Encounter at the Cello Biënnale

A Film by Myles O’Reilly featuring Ernst Reijseger and music of Trio Reijseger Fraanje Sylla.

In 2009 I first watched the film by Werner Herzog ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ and for the first time heard a film score composed by cellist Ernst Reijseger. Ernst is the most Dutch of cellists. He embodies the range of his country’s forward musical thinking, which means a forward approach to old music as well as new.

This kind of building bridges over musical canals is one of the things that makes his home town Amsterdam so very interesting. And that is exactly what Reijseger does in the music he has also soundtracked filmmaker Werner Herzog’s films, Wild Blue Yonder (2006), White Diamond (2006), My Son My Son What Have Ye Done (2010), Cave Of Forgotten Dreams (2011) and Ode to the Dawn of Man (2011)

Reijseger began in the early music movement, for which Holland has been a longtime capital, playing a period-instrument Baroque cello. From there he leaped, in a way that the Dutch do with a startling lack of self-consciousness, into avant-garde music. From there to jazz, for which he is now best known.

Reijseger no longer discharges genres; he simply renders them irrelevant.

On his gripping new CD for the stylish Winter & Winter label, he joins Dutch jazz and classical pianist Harmen Fraanje and the extraordinary Senegalese vocalist and instrumentalist Mola Sylla.

When bowed, Reijseger’s cello sounds like Handel’s cello. Plucked one way it conveys Mingus’ bass. Plucked another way, it becomes sibling to Sylla’s mbira. This combo cooks not from the heat of cultures colliding but because they have a big kitchen for three chefs with many musical hats. There is even a little place, on this audacious opening among these open-minded players, for a little dip into Puccini, played with an unforced expressive honesty.

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For more information on the Trio Reijseger Fraanje Sylla visit www.reijsegerfraanjesylla.com