Скачать или смотреть Dick Kattenburg - Romanian Melody for Violin, Cello and Piano

Dick Kattenburg (1919-1944)

Romanian Melody for Violin, Cello and Piano (1941)

Leo Smit Ensemble


Dick Kattenburg was still a student when the war broke out. Little is known about Kattenburg and his musical activities, as there are few surviving documents. He must have had a solid musical education at an early age, because by the time he was seventeen he had received a diploma "Théorie et Violon" at the Collège Musical Belge in Brussels, where his teacher was Hugo Godron. In 1941, he passed his state examination in music at The Hague under the direction of Willem Pijper. During his short life, Dick Kattenburg wrote about thirty compositions: solo pieces, chamber music and works for orchestra. His compositions show the influence of French music, but they are often somewhat Romantic, too, with charming melodic lines and harmonies and sometimes even a jazzy feel. At the age of eighteen, he wrote a piece for piano four-hands and a tap dance. During the war, he received lessons in composition from Leo Smit while in hiding. It was only then that his Jewish background started to appear as an inspiration in his music. He started to write songs on Hebrew texts, calling them Palestinian, Mexican or Rumanian in the hope that this would increase the manuscripts' chances of surviving the war. Dick Kattenburg was arrested and transported to Auschwitz, where he was killed in the summer of 1944 at the age of 24. After Eleonore Pameijer performed what was thought to be his sole surviving composition, the Flute Sonata, Kattenburg's niece, Joyce Bergman-van Hessen, decided to go through the family effects that she had inherited; she found a considerable number of compositions and gave them to the conductor Ed Spanjaard. Most of these works turned out to be of high quality, often joyful and light-hearted, with many polytonal passages reminiscent of the music of Kattenburg's contemporary, Darius Milhaud.