I don’t know much about Gilius van Bergeijk, other than the fact that he was a teacher of Richard Ayres at The Hague Conservatory, but the first piece of his that I encountered, his Symphonie joyeuse composed between 1988 and 1992, included in the recital by the Maarten Altena Ensemble “Working on Time” on NM Classics (1995), is excellent and original, with, in particular, two very sparse and very hauting slow movements, and a Finale that starts with the soprano whispering at the threshold of silence an excerpt from Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur – appropriately starting with the words “il y a du silence”, “there is silence”, and about the bodies of the former lovers decomposing in the earth of the cemeteries…
In fact it’s intrigued me enough for me to immediately buy another CD of van Bergeijk, Gilius van Bergeijk vol. 1 on the label X-OR CD 07, barcode 786497170920. It’s badly listed on Amazon and sold very cheap on Amazon.uk. If it confirms my impression of Symphony joyeuse I’ll go for volume 2, 786497468423. Volume 1 contains what is perhaps the composition for which Van Bergeijk is best known, his own “Symphony of a Thousand (Alphabetically)”, in which he pastes together, in the course of 10 minutes, 1,000 microscopic snippets from 1,000 works of classical music. Yeah, well… it’s on YouTube, it’s a spoof, and pretty tedious at that. In fact, there are many pieces of Van Bergeijk on YouTube (including the Symphony), and most of those that I’ve listened to are extremely tedious. We’ll see…