Bosquejos del Bosco (sketches of Bosch)

Guillermo Lago
Score (PDF) available on this website € 25,-

In the spring of 2015 Lago got a call from his friends Harmen de Boer, Bart de Kater and Tom Wolfs, all clarinettists with the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, inviting him to write a solo piece for clarinet at the first Dutch Clarinet Festival in Amsterdam the next year. The piece would be performed by Arno Piters, clarinettist with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and one of the founders of the Festival.

Lago accepted the challenge….

And found inspiration in the painter Jeroen (Hieronymus) Bosch. Lago had been fascinated by the crazily creative pictures of this late-medieval dutch painter since his early childhood, and as it happened the Clarinet Festival coincided with the 5th Centenary of Bosch’ death; a fact that was celebrated world-wide and also in the town of Den Bosch where Bosch had spent his entire life. The Noord-Brabants Museum organized an impressive exhibition of the painter’s work. By the time the exhibition opened Lago had already selected five paintings to base his ‘Bosquejos’ (Sketches) on and he was very moved to find all these five exhibited together at this exposition (for the first time since their creation). He went back a few times…

The five paintings are

1. El vendedor ambulante (the Wayfarer, de Marskramer) Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands

2. La Nave de los Locos (the Ship of Fools, het Narrenschip) The Louvre Museum, Paris, France

3. La Muerte de un Avaro (Death and the Miser, de Dood van een Vrek) National Gallery of Art, Washington DC., United States of America

4. El Prestidigitador (the Conjurer, de Goochelaar) Municipal Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France

5. La Ascension al Empireo (Ascent of the Blessed, Opstijging naar de Hemel) Galerie dell’Academia, Venice, Italy