Presenting an incredible series of concerts ranging from classical to contemporary music, the Strijkkwartet Biënnale Amsterdam punches well above its weight to the delight of its admiring international audience

Strijkkwartet Biënnale Amsterdam at the Muziekgebouw Amsterdam (Photo: Marco van Es)

Strijkkwartet Biënnale Amsterdam; Muziekgebouw Amsterdam
Reviewed by Tony Cooper, 26-28 January 2026

The swishy, comfortable and ultra-modern Muziekgebouw Amsterdam provided the perfect setting for the 5th edition of the Strijkkwartet Biënnale Amsterdam held over the course of eight action-packed days with concerts taking place from early morning to late evening featuring some of the world’s most renowned quartets while highlighting emerging young talent pushing the next generation forward

The Strijkkwartet Biënnale Amsterdam, a pretty impressive and world-beating event, features a host of international ensembles of the likes of the Belcea Quartet, ADAM Quartet, Cuarteto Casals, Engegard Quartet, Quatuor Ebene, Quatuor Arod, Malion Quartett, Chiaroscuro Quartet, Maxwell Quartet, Barbican Quartet, Pavel Haas Quartet, Quatuor Van Kuijk, PUBLIQuartet, Marmen Quartet, Leonkoro Quartet, Animato Kwartet, Belinfante Quartet, Attacca Quartet, Signum Quartet, Chaos String Quartet and North Sea String Quartet as well as String Quartet Competition winners from Trondheim, London and Banff.

Overall, the festival featured four Dutch premières by David Lang, Brett Dean, Denise Onen and Dizu Plaatjies and also presented twelve other world premières by Samuel Adams, Richard Ayres, Alexander Raskatov, Mathilde Wantenaar, Boris Bezemer, Eleanor Alberga, Primo Ish-Hurwitz, Vinthya Perinpanathan, Frieda Gustavs, Hanna Kulenty, Aftab Darvishi, Jan-Peter de Graaff while special guests included Elisabeth Hetherington (soprano), Tabea Zimmermann (viola), Klaus Makela (cello), DIzu Plaatjies (African instruments), Ales Brezina (musicologist), Olga Pashchenko (fortepiano), Olli Mustonen (piano), Khorshid Dadbeh (tanbur), DOMNIQ (percussion), Ariane Schluter (actress), Julian Steckel (cello), Bruno Monsaingeon (documentary film director), Takehiro Konoe (viola), Naomi Shaham (double-bass), Katy Hamilton (presenter). What a tally!

Animato Kwartet with Khorshid Dadbeh (Photo: Juri Hiensch)

All the concerts took place at the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam, commissioned and funded by the city of Amsterdam in the eastern docklands as opposed to the historic Concertgebouw of 1888 which was funded by six prominent Amsterdam citizens to build a world-class concert hall to elevate and enhance the city’s cultural life.

Therefore, the Muziekgebouw complements so well its larger and mature neighbour while providing the perfect venue for the Strijkkwartet Biënnale founded by Yasmin Hilberdink in 2018. She established the festival based on years of experience in organizing chamber-music concerts at the Concertgebouw to create a more vibrant and spontaneous environment in which string quartets can healthily thrive.

Gracing the banks of the river IJ, the Muziekgebouw, designed by the esteemed Danish architectural firm, 3XN, emphasizes openness with its expansive glass façade inviting sunlight to penetrate the building’s interior thus creating a connection to the surrounding harbour and well beyond.

We are the lucky ones: Philip Venables new opera at Dutch National Opera, his first large-scale orchestral opera

Philip Venables (Photo: ® Charl Marais)

Philip Venables' opera We are the lucky ones is being premiered by Dutch National Opera on 14 March 2025 in Amsterdam.

