John Borstlap

John Borstlap (born 1950, Rotterdam) is a composer, born in the Netherlands, and an early pioneer working on a renaissance of tonal and classical traditions. Also he is an author on cultural subjects, related to music and the visual arts.

Education

John Borstlap studied 1968-73 at the conservatory in Rotterdam, composition with Otto Ketting and Theo Loevendie, and piano with Elly Salomé

Early career

After having moved to Delft in 1976, John Borstlap made a living by private piano teaching and accompanying ballet classes, while carrying-out extensive musical studies, as well as studies in art history and Jungian psychology. The American pianist Christopher Czaja Sager, who had shortly before settled in the Netherlands, discovered some of his piano pieces which he performed many times, including radio recordings. In 1981 Sager premièred Borstlap’s ‘Variations’ for piano and string orchestra (commissioned by the Johan Wagenaar Foundation in The Hague) with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra under Antoni Ros-Marbà with performances in Amsterdam and The Hague.

Cambridge and beyond

In 1984 Borstlap successfully competed, on the basis of two prizes he had meanwhile won with his Violin Concerto, the Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Poznan and the Prince Pierre de Monaco Competition in Monaco, for a full British Council Scholarship for a year study at the University of Cambridge At the music faculty he studied with Alexander Goehr. As Borstlap wrote in his book, The Classical Revolution (2013): "Understanding the Schönbergian heritage would mean understanding of the origin of musical modernism".

In 1990 the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra under Hartmut Haenchen performed Borstlap’s first symphony, Sinfonia.

In the nineties Borstlap was involved in various projects, one of them being an extensive national concert tour of the Ludwig Trio for which he wrote a string trio, another the production of a CD with his chamber music Hyperion’s Dream. In 1998 he organized a classical chamber music festival in Haarlem. While working on his music, his writings on musical and wider cultural subjects began to be published.

The beginning of the new millennium saw various performances of his elaboration of a Wagner sketch, Psyche, in Manchester, the Netherlands and Romania, and the publication of a long essay: Recreating the Classical Tradition in the tome Reviving the Muse in which Borstlap formulated his latest ideas about the possibilities of a renaissance of the tonal tradition. Psyche received a successful performance by the Orchestre National de Montpellier in 2008. Since then, interest in Germany and Austria has grown, resulting among other things in a commission by the Kammersymphonie Berlin for a classical symphony. In 2013 his book The Classical Revolution was published.

Works

Orchestral / operatic music

• Invocazione, orchestra [1972]
• Violin Concerto, violin & orchestra (revised 2003) [1974]
• Variations, pf & strings (Commissioned by the Johan Wagenaar Foundation) [1981]
• Sinfonia (Symphony nr 1), chamber orchestra (Work for the M.Phil. Degree at Cambridge University) [1985/88]
• Psyche, orchestra (elaboration of Wagner’s sketch ‘Romeo und Julie’) [1999]
• Capriccio (version for orchestra) [2002]
• Flucht nach Kythera, opera/monodrama: sopr, choir & chamber orchestra [2007]
• Four Tagore Poems, sopr & chamber orchestra [2008]
• Symphony nr 2, orchestra (orchestral version of 'Hyperion's Dream') [2009]
• Symphony nr 3 (‘classical symphony’), orchestra (Commissioned by the Kammersymphonie Berlin) [2013]
• Feierliche Abendmusik (co-commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra) [2015]

Chamber music (selection)

• Sonata (1 mvt), pf solo [1975]
• Avatâra, pf solo [1980]
• Sechs Chinesische Gedichte, sopr & pf [1982]
• Fantasia, pf solo [1985]
• Paraphrase, ensemble: fl-clar-vl-vlc-pf (Work for the M.Phil. Degree at Cambridge University) [1985]
• Hyperion’s Dream, vlc & pf [1992]
• Night Music, vla & pf [1993]
• Capriccio, vl-hrn-pf (Commissioned by Antony Boersma) [1994]
• Trio for Strings, vl-vla-vlc (Commissioned by the Culture company) [1996]
• Traum, Lenz, Verwandlung (string quartet) [1997]
• Rajanigandha, Seven poems by Rabindranath Tagore, sopr, fl & pf (Commissioned by the Leo Smit Foundation) [2008]
• Serenade, fl-vl-vlc-pf (Commissioned by the Leo Smit Foundation) [2012]

Writings

selection / sources

Postmodernism and new music, in 'Maatstaf', cultural magazine in the Netherlands, 1988/4.

Towards a dynamic classicism, in 'Mens & Melodie' (see above), February 1995.

Recreating the Classical Tradition, essay in ‘Reviving the Muse’, published by the Claridge Press UK, 2001.

Cultural identity, in 'Art and Science', see above, 2005/3.

Will the Concertgebouw become one big brother? in 'Trouw', March 2006.

Renewal in music: a wide-spread misunderstanding? in 'Mens & Melodie' (see above), 2007/6.

Tagore: language as the music of interiority, in 'Mens & Melodie' (see above), 2008/5.

The Classical Revolution, published by the Scarecrow Press, New York, in 2013.

Zurück ins Blickfeld der gesellschaftlichen Aufmerksamkeit, essay in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 2014/2.