SUMMERTIME

A sunlit afternoon, a lush garden filled with listening hearts, music blending with the rustling leaves, and a gentle breeze carrying the melodies through the air... From 23 to 28 August 2022, the canalside garden of Museum Van Loon became the stage for Opera in de grachtentuin, a special concert series where musicians and poets came together to take the audience on a journey of beauty and emotion.

We brought a programme with soul, a programme where everything revolved around our deepest emotions, a programme about love.

 

Love in all its forms. The sultry warmth of a summer evening captured in Gershwin’s Summertime, where time seemed to stand still, and we let ourselves drift on the gentle, swaying rhythm of the melody. The passion and burning desire of Cole Porter’s So in Love, where love felt both enchanting and inescapable. The playful seduction and sparkling liveliness of Puccini’s Quando m'en vo, where Musetta’s flirtation and freedom filled the air around us.

 

We drifted further, over the waters of the night, with Reynaldo Hahn’s La Barcheta, a moment of tenderness and longing, as if we were gliding through Venice on a gondola, chasing the echoes of a lost love. And then came Kurt Weill’s Youkali, a song steeped in dreamy hope and melancholy, where we felt, just for a moment, what it is like to reach for utopia, only to realise it is always just out of reach.

 

Each piece carried us deeper into emotion, letting us feel, relive and dream. The intimate setting of the canalside garden made it all the more immersive - a space where music and nature embraced, where the audience was transported into a world of sound and sentiment.

 

In the words of Orville Breeveld (Senior Consultant, Het Concertgebouw):
"It felt like the old days, when classical music was pop. Grounded in the splendour of the invaluable artistic gifts that Natali Boghossian and Hans van Beelen shared so sincerely this afternoon. Witty anecdotes brought laughter to the audience, only for them to soon be swept into deep emotion, eyes closed, fully immersed in each song. Even the parakeets fell silent. Thank you, Natali and Hans.”

 

Music beneath the sun, a garden filled with listening hearts, an afternoon that lingers in the memory, with a breeze carrying the melodies softly into the air... This was Summertime.