The opera features a libretto by Nina Segal and Ted Huffmann, and Huffmann also directs and designs. This will be Venables and Huffmann's fourth music theatre collaboration and their previous work included 4.48 Psychosis [see my review of the 2018 revival], Denis & Katya [which debuted in Philadelphia in 2019 then travelled to Wales in 2020, see my article] and The Faggots and their Friends between Revolutions, an adaptation of Larry Mitchell’s queer fairy tale which debuted at the Manchester International Festival in 2023. We are the lucky ones is their first collaboration with playwright Nina Segal, and also their first full-scale orchestral opera.

We Are The Lucky Ones tells the story of a generation. It is based on interviews with more than seventy people in Western Europe who were born between 1940 and 1949. The musical director is Bassem Akiki and the cast includes Claron McFadden and Jacquelyn Stucker. Full details from Dutch National Opera's website.

Philip Venables also recently announced the launch of his own publishing imprint, Opera Edition Ltd. Venables, previously published by G. Ricordi & Co. (Berlin) for the past seven years, will now publish all future works and many older pieces exclusively through Opera Edition Ltd, while Ricordi will continue to manage their catalogue of his works. Additionally, he will now be represented by OWL Artist Management.

Philip Venables said: "I’m thrilled to start a new adventure by setting up Opera Edition and collaborating with Oliver Clarke at OWL Artist Management. As I transition from chamber work to large-scale opera, and having decided to move away from a traditional publishing arrangement, I am hugely excited by the possibility of a new publishing and promotion model to facilitate the bespoke music theatre projects that I want to make. I know that Oliver shares that vision and is eager to help make it a reality; I’m absolutely delighted to be working with him."

Further details from Philip Venables' website.

Idomeneo in Amsterdam: Lawrence Cummings joins forces with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui for a new production of Mozart's first mature opera

Mozart's Idomeneo is regarded as his first mature opera, written for Munich in 1781. The subject may not have been Mozart's choice but it represents the composers continuing engagement with Italian opera seria, a style that had dominated his operatic output in his teenage years. Mozart continued his engagement with this style, though his three mature operas with Lorenzo da Ponte represent a new direction, yet in 1791 he would return to opera seria for his late masterpiece, La clemenza di Tito.

Idomeneo was written to a libretto by Giambattista Varesco, the court chaplain, based on a libretto written for  André Campra's Idoménée (1712). It has been suggested that Varesco was familiar with the work of Calzabigi, Gluck's librettist, and much of the opera represents a mediation between the French and the Italian serious styles. The opera is something of a musicological minefield, before the first performance Mozart was making large cuts and changes, then in 1786 he was contemplating wholesale revisions to make it more Gluckian, with Idomeneo as a bass and Idamante as a tenor (rather than a castrato). In the event, all he did was give a concert performance in Vienna in 1786, writing some new music, making more cuts and changing Idamante to tenor, a half-way house towards a version that he never created.

Idomeneo's dependence on the Italian 18th-century opera seria style can mean dramatic challenges for directors, yet you need to set beside this that Mozart wrote a full-scale dance divertissement for the opera too! Idomeneo remains one of those operas that fascinates and tantalises on the stage, whilst few productions manage to distil its essence.

If you fancy a trip to Amsterdam then on 7 February 2025, the Nationale Opera & Ballet opens a new production of Mozart's Idomeneo. Lawrence Cummings conducts, making his debut with the company and the production is directed by choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui who will also be working with members of his dance troupe, Eastman, and sets are designed by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. Daniel Behle is Idomeneo with a cast including Cecilia Molinari, Anna El-Khashem, and Jacquelyn Wagner.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, former artistic director of Royal Ballet of Flanders, has directed a number of operas including Rameau's Les Indes Galantes (2016, Bavarian State Opera), Philip Glass' Satyagraha (2017, Theater Basel), Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (2018, Opera Vlanderen) and Gluck's French version of Alceste (2019, Bavarian State Opera, see YouTube)

This is a co-production with Grand Théâtre de Genève and Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg, so if it appeals then there are other wonderful operatic trips to be made.

