13 January 2026, Neil van der Linden, www.operamagazine.nl
Review (nl)
Walden van Goebbels verdient vaste plaats / Walden deserves a permanent place
Walden is an experience, a musical theater performance with song and spoken word, so it's a performance for Neil van der Linden, who went to the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ.
Walden opens with a long, sustained note that resounds from the darkness of the Muziekgebouw's slowly illuminating stage. The sound is produced by bow chimes, cymbals played with an electric—electrically amplified—bow, developed for the premiere of Walden by the Ensemble Modern, now played by Ensemble Klang's percussionist, Joey Marijs. I see a musician in the back right, standing with his back to the audience in front of a sound system, also with a bow and (it's hard to see) also bow chimes or a violin (and is he using feedback effects familiar from, say, Jimi Hendrix?).
Later, as he emerges from the darkness, he turns out to be the violinist of the string quartet section of the Kaleidoskop ensemble, Grégoire Simon. The other musicians enter, and the entire string ensemble, wind section, and keyboards adopt the key. Is it an E-flat? That would correspond to the key of the prelude to Wagner's Rheingold, which also begins as if looming and veiled from the darkness. No, it's an E, as I would later learn from the composer. But… after a while, the pitch begins to fluctuate. "Officially, we begin on an E. But… the bow chimes have a mind of their own when it comes to pitch! So we did indeed begin the performance on E. But we also deviated to E-flat, and the central section of Walden, 'Reading,' is definitely in E-flat," Klang's artistic director Pete Harden explains after the performance.
Meanwhile, the stage lights up in several places. Spotlights from the audience, a light box from behind. A smoke machine produces smoke. The music evolves towards industrial, at one point featuring a solid rock guitar solo. But a little later, with the addition of saxophones, clarinets, trombone, the (West African) djembe, and the (Arabic and Turkish) darbuka, it sounds like the Sun Ra Orchestra. When Saskia Lankhoorn's keyboard and piano become more prominent in the soundscape, snatches of Weather Report-esque jazz-rock emerge, with sounds reminiscent of (Weather Report and Miles Davis electric jazz pianist) Joe Zawinul. There are even a few minutes of lounge jazz, visually accentuated by the almost swinging movements of keyboardist Saskia Langhoorn from behind her keyboards; but hey, in these passages the time signatures keep changing, so leaning back is out of the question.
The atmospheric stage setting is primarily generated by light, in various positions, combined with the musicians' movements, plus the instruments, including a collection of wooden objects, boxes, blocks, and sticks, which spoken-word artist (or rather, narrator) and saxophonist Keir Neuringer would later use. All of this, of course, is set against the magnificent architecture of the back and side walls of the Muziekgebouw. At one point, a giant lamp illuminates from above the stage, bathing everything in an even pinkish glow, like a flare fired by ships in distress.
Heiner Goebbels named his Walden after the book "Walden, or Life in the Woods" by Henri David Thoreau, the author who settled for a few years in 1845 near a remote lake in Massachusetts to see if he could endure life in nature (albeit not far from Boston). The book was published in 1854 (also the year Wagner completed "Das Rheingold"; another reference?). When Frederik van Eeden later founded a commune in Het Gooi (also not far from civilization, near Bussum), it was also called Walden.
Thoreau as a Composer
Goebbels believes that Thoreau could just as well be considered a composer, because of the detailed description of natural sounds in his book. Thoreau describes his stay there as roughly like attending a 24-hour symphony every day, according to Goebbels. According to him, you can also experience his music as a radio drama with Thoreau's texts.
Keir Neuringer recites passages from Thoreau's book. The more trivial passages in the book are particularly amusing, such as the list of building materials Thoreau used to construct his cabin and their cost, which items he considered a bit high, and how he saved money by transporting them to the site himself; we learn that the entire house cost $28,125 at the time, still only $948.95 by today's standards, and Goebbels has all of this recited. I don't know how Thoreau described the sounds of the birds by the lake, but Keir Neuringer also proves to be a master at imitating them; worthy of Wagner's "Waldweben" from Siegfried. Besides the saxophone, in one passage Neuringer also uses wooden objects on stage to produce sounds—boxes, blocks, and sticks. At one point, we see Neuringer leafing through a book, the aforementioned "Reading" scene. He stands and reads a passage from Thoreau’s “I Am the Little Irish Boy,” an 1850 poem that Thoreau also wrote during his stay at the lake, about a “little Irish boy,” destined for a life of manual labor, living in abject poverty like many newly arrived Irish immigrants in the United States; Thoreau himself came from what he described as a “lower-middle-class” family (his French surname comes from his Huguenot father), but he also showed empathy for the immigrants at the bottom of society at the time. The Test of Time Klang had previously performed Walden, between 2008 and 2013, in the Netherlands, as well as Switzerland, Germany, and Great Britain. The work undoubtedly deserves a permanent place in the repertoire. Walden by Ensemble Klang.
https://www.operamagazine.nl/recensies/76604/walden-van-goebbels-verdient-vaste-plaats/
on: Walden (Ensemble Version) (Composition for Ensemble)