Eight colorful abstract landscape paintings by Annemarieke Woltman (1959-1997) engage with the music of her brother Herman Woltman and singer/trumpeter Ella de Jong (the duo Ella & Her man). Together with Tsead Bruinja (Poet Laureate 2019-2020), they wrote new music, songs, and poems inspired by how Annemarieke saw sea, meadow, and sky thirty years ago.
They spoke in IJlst, Leeuwarden, Amsterdam, and Nijmegen about the very first moment of seeing, tasting, and hearing. This led to a song about daughters who feel snow for the first time and are impressed by a turbulent sea. Bruinja reflected on how painters can stop a landscape and translated a song by his favorite band, Marillion, in which the singer challenges us to capture a spark and nail a cloud to the sky.
The view that Woltman, De Jong, and Bruinja share with the audience is expansive. It ranges from a frantic love song from the port city of Buenos Aires to seals and seabirds on the mudflats, to poems of mourning for the cruel fate of refugees in the Mediterranean and the people of Gaza, who are starved and bombed.
In addition to music with lyrics by Bruinja, songs based on poems by Baukje Wytsma (1946-2022) and Karin Hazewinkel will also be performed, songs in Frisian and French about the loss of lush meadows and meadow birds, and the hope and inspiration that the mudflats and the rich life surrounding them can still offer.
Picture: Lucas Kemper
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