Jeroen van Veen

Jeroen van Veen – Adams: Piano Music (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 57:21 minutes | 477 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Brilliant Classics

Piano music spanning three decades by the foremost living Minimalist composer of our time. John Adams has won listeners from far beyond the traditional classical world thanks to his energy over the course of more than half a century in writing music that speaks directly to hearts and minds with undiminished energy, reflecting contemporary concerns and technologies while also crafted with traditional finesse. As well as a composer he has been an active promoter and performer – not only of his own music but of his contemporaries and those who exercised a decisive influence on him as a student in California, including Debussy and Stravinsky. His parents wereboth jazz musicians and he grew up in a household where, as he says, ‘Benny Goodman and Mozart were not separated’. There is a corresponding harmony between traditional and modern idioms in his own music. Both written in 1977, Phrygian Gates and its briefer pendant or companion, China Gates, were game-changers for the course of Adams’s music. Although his output for the instrument is not large, it was with the piano that Adams discovered the possibilities of slowly moving, patterned textures that had already seized his attention in the compositions of Steve Reich. Phrygian Gates is a broad monolithic arch, roughly 24 minutes long, which is built upon a plan that resembles the classic ‘tour’ of the twelve keys, while entirely confined to the Lydian and Phrygian modes of ancient music.

(more…)

Jeroen Van Veen – Merry Christmas Pianomania (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:29:23 minutes | 2,51 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Brilliant Classics

This album features Christmas music for the piano in a timeless journey through the decades and centuries. These songs have been through a remarkable evolution over the course of several centuries, with the changes they have undergone reflecting the shifting musical styles and cultural influences that prevailed in various times.

(more…)

Jeroen van Veen – Tiersen: Pour Amélie, Piano Music (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:51:16 minutes | 1,91 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Brilliant Classics

The maestro of Minimalist piano music has done it again, with an album of gentle melodies and soothing sounds from Yann Tiersen (b.1970) a composer best known outside his native France for the soundtrack to the movie Amélie (2001): the soundtrack sold over 200,000 copies in his homeland, and became Platinum in the US and Germany.

(more…)

Jeroen Van Veen – Simeon ten Holt: Complete Piano Works (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 20:58:11 minutes | 14,72 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Brilliant Classics

The most complete collection ever issued of the Dutch Minimalist master, including the famous Canto Ostinato but also many previously unreleased recordings, all made by a pianist with an international reputation in the field of Minimalism.

(more…)

Jeroen van Veen – Ludovico Einaudi: Clouds (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 08:20:09 minutes | 6,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Brilliant Classics

Among the best-selling composers of our time, Ludovico Einaudi has won a following of millions through his distinctively calm, smoothly unfolding works, which spin unbroken songs from the simplest material and cast a spell of relaxed enchantment over their audience.

Jeroen van Veen is the Dutch pianist who has likewise won an international following for his many albums of Minimalist piano music on Brilliant Classics, including a previous collection of Einaudi’s music, ‘Waves’ (9452).

‘Clouds’ is another 7CD collection, which ranges across 30 years of Einaudi’s oeuvre, from the Stanze (‘Verses’) of 1992 to the Underwater collection from 2022. In fact, as a relatively early work, Stanze contains intriguing and uncharacteristic elements: as the composer himself explained, ‘I had one goal: to remove, and leave space. The title refers to the poetic stanzas but also to invisible spaces to be inhabited with the mind.’

(more…)

Jeroen van Veen – Van Veen: Piano Music, Vol. 2 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 08:34:13 minutes | 6,38 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Brilliant Classics

Jeroen van Veen about his own piano music: “All my music is about time and space. The duration of music is an essential part of the concept in my music. Time goes by so quickly in these modern times that it has become an exclusive privilege to people. The concept of music, specifically my minimal oriented music, only can exist in time. The slow progression, the building of the material, the motifs and the search for new sounds is audible in this new box”.

This set contains music ranging from one piano, two pianos, piano and keyboards, organ, up till 6 pianos.

