It has, by anyone’s standards, been a remarkable ten years for Dutch composer Joep Beving. Back in 2015, when he posted an album of solo piano pieces—written and recorded in his Amsterdam home—on an online music service, he was completely unknown. He had grown up playing piano and improvising, with some dreams of creating and performing jazz, but his career led him to a demanding day job. In 2009, he found his way back to music after inheriting a Schimmel piano from his grandmother.
Recorded from his Amsterdam home and initially intended for his friends and family, one of those friends pushed him to contact some record labels. When they didn’t show any interest, Beving released it himself—on vinyl as well as digitally—and performed a show for a small audience of around 100 people. “Something magical happened that night,” he told Glamcult. “It told me my little experiment in existential communication was working. Five years later I got the same confirmation from people from all over the world. It still amazes me.”
That debut, Solipsism, was re-released in 2017 after Beving signed to Deutsche Grammophon. It eventually earned gold status and over 340 million streams to date, Beving himself has surpassed the landmark figure of one billion streams across his UMG catalogue and become one of the world’s best-loved and most frequently heard pianists. Between then and now, he has gone on to release more of what he terms “simple music for complex emotions”—including celebrated albums such as Prehension, Henosis, Hermetism and, most recently, 2024’s Vision of Contentment, a collaboration with cellist Maarten Vos.
And now, a decade later, he has released Solipsism Redux, a re-recording of the original’s timeless, introspective music that's available digitally and as a limited-edition vinyl album, and with a specially-created video of the new album. “As the anniversary approached, I knew we had to do something special,” he says over Zoom, from the Amsterdam home where it all began. “I started thinking that my ideal would be that the music has somehow stood the test of time. But it also made me wonder what effect that amount of time has had on the music as well as me; and that’s when we had the idea to re-play it and film it in a way that was really about capturing both the music and the time that has passed in between.”
Before going into the studio, Beving retreated to a friend’s woodland cabin for a couple of days to revisit the music in a more personal way. While he has played some of the songs live since its release—especially “Sleeping Lotus”, “Midway” (“one of my favorites”) and “Études” (“it grounds me if I’m nervous; I always play it as early as possible so that I get to settle in with myself and the audience”—others he hasn’t revisited at all. “Daydream” and “Reflection”, for example, were improvised, so the new recording required that he notate them and play from the page. Overall, the new music is slower, dreamier—more patient and relaxed.
“It’s trying to be as pure with it as possible, but at the same time not wanting to compete with the original,” he explains. “I’m not saying now is better—now is just… different. That first moment of creation is difficult to recreate, as there were so many factors at play at that time. The purpose behind making the music back then was different to how it is now, for example. The original was recorded at home with two mics and a crappy sound card, and there was this pureness and nakedness. This time we had a professional studio, so of course the recording and technical aspects are better. But we did use an upright piano and both an open and closed mic to try and keep some of the intimacy.”
ConcertLab, a state-of-the art venue in Utrecht, have already premiered their filmed version of the album exclusively on STAGE+, but Beving will also undertake a 10th anniversary album tour of Europe in November, with dates in Paris, Lisbon, Budapest. Hamburg, London and Liège. All of which brings his formidable career full circle, of course.
“Nowadays, I feel a lot more comfortable with the spaces between the notes, and allow them to be there,” he says. “Ten years ago I would have played them way too quickly so that the whole show would be over more quickly and I wouldn’t then be bothering the audience any longer. Writing a simple piece of piano music and putting it on stage for an audience is basically saying ‘I am a pianist and I want to show you something that deserves to be on a stage in a classical environment’. That’s a lot already, and that was never my aim, which was to communicate and reconnect with my friends. But I have let go of some of my fears. I’ve grown more comfortable with the belief that my music can have a positive effect on people. I’ve built up trust, growth and acceptance and have also been questioning everything and using that as a means of inspiration for new work, which will be coming next year. Ultimately it’s been a huge learning curve that has brought me closer to people. I am very grateful for that.”
