Holland Festival Proms: Tribute to Blackstar

In 2016, after the death of British rock star David Bowie, the German conductor André de Ridder directed and curated Tribute to Blackstar, a performance in memory of Bowie,

inspired and partly based on his last album Blackstar, released on 8th January 2016, just two days before Bowie’s death. The concert was performed at the BBC Proms and featured his Amsterdam-Berlin musical collective stargaze and the singers Anna Calvi, Laetitia Sadier and Anja Plaschg (Soap&Skin). Bass guitarist Jherek Bischoff and organist James McVinnie were also part of the line-up for this concert. 

For more than forty years David Bowie set his stamp on the world of pop music, as style icon and as musical chameleon, astonishing the world with his ground-breaking artistry. With twenty-five studio albums to his name and record sales of over 140 million albums, he was one of the most successful artists of recent decades. This was certainly one of the reasons why De Ridder and his fellow musicians wanted to pay tribute to him. 

André de Ridder was first smitten by Bowie’s work when as a teenager he saw the single Let’s Dance on MTV. Then in 1987 when De Ridder saw Bowie’s Glass Spider Tour performance in front of the Berlin Reichstag, he found this an amazing and unsurpassable rock experience. In Tribute to Blackstar De Ridder wants the harmonic and chamber music qualities of Bowie’s songs to emerge. 

Bowie is also a major source of inspiration for singer Anna Calvi. When she was only ten she formed a band, The Rock Spiders, inspired by Bowie’s band The Spiders from Mars. ‘You can really see the music,’ she says. ‘It’s very visual. I’m very much in for trying to create music that you can see as well as hear’. 

The first version of Tribute was premiered at the Royal Albert Hall during the 2016 BBC Proms, with an impressive line-up of guest artists including Michel van der Aa, Jherek Bischoff, John Cale, David Lang, Anna Meredith, Gren Saunier and Josephine Stephenson. A new version of this tribute will receive its world premiere on 1st May 2018 in the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie and will then be performed at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw during the Holland Festival. An unusual feature of this tribute is that three female singers interpret Bowie and his songs: Anna Calvi, Laetitia Sadier and Anja Plaschg. The arrangements are by De Ridder himself, but there are also contributions by other composers, including Jherek Bischoff, Josephine Stephenson and Aart Strootman. The rhythms, melodies and emotional depths of Bowie’s music are explored and accentuated, an approach made possible by the adventurous work of the stargaze ensemble. This has created completely new versions of Lazarus, Lady Grinning Soul, I Can’t Give Everything Away and Blackstar.