival and the World Music Days in Tel Aviv, Warsaw, Seoul, Zagreb and Toronto. In New York, November 2012 CANTORI NY gave an impressive performance of his Felix und Clara, a composition for narrator, mixed chorus and stringquartet. Bank was awarded several prizes a.o. by the Rostrum of Composers for Minutes of Lives, the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize (the most prestigious prize for compositions in The Netherlands) by the Amsterdam Fund of the Arts for his Requiem for a Living One and the Prize of the International Competition for Mini-opera for Children in Warsaw for his opera The Piano Teacher.


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