Leo Svirsky has written an introduction to the performance, detailing the significance of his collaboration with Studio LOOS:
“I think the first concert I ever saw in the Hague was at studio Loos, it was Han Bennink with Mary Oliver and the Pow Ensemble. My friend Daniel Bitran and I were the only audience, and it was amazing! A year before that I had seen ICP orchestra with Misha Mengelberg at the Library of Congress, and that was a big part of coming to the Netherlands to study. Getting to be part of such a long history is a big privilege for a young musician, one that wasn’t really available to me in Maryland. I didn’t actually get the nerve to talk to Han until Yedo Gibson introduced us a few years later but that was the first of many encounters with legends at Loos, Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris, Tristan Honsinger, and Roscoe Mitchell visited in this past decade. I booked artists like Leila Bordreuil (the second performance of her piece for 3 amplified basses), Hannah Marshall, MSHR, GRID (they played an amazing set while Nick Podgurski was suffering from a kidney stone and had to be taken to MCH right after the set!). I attended many more events over the years as performer and audience. I feel that I am already only addressing people here who are already concerned about the future of the Arts of Art spaces, so it’s not necessary to develop here, but I am thinking back a lot to the question my composition teacher Cornelis de Bondt raised quite forcefully with the withdrawal of his scores from the public sphere, what is the role of an artist in a society where so much of the social contract is in bad faith?
Jasper Stadhouders and I will attempt a version of Peace On Earth, both the John and Alice Coltrane versions. We can only hope that in this case the message against all odds transcends the medium.”
The stream will start on Friday 29th May with a short introduction at 20.15 CEST, with the performance beginning at 20.45.
In the meantime, you can stream Leo Svirsky’s excellent debut LP ‘River Without Banks’, released in 2019 via Unseen Worlds, here: