Ties Mellema, Dudok Quartet Amsterdam, Bram van Sambeek, and Jesse Faber

For this members concert I've invited some exceptional company. The Dudok Quartet Amsterdam asked me to join them for the third edition of their festival, Dudok Muziekdagen in Kampen (28–31 May). On 21 May we offer a preview.
The programme brings together strikingly different works: Philip Glass's Façades unfolds in long, floating melodies over a gently pulsing bed, more withdrawn than his rhythmically driven work. Sofia Gubaidulina's Duo Sonate (1977) moves in a completely different world: quarter tones, multiphonics, two voices in entirely independent senses of time. Gubaidulina spent her life as an outsider in Soviet musical culture; Shostakovich advised her to stay on her "wrong path," and she did. She passed away in March 2025. Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8 closes the programme — dense with self-quotation, dedicated to the victims of fascism and war, yet equally readable as a deeply personal document. I will also perform a solo set with electronics, presenting new compositions drawing on techno, jazz, minimal and classical music.
Jesse Faber (clarinet) performed at Carnegie Hall at eighteen with the Jon Batiste trio. Bram van Sambeek (bassoon) received the Dutch Music Prize in 2009 — the only bassoonist in the prize's thirty-year history. The Dudok Quartet Amsterdam performs at the Concertgebouw, Wigmore Hall and the BBC Proms, and organises its own festival in Kampen, where Shostakovich quartets nos. 3, 5 and 8 can be heard across three days.
Dudok Quartet Amsterdam: Judith van Driel, Marleen Wester (violins) · Marie-Louise de Jong (viola) · David Faber (cello) · Jesse Faber (clarinet) · Bram van Sambeek (bassoon) · Ties Mellema (saxophone & electronics)