Jeroen van Veen established himself as “The leading exponent of minimalism today” (Fanfare), “Jeroen van Veen has been a powerhouse in the piano world” (Musicweb). His numerous recordings for Brilliant Classics include works by Glass, Reich, Ten Holt, Pärt, Satie, Tiersen, Einaudi, Preisner and many others.
(more…)

Jeroen van Veen – The Best of Minimal Piano Music (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 07:50:10 minutes | 3,58 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Brilliant Classics

Highlights from the award-winning, much-praised series of Brilliant Classics recordings by today’s leading champion of minimalist piano repertoire.
(more…)

Jeroen van Veen – Piazzolla: Para el Ángel (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:36:02 minutes | 2,72 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Brilliant Classics

‘I play with violence,’ Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) told one interviewer. ‘My bandoneon must sing and scream – I can’t conceive of pastel tones in tango.’ With an unrivalled discography of minimalist classics to his credit, from Satie to Glass to Yann Tiersen, Jeroen van Veen is ideally placed to return the raw passion and punchy rhythms that belong to the music of Piazzolla in any context.
(more…)

Jeroen van Veen – Nietzsche: Complete Piano Music (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:06:50 minutes | 506 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Brilliant Classics

“Without music life would be a mistake”, “there has never been a philosopher who has been in his essence a musician to such an extend as I am”, two quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche, indeed the most musically gifted of all philosophers.
(more…)

Jeroen van Veen – Glass: Complete Piano Etudes (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 02:23:01 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Brilliant Classics

Along with the two books of piano studies by Gyorgy Ligeti, the Etudes of Philip Glass have taken their place as modern classics of the literature, serving both a didactic purpose to train the fingers and minds of their performers, but also bringing their unique soundworlds to new audiences.
(more…)

Jeroen Van Veen – Tiersen: Island (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:11 minutes | 1017 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Brilliant Classics

Yann Tiersen’s (b.1970) music traverses genres from French folk music and chanson to minimal, avant-garde and post-rock. The French composer and multi-instrumentalist is primarily known for writing the music for the film Amélie. In 2016 he made the album EUSA, then in 2021, he ventured a step further towards electronic music with his new album Kerber (2021). The latter is a beautifully structured, immersive and thoughtfully constructed electronic world, composed on the island of Ushant where Tiersen now resides. The title of each track on these two albums refers to a specific place on Ushant. Kerber, for example, is named after a chapel in a small village on the island. Some offer the perfect soundtrack for contemplation on a long walk or staring out of a window on a train journey. Others seem predestined to be background music for study or relaxation. With each song, your imagination can easily conjure a scene from a movie: a breakup after a fight in a cosy café or a nature documentary showing two baby birds opening their eyes for the very first time. After a frightening experience with a mountain lion in California, Tiersen came to a realisation. He needed to discover himself more intimately, and to do that, he needed to better know his home, Ushant. In order to understand his home and discover himself, he decided to draw a musical map of the island, of which EUSA is volume one; it contains ten piano works about ten places on Ushant. ‘I think there is a similarity between the infinite big and the infinite smallness of everything,’ explains Yann Tiersen. ‘It’s the same experiment looking through a microscope as it is a telescope.’ This exploration of the micro and the macro has permeated much of Tiersen’s career, and Kerber once again shows the vast expansiveness and intricate detail of his work. This isn’t a collection about isolation; it is more an expression of being conscious of your immediate environment, and your place within it. For Tiersen, this approach extracts the same degree of profundity as spending the evening studying the stars – which he himself does.
(more…)

Jeroen Van Veen – Tintinnabuli: Arvo Pärt & Jeroen van Veen (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:19:25 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Brilliant Classics

Arvo Pärt (born 1935) is without doubt one of the best-known and -loved composers of today. His highly personal style, influenced by Gregorian Chant, is based on slowly shifting patterns, tintinnabuli (little bells), creating a meditative and hallucinatory effect, a visionary world of spiritual contemplation. Pärt’s music enjoys a huge popularity with both the traditional classical audience as well as an open-minded new generation. “Tintinnabuli” (Latin for “bells”) refers to the principle that does not strive towards a progressive increase in complexity, but rather towards an extreme reduction of sound materials and a limitation to the essential; in other words minimalism with maximum effect.
(more…)