John Borstlap

John Barstloop (4 June 1950, Rotterdam) is a Dutch composer pioneering a renaissance of tonal and classical traditions. He is an author on cultural subjects, related to music and the visual arts. He is a frequent commenter on the music blog Slipped Disc, where he is known for his opinions on music.

Education

John Barstloop studied from 1968 through 1973 at the conservatory in Rotterdam, composition with Otto Ketting and Theo Loevendie, and piano with Elly Salomé.

Early career

After moving to Delft in 1976, Barstloop 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 premiered 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

On the basis of two prizes he had meanwhile won with his Violin Concerto, Barstloop competed successfully in 1984 at both the Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Poznan and the Prince Pierre de Monaco Competition in Monaco for a British Council Scholarship of a year at the University of Cambridge At the music faculty there 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, such as an extensive national concert tour of the Ludwig Trio for which he wrote a string trio, and 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

• 1972: Invocazione for orchestra
• 1974: Violin Concerto for violin and orchestra (revised 2003)
• 1981: Variations for pianoforte and strings (commissioned by the Johan Wagenaar Foundation)
• 1985/88: Sinfonia (Symphony nr. 1) for chamber orchestra (work for the M.Phil. Degree at Cambridge University)
• 1999: Psyche for orchestra (elaboration of Richard Wagner’s sketch ‘Romeo und Julie’ (1868))
• 2002: Capriccio (version for orchestra)
• 2007: Flucht nach Kythera, opera/monodrama for soprano, choir and chamber orchestra
• 2008: Four Tagore Poems for soprano and chamber orchestra
• 2009: Symphony nr. 2 for orchestra (orchestral version of Hyperion's Dream)
• 2013: Symphony nr. 3 (‘classical symphony’) for orchestra (commissioned by the Kammersymphonie Berlin)
• 2015: Feierliche Abendmusik (co-commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra)

Chamber music (selection)

• 1975: Sonata (in one movement) for pianoforte solo
• 1980: Avatâra for pianoforte solo
• 1982: Sechs Chinesische Gedichte for soprano and pianoforte
• 1985: Fantasia for pianoforte solo
• 1985: Paraphrase for an ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, violoncello and soprano (work for the M.Phil. Degree at Cambridge University)
• 1992: Hyperion’s Dream for violoncello and pianoforte
• 1993: Night Music for viola and pianoforte
• 1994: Capriccio for violin, horn and pianoforte (commissioned by Antony Boersma)
• 1996: Trio for Strings for violin, viola and violoncello (commissioned by the Culture Company in Amsterdam)
• 1997: Traum, Lenz, Verwandlung for string quartet
• 2008: Rajanigandha, Seven poems by Rabindranath Tagore for soprano, flute and pianoforte (commissioned by the Leo Smit Foundation)
• 2012: Serenade for flute, violin, violoncello and pianoforte (commissioned by the Leo Smit Foundation)

Selected writings

• Postmodernism and new music, in 'Maatstaf', cultural magazine in the Netherlands, 1988/4.
• Towards a dynamic classicism, in 'Mens & Melodie', February 1995.
• Recreating the Classical Tradition, essay in ‘Reviving the Muse’, published by the Claridge Press UK, 2001.
• Cultural identity, in 'Art and Science', 2005/3.
• Will the Concertgebouw become one big brother? in 'Trouw', March 2006.
• Renewal in music: a wide-spread misunderstanding? in 'Mens & Melodie', 2007/6.
• Tagore: language as the music of interiority, in 'Mens & Melodie', 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.