Festival 20·21, music of the 20th and 21st century TRANSIT, festival of contemporary music 12 September to 26 October 2024 in Leuven
From the very beginning in 1994, when Festival 20·21 was still called 'Festival van Vlaams-Brabant' and later 'Novecento', it was the intention of festival director prof. em. Mark Delaere to bring not only 'beautiful music in the best performances' to the people but to repeatedly search for coherence and meaning. Because the current artistic leaders Pieter Bergé (20·21) and Maarten Beirens (Transit) also like to weave connections between the performed works, it often seems as if each concert programme is a composition in itself. The audience knows that it will mainly hear music from after 1900, but opening with Schönberg, we don't see many festivals doing that, faut le faire. 20·21, which traditionally opens together with the academic year of the university city, wants to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary in a rather modest way according to its own account. What is certain is that the meanwhile spoilt concert audience will once again leave enriched. 150 – 100
Is it because the two festivals 20.21 and Transit are themselves celebrating anniversaries, but it is striking that this edition pays greater attention to composers' anniversaries. Two important and perhaps still little-known 150-year-olds they did not want to let pass. Therefore, the series exceptionally opens before the start of the academic year on 13 September, precisely on the birthday of Arnold Schönberg (1874). The godfather of the American avant-garde Charles Ives was born shortly after in that same grand cru year 1874. The 'prelude concert' will be an adventurous Viennese-American diptych, supplemented with Anton Webern, Henry Cowell, Frederic Rzewski and Ferruccio Busoni who died 100 years ago. An expert in this repertoire and friend of the festival is pianist Daan Vandewalle.
Because THE Ives specialist and author of Listening to Charles Ives. Variations on His America prof. em. Peter Burkholder happens to be in our country in September for a congress on music after 1900, the festival even opens a day earlier. On 12 September, Burkholder, who has made Ives his life's work, gives a lecture in which he warms up the listener and prepares them to truly listen with 'open mind, open ears' to what is perhaps the most idiosyncratic and radical composer in the history of music.
Is this the man of thousand thrones who strew'd our earth with hostile bones and can he thus survive?
Two weeks later, on 26 September, the 150-year-old Schönberg is heard again in the piano quintet Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, in which the Jewish composer, in an extremely personal way in 1942 from the USA, sarcastically commented on events in Europe that he had fled. The biting words from Lord Byron's poem of the same name that Schönberg set to music will be declaimed not quite sung but rather rhythmically by none other than Dietrich Henschel. Trio Khaldei, expanded with Tony Nys (viola) and Maximilian Lohse (violin) open the concert not only but also conclude it once more with Ode to Napoleon. Knowing that you will hear a piece twice can bring with it a special concert experience and offers the chance to delve deeper into a piece. At the second performance you might pay attention to other parameters than at the first more general listening. Perhaps we will experience how variable listening to a work can be, for can we ever cross the same musical river twice? In between, parts of Beethoven's Eroica are heard in an arrangement for piano quintet by Ferdinand Ries and the Piano Quartet by Aaron Copland. Praise and Horror for an authoritarian leader, in one breath.
Having a birthday is also looking back at what went well. For the 'real' opening concert on 23 September, the start of the academic year, the festival – to the delight of those who were there – returns to a sharply flavoured programme from 2018 when composer Daan Janssens at the request of the festival arranged Schubert's song cycle Die schöne Müllerin for a larger ensemble. Schubert remains untouched but in Janssens' Eine schöne Müllerin the melodies are given a rich, contemporary soundscape. At appropriate moments he adds his own intermezzos to texts by Fernando Pessoa from the Book of Restlessness. The CD recording that Spectra under the direction of Filip Rathé made with tenor Thomas Blondelle in the meantime (in 2018 Thomas E. Bauer sang) is presented on the day of the concert. A collector's item, both through the original musical content but also through the design entrusted to visual dramaturgist Lise Bruyneel who has been taking care of the visual aspect of 20·21 for many years.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYIY7A_5iBE[/embed]
EINE SCHÖNE MÜLLERIN by Daan Janssens recording of the 2018 premiere with Thomas E. Bauer
65 - 25
Whoever can write one sonata can just as well write 24, composer Frank Nuyts must have thought. With his well-known abundance of energy and ideas, he has over the years breathed contemporary life into the venerable piano sonata. In the footsteps of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, he wrote 24 virtuosic and sparkling sonatas tailored to different pianists. On Transit, which by the way also celebrates 25 years, Elisa Medinilla, Jan Michiels and Barbara Baltussen play sonatas 8, 16 and 24 that were written for them. Who knows, that might become a self-portrait concert? In any case, in Leuven, two years late, there will finally be a celebration of Frank Nuyts' 65th birthday, who knows that COVID-19 can have long-lasting effects. Whoever wants to experience the complete cycle of 24 sonatas by 18 different performers, each provided with a unique introduction by the composer, must head to Quatre Mains in Ghent during the last weekend of September.
