“Randschilderingen” is spectacle of dance, music and visuals, performed in the beautiful cathedral of the Belgian city Grimbergen. The cathedral is very impressive. It is completely decorated, has full church organ installed and the reverb time of over 6 seconds gives you an idea about it’s size!
It is Stijn Kolacny who brought this project to live, bringing many musicians, singers, dancers and visual artists together. With director Luc Morren on our team, we put together a setlist of beautiful music. We chose a combination of film music and classical music in both very minimalistic and epic styles. I had to arrange the existing music, so it could be played by the string orchestra, choir, organ, solo voice, piano and percussion. This was really interesting, because it took me deep inside the music and the minds of the composers that wrote this music. I am talking about Arvo Pärt, Nils Frahm, Hans Zimmer, Gorecki, Max Richter and Olafur Arnalds to name a few. These guys have written music with an extreme level of beauty.
I also composed a few pieces of my own. These were a bit different then the rest of the music, because they would make use of a children’s choir. I had the children use their bodies as percussion instruments for some parts, which I thought was really cool. The kids were having a lot of fun with that. Obviously I also let them sing. Imagine the songs you sang as a child growing up, but now contrasting that with a huge sound from the adult orchestra and choir.
The organ was put to great use. It is incredible what you can do with such an instrument. I grabbed the opportunity to try out things like killing the engine, opening up all the registers, playing a chord and then restarting the engine. I can tell you that what comes out is a really awesome effect. A bit like the THX opening in movies, but less controlled and more out of this world.
We had female singer Laurie Janssens on the team to sing the solo’s. Her incredible voices brought tears to the eyes of most people both in the orchestra and audience.
A great experience to a project like this. Working with Stijn Kolacny is always a pleasure as the man really knows his profession and has very good people skills to get the best results out of a project like this.
Big thanks to CC Strombeek / Grimbergen and Jo Sollie for funding and organizing this event.
