Jan Michiels . Kris Defoort

Maybe, just like the pianist Jan Michiels, you were highly impressed by Kris Defoort's opera 'The Woman Who Walked into Doors' (2001) or by the concert piece 'ConVerSations/ConSerVations' (2003) that lasted the whole evening. They both opened at deSingel and afterwards toured successfully at home and abroad. After he had heard both pieces, Michiels asked Defoort to compose a piano cycle. The result was 'Dedicatio': approximately ten intimate piano works, almost like personal letters, dedicated to people who were close to him. As the piano cycle materialised, Jan Michiels saw an increasingly close affinity between Defoort and Claude Debussy (1862-1918). A hundred years separate the French impressionist and Kris Defoort, but they write from a similar internal perspective - a feeling for colour, and a feeling for what is unheard. This is why both Michiels and Defoort have decided to include three Preludes by Debussy in the programme. Jan Michiels performs them; Kris Defoort speckles them with simultaneous improvisations. The Walloon musicologist Harry Halbreich described Debussy's Preludes as 'no descriptions, but some premonitions, musical intuition, the extensions within us limitless...'. According to Jan Michiels this is also pertinent to the music of Kris Defoort.