Dedicatio

Jan Michiels plays piano pieces by Kris Defoort and Claude Debussy

The composer Kris Defoort, who is permanently attached to the LOD production company in Ghent, composes a piano series for and at the request of the pianist Jan Michiels. After seeing the opera The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (2001, directed by Guy Cassiers) and the ConVerSations/ConSerVations concert cycle (2003), Michiels was very much impressed with Defoort’s work. Especially the bridge Defoort creates between classical music, particularly Renaissance music, and jazz, is exciting and challenging. Consequently, there is now Dedicatio, ten intimate piano pieces, personal letters as it were, which Defoort dedicates to people who are very dear to him and which he has written specially for Michiels.

As the piano series took shape, Jan Michiels began to see more clearly a link with the French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918). Although a hundred years separates Debussy and Defoort, they write from the same inner perspective and the same feeling for colour and what is not heard. It was from here that the idea developed of introducing the series with several of Debussy’s Préludes, specially selected by Defoort. These Préludes by Debussy were composed between 1910 and 1913 and form both the climax and the conclusion of his impressionistic piano music. After this he developed a more abstract musical style of writing and influenced later avant-garde composers such as Pierre Boulez and Henri Pousseur.

This will be a double concert, performed by Jan Michiels and larded with improvisations by Kris Defoort himself.