Silence #36: Liberation Concert
Early in the morning, the Oude Kerk is a meditative oasis in the city. Since 2017, on every first Friday of the month at 8 a.m., when the rising sun casts its light through the church’s towering windows and the neighbourhood slowly wakes up, visitors can enjoy the Silence music programme. The concerts celebrate the acoustics and space of the Oude Kerk, which invites mostly young, experimental musicians. There are no fixed seats; visitors are welcome to walk around and discover what the music sounds like in different places in the church.
The Amsterdam Liberation Festival 2022 opened that morning on the oldest music stage in the city with a programme focused on the end of the Second World War. During this special edition of the music series Silence, the Mondriaan Quartet played the 'Eighth String Quartet' by Dimitri Shostakovich and ‘Different trains’ by Steve Reich. Both pieces are considered iconic works about the Second World War.
During his visit to Dresden in July 1960, Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich worked feverishly on his eighth string quartet. In just three days, amid the debris of the Allied bombing, he wrote one of his most melancholic and intimate compositions. Shostakovich dedicated the work 'to the victims of fascism and war', but gave the piece also autobiographical connotations by incorporating his musical signature: the four initial letters of his name. According to insiders the work was thus also a reference to the totalitarian oppression in his own country. In 1988, Steve Reich (1936) wrote the three-part 'Different trains' for the Kronos Quartet. The title refers to a simple but powerful contradiction: a Jewish boy, Steve Reich, travels back and forth between New York and Los Angeles and realises many years later: had he been living in Europe as a Jewish boy, he would have been on other trains and to other
destinations. In the composition, sound references to trains and air raids, phrases of text, synchronised with musical themes in the string quartet.
