Juan Manuel: “This has been on our bucket list for a while.”
Juan Manuel Domínguez is the baritone saxophonist of the Keuris Quartet. During Festival Dag in de Branding they will play at the special location Haags Hoog. There they will perform the program Piece of Cake, with which the saxophone quartet celebrates its tenth anniversary. “It is a Dutch-American set with the central work Facing Death by Louis Andriessen. That had been on our bucket list for a while.”
How would you describe the Keuris Quartet?
‘We are four not so serious people with a certain chill factor, who like to joke around. But we do take the music we play very seriously. We like to challenge and surprise our audience and ourselves.’
How did the quartet come into being?
‘I know Michal Grycko and Evgeny Novikov from our joint studies at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. They had another quartet at first, but when they said they were going to start a new group, I immediately wanted to join. Andreas Mader is a bit younger, but he also studied in Amsterdam. He is already our fourth alto. Playing together in a quartet is very precise and it has to really click, and everyone has to have the same ambitions. Now we are completely on the same page.’
Where does that click come from?
‘It is a matter of musical taste, of musical decisions that come naturally, without the need for words. If things keep happening that you find logical, then playing together becomes easy.’
Has much else changed in those ten years?
‘We are all self-employed, some of us have children, myself included, so it is becoming more difficult to find the balance. Moreover, half of the quartet lives abroad, Evgeny in Paris and Andreas in Luxembourg, so the logistics require good planning. But it is absolutely worth it. It is wonderful to be inspired by your colleagues, to sit next to someone who plays really well. The context may have changed, but the fun is still there.’
What kind of programme is Piece of Cake?
‘We made it to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Keuris Quartet. We only played it once last year and it’s great fun to repeat it now. The pieces are not exactly ‘a piece of cake’ to play, but in a figurative sense we serve the audience a piece of cake. And maybe there really will be cake, why not.’
How is the programme structured?
‘It is a Dutch-American set with Facing death by Louis Andriessen as the central work. That had been on our bucket list for a while. Since Andriessen’s death in 2021, we were looking for a way to honor him and we decided to put it in the middle of our party programme. Andriessen wrote Facing death for strings, but he made a saxophone arrangement of it himself. It is certainly not an easy piece, but it works great. Andriessen was inspired by bebop and other jazz, so there is a clear link with the sax. That association also works through in the other pieces. For example, Phil Woods is a saxophonist himself and his piece requires a lot of improvisation – Evgeny and Andreas are very good at that and it’s nice to give them that space.’
Piece of Cake performed by the Keuris Quartet can be seen on October 19 at 2:15 PM in Haags Hoog. Info and tickets.