Pianist Peter Beets leads the New Jazz Orchestra, an orchestra made up of the finest young professionals in the Netherlands. Beets has played with Chick Corea, Wynton Marsalis and Kurt Rosenwinkel, among others, and has built a reputation stretching from Tokyo to New York. With the orchestra, he has previously explored Chopin, French Romanticism and Spanish classical music.

On our stage, the orchestra presents Bach to the Blues, tracing the line from Bach to jazz. Alongside arrangements of works including Air, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring and the Goldberg Variations, you’ll hear new pieces written in the spirit of Bach by Rob Horsting, Joris Bolhaar, Claudio Jr De Rosa and orchestra members Suzan Veneman and Bart van Gorp, among others. As narrator, journalist and musician Koen Schouten draws the connections between Bach and jazz, from the walking bass to improvisation.

“Jazz always contains both Bach and blues. If one of the two is missing, it isn’t real jazz.” (Peter Beets)