Meppel

Meppel is the smallest of Drenthe's towns and was once, per metre of quay, among the busiest inland ports in the land. The "gateway of Drenthe" sat where the province's canals gathered before running to the Zuiderzee, and everything the peat colonies produced — turf above all — passed through its locks: at the trade's height the little town cleared thousands of barge movements a year, skippers' town and market town in one, and its ring of waterways and gabled warehouses still says so. When the barges thinned, Meppel kept two vocations — printing, which made the town a national centre of the graphic trades, and the market, which fills the streets each summer with the Meppeler Donderdagen, the Thursday festivals of fairs, music and shantymen that are Drenthe's most cheerful institution.

The town's scale is its charm: church tower, drawbridges, a grid of quays walkable in an evening, with the Weerribben-Wieden wetlands and Giethoorn's punt-canals a short hop west. The concert record's register — chamber concerts, choirs, school ensembles, church music and festival visits — describes Meppel's musical life precisely: community craft, augmented by the touring circuit at the town's theatre. Turf out, ink in, shanties on Thursdays: Meppel worked its water and kept the songs.