DESCRIPTION:
Theo Verbey (1959-2019)

De Peryton : for seven wind instruments (1990)

Ensemble: Radio Kamerorkest
Conductor: Mark Foster

dedicated to the Beaufort Kwintet


Theo Verbey was a Dutch composer. He studied at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague (1978-1985) with Diderik Wagenaar, J. van Vlijman and Schat, among others. In 1982 he visited the Darmstadt summer course and participated in a Stockhausen project at the Royal Conservatory. In 1987 he received the Amsterdam Arts Fund's incentive award for young composers for Aura, after which commissions came from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, the Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam and the Residentie-Orkest, The Hague. In 1992 and 1997 Verbey was a juror for the Queen Elisabeth Composition Competition in Brussels and in 1997 began teaching composition at the Amsterdam Sweelinck Conservatory.
His compositions show his striving for clarity and richness in harmony and rhythm. He has also a special feeling for instrumental colour and harmonic nuance, and consistently uses self-generating musical phenomena. The inevitability of already chosen processes particularly fascinates Verbey, as is shown in complex scores such as Tegenbeweging ('Contrary Motion', 1986), Inversie (1987), Expulsie (1990) and Produkt (1992), which was first performed at the Donaueschinger Musiktage of 1992. Verbey has also written apparently tonal and easily intelligible music that is based on proportional ratios. His music is also naturally rooted in the significant developments of Western music. Triade (1991, revised 1994), which uses Mozart's 'Prague' Symphony as a point of reference for phrasing, structural proportions and the relationships between harmonies and melodies, has changing metres in a ratio of 1:2:3:4. In Conciso (1996) Verbey uses the ratio of 4:5:3:6, which he borrowed from Beethoven's Piano Sonata op.101. At the same time, the harmonic contour of Conciso is largely determined by Skryabin's Piano Sonata no.8. Like most composers of his generation, Verbey is conscious that it is impossible to be impervious to a music history that has permeated our thought.