Oosten: Mare Liberum – Vu Orchestra Amsterdam

   in Choir & Organ (May, 2015)
‘These things belong to us all.’ Roel van Oosten’s 2009 commission was made to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Hugo Grotius’s pioneering treatise on the freedom of the sea and his wider work on the law of peace and war; but the composer extended the principle to include the international lingua franca of musical style, which here draws on everything from Dutch minimalism to the English and American hymnal, especially obvious when John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’ and Walt Whitman’s Civil War verse is invoked. The score ranges between juridical precision and powerful emotion, and Daan Admiral (a splendid name for the conductor of Mare Liberum!) keeps his potentially unruly forces …