TOETSENPARADE
Toetsenparade is a festival for the keyboard instruments of all shapes and sizes. For the 2024 edition, Mattias Spee was invited as artist in residence. As such, he curated a program full of artists who are each inventing and reinventing keyboard instruments in their own way.
Poster Toetsenparade 2024
Poster Credits: Jaela van Tijn
The festival opener was the Rembrandt Frerichs Trio, an ensemble which applies their contemporary jazz vocabulary on historiscal instruments. Guy Maori played 19th and 20th century music on the anachronistic harpsichord. The Xavi Torres Trio presented their project Kind of Beethoven, in which they reinvent Beethoven’s piano sonatas in a modern style with lots of jazz-influences. Xico Ribas Tur played original compositions, using live electronics to enrich the sound of the piano. Arieh Chrem a.k.a. Cartopol released his new EP Storm Service at the Toetsenparade. Arieh is an electronic music producer and uses a very modern keyboard instrument; the keyboard of his laptop. However, there was an even more novel instrument at the festival. Marije Baalman of the Instrument Inventors Initiative presented her newly designed Twiddler, which she uses for high-speed live coding. Marije and Toetsenparade founder Jan van der Sangen together gave a lecture on instrument building, a process to which each has their own wildly different approach.
Impression Toetsenparade 2024
Of course, artist in residence Mattias Spee performed himself: he played a recital of his own compositions. Furthermore, he lead a workshop with renowned piano tuner Charles Rademaker. Together with the audience, they dove into the mechanics of the piano and demonstrated how a pianist and piano tuner collaborate. It was a highly varied an innovative festival program at the Toetsenparade, hosted by Het Veem in Amsterdam.
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