Simeon ten Holt spent most of his long life being ignored, which suited him fine. He worked in a kind of magnificent isolation — teaching in Alkmaar, studying briefly with Arthur Honegger in Paris, absorbing serialism and then, decisively, rejecting it — before arriving in the mid-1970s at a language so purely, stubbornly his own that no one quite knew what category to drop him into. Minimalist? The Dutch were offended by the comparison to Glass and Riley. Post-romantic? Too reductive. Ten Holt himself shrugged at the fuss. The music was the music. He died in November 2012, just weeks after Jeroen van Veen finished these recordings, and what might have been a cause for celebration became instead something more complicated — a valediction, and a very luminous one.
Canto Ostinato is where most listeners find him, and understandably so. The piece accrued its fame in the four-piano version — those overlapping waves of sound, the slow harmonic drift, the sense of time suspended and then very gently resumed — but ten Holt conceived it for solo piano, and in that original form something clarifies. The textures thin. The loneliness of the material becomes audible. What had seemed like communal meditation turns out to be, at bottom, a single voice talking to itself across a long afternoon.
Van Veen understands this. His touch here is almost unnervingly light — not precious, nothing so calculated as that, but genuinely transparent, as though he’s wary of pressing too hard on glass. The Satie-esque harmonies that drift through the piece’s midsection, those unresolved chords hanging in the air like smoke, register with an almost startling delicacy under his hands. Ivo Janssen, on the VOID Classics label, recorded this music too, and the contrast is instructive — Janssen’s heavier approach, his tendency to lean into the downbeat, turns the repetitions stolid, even punishing. Van Veen finds the shimmer. The music becomes something closer to Debussy’s water imagery than to the piston-driven machinery some minimalism suggests. Ripples, not pistons.
Nearly eighty minutes, and it holds.
The Solo Devils Dances are another matter entirely — more demanding, more violent, more frankly strange. The second, which fills an entire disc on its own, was originally orchestral, and you feel the orchestral weight pressing against the piano’s limits throughout. The rhythmic displacements, the sudden metric lurches, the way accents migrate through the bar like a restless animal that won’t settle — all of this requires not just craft but a particular quality of mind, a capacity to hold multiple rhythmic strata simultaneously while keeping the surface music sounding inevitable rather than merely difficult. Van Veen, with characteristic understatement, has described these pieces as requiring “a well-trained pianist.” That is roughly equivalent to describing Everest as a moderately strenuous hike.
What’s astonishing is the joy in his playing. That’s not a word one reaches for easily in this repertoire — precision, concentration, stamina, yes — but Van Veen’s interpretation of the second Solo Devils Dance has an almost giddy buoyancy, a sense that the rhythmic complexities are a game being played rather than an obstacle being cleared. The fourth, from 1998, is leaner, stranger, more ruminative — ten Holt at seventy-five, still restless.
Eadem Sed Aliter — the title translates roughly as “the same, but otherwise” — sits quietly among the grander works, and you might miss it if you’re not paying attention. Don’t. The 1995 date places it late in ten Holt’s creative life, and there’s a reflective quality to the writing, a willingness to let ideas breathe and then disappear, that feels earned rather than merely resigned.
Jeroen van Veen has spent years inside this music, release it in multiple configurations, performing it across Europe, living with its particular demands. That immersion shows — not as familiarity that breeds contempt but as the kind of deep knowledge that allows a performer to make choices the rest of us wouldn’t even recognize as choices. This is, quite simply, the solo piano collection ten Holt deserved. It is also the one to own.
