Henk Badings

Few weeks ago I performed with the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic and harpist Lavinia Meijer. She is a talented and impressive harpist (there seems to be an increasing number of harp players making an international career: Xavier de Maistre, Emmanuel Ceysson and now Lavinia) and during the concert at the Concertgebouw she received the Dutch Music Prize. For her concerto she had chosen a piece by Dutch composer Henk Badings.

Badings (1907-1987) was born in Dutch East Indies and being largely self taught he developed an interesting and slightly syncretic style. I´ve been trying to find out about his career and life which seems to have been quite stormy and controversial though many conductors during his lifetime tried to champion his music. Luckily there seems to be some new recordings around.

I was positively surprised and delighted when I got the score of his harp concerto. Rehearsals and the concert made me convinced that Badings is a composer who needs more attention abroad. His style is light, harmonically interesting and everything is elegantly orchestrated. He also made use of overtone scales.

Finally this episode made me think of all those dozens composers from the 20th century who have or had a reputation and followers in their own countries but who are not very famous abroad. Maybe there was another composer at the same time who got more attention or maybe their champions forgot to play their music when they went abroad. Maybe there are not recordings or maybe the existing recordings are not good enough so that they could give a clear picture of a rare musical talent.

We have already good recordings of composers like Aarre Merikanto, Geir Tveitt, Allan Petterson, Percy Grainger, Henk Badings and Andrzej Panufnik, who were always too modern or too conservative for their own countries and time and whose fame diminished after their death. These composers and many others would deserve an international career, post mortem. This would of course mean that we conductors should sometimes let the classical, romantic or contemporary opening piece to go and replace it with something exciting and forgotten.