Writing To Vermeer is the sixth Nonesuch release from Louis Andriessen, the most highly regarded contemporary composer working in the Netherlands today, an influential and iconoclastic figure whose work has been presented on stages throughout the world. Vermeer is Andriessen"s second collaboration with filmmaker-conceptual artist-provocateur Peter Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover) as librettist and director. This multimedia opera contrasts the alluring stillness and warm glow of the domestic scenes painted by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer with the clangorous political, social and economic turmoil of the encroaching outside world during the late 1700s. Premiered to critical acclaim in Amsterdam in 1999, the ambitious piece has been subsequently performed at Australia"s Adelaide Festival and the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City. In a four-star review of its Dutch engagement, in Billboard, columnist Bradley Bamberger remarked, "The mixture of poetic speculation, tragic Dutch history, and Vermeer"s sweetly haunting pictures is deeply touching, and Andriessen"s rich, humane score makes for the ideal emotional agent." Andriessen himself, who is best known for his earlier, rigorously minimalist pieces, has said, "Like all Dutch kids, I grew up with Vermeer"s images; the music is serene because of the serenity in those pictures, which I love. The ideal was to create music that somehow approached the beauty of those paintings." Atlantic. 2006