Despite their very different artistic backgrounds, the three prizewinners we are celebrating in the opening concert share a great musical imaginative power. Inspired by Mediterranean cultures, Uday Krishnakumar creates a fictional art music tradition. Irene Galindo Quero unfolds a telepathic communication between two parallel worlds through sensitive threads of sound, while Philipp Krebs, with great gesture, cranks up an ensemble machinery that increasingly picks up speed, from which individuals repeatedly detach themselves as impulse generators.

After the rapid finale of the first concert, there is contemplation. Embedded in two performative concept pieces, the admirably versatile percussion artist Vanessa Porter makes the directness and physicality of Rebecca Saunders’ music tangible in the midst of the audience sitting close to her, revealing the production of her often seemingly enigmatic sounds through a live camera and alienating them at the same time.

»I find the idea of spaces enlivened by the focus of attentive ears very inspiring. In such moments of collective concentration, it almost feels as if invisible threads are growing between us, connecting us for a moment before we disperse back into the world. The ritual of performance is not just about the music being played, but more importantly about spending time together in that special state of consciousness.«

(Christian Mason)

Inspired by the pop music concept of »featuring,« two acclaimed ensembles then unleash a whole new energy as they work together. In constellations of soloists against groups, the attempt to outbid each other to the point of sonically devouring the others, composers and ensembles make the critical discourse on hierarchies and power structures come alive on an artistic level.

A musical theater for children about friendship, trusting and helping each other, diving into fantastic worlds as well as the boundless fantasy of playing opens Friday. In the orchestral concert, baroque instruments meet the classical-romantic orchestra, and Don Quixote and Sancho Panza may be resurrected as pianist and percussionist: For ECLAT fans, this is a re-encounter with Franck Bedrossian’s great work, which can now finally come to the festival in its original version after the chamber version in 2021.

Finally, Friday ends with an artist’s »self-encouragement« for an increasingly free approach to given materials and notes. Beginning with a fantasy on Stefan Wolpe’s »Battle Pieces«, Christoph Ogiermann’s work reaches out into a wide variety of playing styles, expressive attitudes and themes.

For the authors, the romantic song in the tradition of the bourgeois salons is a prototype for the objectification of women and the abuse of power in the art industry. The two female interpreters of the song in the music theater literally become projection surfaces; post-digitally processed hybrid beings emerge from voice, instrument and body, acting on the border between physical and digital space.

In the choral concert, the SWR Vokalensemble not only moves away from the usual in terms of vocal technique: Michael Reudenbach’s work is staged in unusual lighting and meticulously choreographed.

Yair Klartag describes the story of the mystical composer Moshe Najara, who is rooted in Sabbatianism, as a »historiographical extreme case that reaches the limits of rationality and dissolves into irrational mysticism«. Najara’s messianic sound visions inspired his multi-layered lecture-concert.

In a special space-sound setting, Max Marcoll slowly transforms morphing sound masses of equally slowly changing pulses, and he gradually unsettles our perception of time through accelerations and decelerations, shifts and broadenings.

For Poetry Affairs, five poets and five composers from ten different European countries have jointly explored the multifaceted relationships between language and music. From the most diverse perspectives of poetry and composition, nine large performances between concert, installation and music theater are created for ECLAT. In two large event parts, ever new constellations arise from the almost homely closeness of the audience to the performers to the far distance: images and scenes full of rhetorical finesse, powerful, shocking, irritating, sublime poetry, labyrinths of linguistic and musical permutations and subtle shifts in meaning. They lead us into different states of being, describe the aesthetics of error, a life in seven panic attacks, a bizarre odyssey in search of the perfect word or a swan song to the alpine glaciers.

Rock my Religion: The no-wave film by Dan Graham with music by Patti Smith, a counter-design to the religious Shaker rituals, is the model for the Heavy Metal Ritual, which embeds the concentrated experience of Poetry Affairs in three ecstatic, ritualistic moments. Those in the audience who not only want to immerse themselves in the music, but also give free rein to a suppressed rage, can »sacrifice« sounds to the stage from isolated smash or shout booths, where they will be processed and burn up in the frenzy of Sarattma’s volume.

The big hall, meanwhile, will be transformed again for the After Show and we will set the stage free for experimental improvisation, intense conversations, party and dance.