Van Gogh in Me is an incredible multimedia project that will transport us to the artistically utopian and forever lost Belle Époque. This time, we will meet not only with composers but also with famous painters from the turn of the century: Vincent van Gogh and Gustav Klimt. Celebrating its twentieth anniversary, the NFM Choir will perform as part of a 2022 project commissioned by the Netherlands Chamber Choir and museums in Vienna and Amsterdam.

The event spans two of the arts capitals of pre-World War I Europe: Paris and Vienna. In addition to the painters mentioned above, in these cities the featured composers were active, too. Camille Saint-Saëns, Claude Debussy, and Erik Satie filled the concert halls and salons of the Third French Republic with their music. Over time, their work was more and more saturated with light. Pieces such as Debussy’s Trois chansons de Charles d'Orléans were characterised by lightness and vivid colours. Meanwhile, Alma and Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Arnold Schönberg, who were unquestioned celebrities in the German-speaking music circles, peered ever deeper into the darkness of the soul. Gustav Mahler’s song Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen expresses the infinite longing for a decadent nirvana.

During the concert, paintings from the era of the featured composers (as well as historical photographs) will be brought to life through advanced computer and biometric techniques. The Italian multimedia studio fuse* is responsible for the technology used, which allows for the modulation of images using data collected live. This data is sourced not only from the music but also from the audience’s emotions, the performers, and the conductor’s movements. Renowned masterpieces of painting are re-created live, bursting with new colours and dissolving in sound. And all this thanks to four million digital micro-brushes, the NFM Choir and… the audience!