Conversation with composers of the festival

ECLAT begins with a musical celebration–in the wonderful combination of the French ensemble C Barré with the Neue Vocalsolisten. Franz Kafka’s »Silence of the Sirens« with all its paradoxes inspired Francesca Verunelli to create her magnificent cycle. High tension!

An ensemble in the room, surrounded by the audience, illuminated by light art: a musical exploration of the night and the heightened contrasts that accompany it.

The forest as a place of projection and imagination: using hydrophones, contact microphones and sensor microphones, Kirsten Reese and biologist Sandra Müller listened to the forest and its microorganisms. An artistic transformation.

Conversation with artists from the two evening concerts

Acoustic beings and sound sculptures:

A constantly changing acoustic body unfolds plastically in space, wanders around, transforms itself, influenced by the movements of the musicians and the audience.

A »recalibration of the senses«.

Martin and his teddy bear Bä embark on an adventurous journey…

A play about friendship, daring to take risks and the boundless imagination of play.

In exchange with European musicians and in the context of current aesthetic debates, young composers from Eastern Europe created five imaginative new works.

Introduction to the works and projects of the day

Conversation with artists from the concerts

To remember something and rescue it from oblivion: In a dialogue between a singer and the computer-controlled microtonal Arciorgano, the composer explores questions of identity.

Orchestral spaces of memory (Bång), a scathing parody of claims to power (Omelchuk): »Everything interacts, is alert, is related to everything else: an organism, a community of individuals, ultimately a utopia.« (Herrmann)

In thermodynamics, entropy describes the disorder or degree of uncertainty in a system. In artistic processes, it is significant for the balance between structure and dissolution, order and chaos.

Between experimental noise, intense club moments and musical islands of concentration, Mutante (powered by Festival ECLAT) drives us physically and with all our senses THROUGH THE NIGHT at Romy S.

A great transformation! The Italian ensemble Azione Improvvisa uses a large box of enchanting sounds to show us what can happen when electronics take over and what musical masks they can put on us.

»Small musical frescoes«, »sluggish, muddy, sloppy and mostly deep-sounding lines that slowly and sluggishly meander through the sonic background…« and AI-controlled music that »emerges from white noise through diffusion«.

A chamber music theatre with the Neue Vocalsolisten, a video narrative and (almost) a still life: the focus gradually narrows, from the universal theme of media oversaturation to seven individual post-Yugoslav experiences to a concentrated, abysmal dialogue.

In an experiential artistic process, seven composers from the former Yugoslavian states reflect on the period of the Balkan Wars and the different perspectives from which the people of the Western Balkans interpret their shared history today.

»The end result is a kind of acoustic group selfie: queer, supportive, personal, hedonistic. A space full of love and desire.«

Four composers elicit a rich variety of colours from this unusual ensemble of instruments and conjure up a wide range of images related to the theme: from the erosion of rock to gently blowing breath to comic-like robotics.

Together with Malin and Marta, we go into the enchanted forest and celebrate Malanka, a wild winter festival with lots of music to wake up spring!

»Before language there was voice. Before every narrative there was breath. … The work does not speak; it listens–an echo that quietly continues to breathe between thought and sound.« (Vito Žuraj)

»A work of extremes, eruptions and collapses«–»unconditional colourfulness and energy«–»of great political and aesthetic urgency«: three very different works by three very special winners of the 70th Composition Prize conclude the festival.