Interesting note: In 1964, Luciano Pavarotti made his UK debut as Idamante in Idomeneo at Glyndebourne in a production directed by Carl Ebert, conducted by John Pritchard with a cast including Gundula Janowitz as Ilia and Richard Lewis as Idomeneo. Now doesn't that make the mouth water! [full details at the Glyndebourne website]

Full details from the company's website.

Four different takes on creating new opera: Dutch National Opera's Opera Forward Festival

Creating new opera involves not simply putting new notes on paper, but re-examining what opera means in the 21st century and how it should be created, asking the question what should opera be in 2022. As part of its Opera Forward Festival in March 2022, Dutch National Opera & Ballet (DNO) is presenting four very different takes on contemporary opera with three world premieres and a Dutch premiere, with work from two different composers, a collective and a VR pioneer.

British readers will, perhaps, be most interested in the fact that Philip Venables' opera Denis & Katya (originally a co-production between Music Theatre Wales and Opera Philadelphia) will be receiving its Dutch premiere in the production directed by Ted Huffmann. The piece is very much a work for our times, an investigation in the form of an opera into how stories are formed and shared in our age of internet voyeurism, conspiracy theories, fake news and being online 24/7.

Manfred Trojahn's Eurydice - Die Liebenden, blind is inspired both by Greek myth and by Rainer Maria Rilke's terrific Sonette an Orpheus. The new opera is directed by Pierre Audi, with Erik Nielsen conducting the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra with Andrè Schuen as Orpheus, Julia Kleiter as Eurydice, Thomas Oliemans as Pluto, Katia Ledoux as Proserpina. Trojahn's contemporary take on the story uses the power of music to allegorically describe the attraction of the muse-like figure of Eurydice to the singing artist Orpheus, to describe the love between Orpheus and Eurydice as the love between word and sound, between artistry and inspiration.

When Manoj Kamps and Lisenka Heijboer Castañón premiered FAUST [Working Title] with DNO they introduced a working practice that created new work via a collective of performers, designers, writers and composers from different disciplines and backgrounds worked together intensively, sharing stories, teaching each other songs and choreographies and exchanging skills in workshops and through online channels. Their new work, I have missed you forever, follows the same communal creation process. The result will not be the work of a single composer and librettist, but a communal experience shared with the audience.

Orphée | L'Amour | Eurydice brings technology into the mix as inspired by Gluck's opera, opera director Robin Coops and VR pioneer Avinash Changa went on a journey of exploring, resulting in three separate opera experiences that immerse visitors in different ways into the perspectives of Orphée, Eurydice and L'Amour. 

Full details from DNO's website.

The opera that Bach never wrote!

Jan van Leyden

The conventional image of JS Bach is of a devout, serious man with no interest in contemporary opera, yet if you look at his music there is a different picture with many arias having operatic elements, and now recent research is showing that he was an attender at the opera in Hamburg when opportunity allowed.

Now, the Dutch touring opera company OPERA2DAY is creating a work which tries to imagine Bach the opera composer. The company's new production, J.S. Bach – The Apocalypse is the opera that Bach never wrote! A co-production with the Netherlands Bach Society, whose centenary the production celebrates, J.S. Bach – The Apocalypse will tour from January through March 2022.

The opera evokes the sixteenth-century story of the 16th century Anabaptist leader, Jan van Leyden, who claimed that the end of time was near. He convinced his followers that they could be amongst the chosen ones at the Last Judgement. But his utopia soon became a tyranny and ended in bloodshed and death. (Jan ven Leyden is also the title role of Meyerbeer's opera Le Prophete). 

The dramatic and musical scenario was developed by Serge van Veggel, artistic director of OPERA2DAY, with the libretto written by Thomas Höft. Panos Iliopoulos, composer, harpsichordist and baroque specialist, has created the score from Bach's music.

The production debuts in The Hague on 23 January 2021, more information from the company's website.