Richard Rijnvos

Richard Rijnvos Born 1964 in Tilburg (the Netherlands), Richard Rijnvos studied composition with Jan van Vlijmen and Brian Ferneyhough at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. After finishing these studies summa cum laude he received a DAAD scholarship with which he followed a postgraduate at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg (Germany). In the summer of 1994 he participated in the International Dance Course for Professional Choreographers and Composers in Bretton Hall (Wakefield, UK). In the period 1986-92 he came in touch with the American composers Morton Feldman and John Cage, who caused crucial changes in his development. There are also a number of distinct extramusical influences from artists such as William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Beuys, Italo Calvino, and Ernst Jandl.  Since 1993 Richard Rijnvos concentrates on the realization of compositions that are part of larger series. The work Stanza, for instance, exists in a diatonic, chromatic and microtonal version. Between 1995 and 2000 he created the eighty-minute cycle Block Beuys, modeled on the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt collection by Joseph Beuys. Late 2008 Richard Rijnvos completed Uptown|Downtown, an urban panorama in six ‘movements’. This series - thought of as an evening-long dance production about city life in Manhattan – include the orchestral works Times Square Dance, Washington Square Dance and Union Square Dance, as well as Grand Central Dance, Central Dance in the Park and ’cross Broadway for piano and chamber orchestra. (These last three compositions can be combined in a concert performance, thus forming a piano concerto entitled NYConcerto). In 2007 Richard Rijnvos started a new series called Riflessi, which consists exclusively of companion pieces. Each Riflesso explores the same non-standard scoring of an existing classic by a composer from the past. In May 2010 his song cycle Die Kammersängerin was premiered in a fully staged performance.  Renowned companies and institutions have commissioned Richard Rijnvos such as the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Ensemble Intercontemporain (Paris), the Holland Festival, the ZaterdagMatinee concert series, Elision Ensemble (Australia), Dutch Radio, Nieuw Ensemble (Amsterdam), the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, Ives Ensemble and Asko Ensemble (Amsterdam). His work enjoys attention during international concert series and festivals, amongst others with performances by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Brussels Philharmonic, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, London Sinfonietta, Apartment House, Ensemble Modern (Frankfurt), Das Neue Ensemble (Hannover), Ensemble KORE (Montréal), Omnibus Ensemble (Tashkent) and many others. Richard Rijnvos has been featured as central composer at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2004, the "Rijnvos Week" at the Royal Conservatoire (The Hague) in 2008, and during the Festival November Music 2008 (Den Bosch & Ghent). During the concert season 2010-11 he acted as Composer in Residence at the Netherlands Broadcasting Music Center, including collaborations with the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra during the ZaterdagMatinee concert series in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. This residency also included a studio recording for CD of the complete Uptown|Downtown cycle, plus the filming of a TV documentary, shot in Venice and Amsterdam. In September 2011 Richard Rijnvos started a three-year residency with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.  Richard Rijnvos has received various awards, among which the Perspektief Prize 1989 and an honourable mention during the 1991 Prix Italia for his radiophonic production Radio I (on text by Samuel Beckett). In 2000 the City of Amsterdam awarded him the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize, the most prestigious award for composers working in the Netherlands, for Times Square Dance. In August 2008 an international jury voted NYConcerto “the best composition premiered in the Netherlands in the year before”, and it was subsequently awarded the Buma Toonzetters Award. In June 2011 Richard Rijnvos was awarded the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize for the second time, on this occasion for the song cycle Die Kammersängerin. Richard Rijnvos is artistic advisor of the Ives Ensemble (Amsterdam) of which he was managing director from 1991 until 2000. He regularly conducts his own work as well as other’s. Since October 2009 he has been Head of Composition at the Department of Music at Durham University (UK).