20
For Malaysian composer Kee-Yong Chong, this edition of 20·21 is a form of coming home. Having just graduated from the Brussels Conservatoire with Jan Van Landeghem and Daniel Capelletti, he was given the opportunity in the early years of Transit to present a Belgian creation. On 19 October, Chong returns to Leuven as one of the leading composers from Southeast Asia with a creation commissioned by the festival.
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© Chantal De Waele[/caption]
EX NIHILO
Ex Nihilo is not only the title of the concert with Brecht Valckenaers on 15 October,
ex nihilo is also the way the festival works. With the exception of Grain de la Voix which on 30 September brings a musical collage around the Messe de Notre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut, all concert programmes this time too have come about 'from scratch' and slowly matured after an exchange of ideas between the performers and the compilers. To arrive at a cohesive concert programme, much ink often flows, emails fly back and forth. So too the collage concert Ex Nihilo around the music of György Ligeti.
When 20·21 and especially Transit send out their brochure in spring, much of the music mentioned in it has not yet been written. As you read this, Brecht Valckenaers is still writing or updating the interludes for the Ligeti concert. In 1951, Romanian-Hungarian Ligeti was a young composer of 27 who was completely stuck and wanted to reinvent his musical language. What could he do with a single note? With a single interval? With certain rhythmic principles? While searching, the piano work of eleven pieces Musica Ricercata emerged. Pianist-composer Brecht Valckenaers, who is still a few years younger than Ligeti was then, develops this music further, stretches it into a full concert programme with both five of his own interludes and five connecting fragments by Lachenmann, Kurtag, Crumb, Cowell and Bartók.
In 1951 I began to experiment with very simple structures of rhythms and sonorities as if to build up a 'new music' from nothing. What can I do with a single note? With its octave? With an interval? With two intervals? With certain rhythmic relationships? György Ligeti.[embed]https://youtu.be/whCItqfiqYI[/embed] ! CELEBRATION ! The stage of the Soetezaal in STUK will be far too small, because for the first time in its history Transit presents a real symphony orchestra. 80 students from d'Academie Podium Sint-Niklaas play both Dali's Dream? by Luc Brewaeys and the creation of Ropes by Belgian-Syrian composer Shalan-Alhamwy, a musician with roots stretching from Homs to Ghent. Expect musical traditions ranging from Gnawa music from Morocco to Western Romanticism. The bagala, oud and percussion from the Middle East add extra colour to the orchestra. [caption id="attachment_33299" align="alignleft" width="474"]
Woodcut by Conrad Felixmüller of the composer Erwin Schulhoff, Prague 1924. © Lindenau-Museum, Altenburg, VG Bild-Kunst.[/caption]
The most festive moment of the festival is reserved for the theme day on 13 October, which due to the municipal council elections exceptionally begins at 1:30 PM this year and is dedicated to the Czech masters Bohuslav Martinu, Leos Janáček and Erwin Schulhoff. Czech That! includes two concerts, one for strings and one for winds and percussion. The highlight will be the Dance of the Philosophers, ballerinas, boxers, critics, parvenus, … in the satirical ballet Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Erwin Schulhoff, who reworked Molière and Lully's would-be-aristocrat in 1926. The festival, which always attaches great importance to a carefully calibrated visual component of the music, has engaged draughtswoman Gerda Dendooven for this production to make music with pen and pencil. Seven wind players from I Solisti and a battery of five percussionists will disappear as much as possible into the orchestra pit to clear the stage for Dendooven's sets and to let her continue drawing on the spot. Will she perhaps engage with the political topicality of 13 October? A concert worth watching literally.
After the evening concert you are welcome in the foyer of the Stadsschouwburg to toast 30 beautiful years and immediately to the future of Festival 20·21. And to continue dreaming out loud about the new Leuven concert hall, of which the first stone still has to be laid? In the meantime, you can already discover the brand new hall on the Philipssite, modernistically furnished, easily accessible and very suitable for chamber music. You can test the acoustics when the Ragazze Quartet plays both Dvořák and the two female American composers Ruth Crawford Seeger and Florence Price. Music From the New(est) World, on 3 October 2024.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with letting yourself be swept along and simply enjoying so many carefully programmed concerts, although it is good to know that the creators are not only concerned with this. For artistic director Pieter Bergé, "the concert hall is not a refuge to recover from overwhelming reality, it is a place to reflect on that reality and where multiple interpretations are possible."
For concerts, dates and tickets see the website