Programs That Think – When Repertoire Becomes Reflection
A concert program is not a list of works. It is not a showcase. It is not an educational format.
For me, it is a form of thought – one that unfolds in time, in space, in listening.
A program is more than its parts.
It is a structure that generates meaning through contrast, silence, transformation.
The sequence becomes a gesture. The works do not illustrate a topic – they speak to each other across time. They amplify, disturb, or question one another. The audience is not taught a message – it is invited into a field of resonance.
Sometimes, a well-known piece can become new when placed in an unexpected context.
A Beethoven symphony after a fragment by Nono may appear less heroic, more fractured.
A romantic concerto, framed by Ustvolskaya and Webern, may lose its center and reveal its instability.
Context does not explain the work – it alters its conditions of presence.
Let me give some examples.
Denn ich dürste
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina – Sicut cervus
Galina Ustvolskaya – Symphony No. 2
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Anton Bruckner – Symphony No. 7
This program traces a spiritual arc – from pure longing, through confrontation, to redemption that remains uncertain. It begins with Sicut cervus by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: a short, radiant invocation of desire. Without drama or rhetoric, the music opens a space of contemplative clarity – a sound turned toward the divine. Without pause, Galina Ustvolskaya’s Second Symphony follows. Longing becomes pressure. The symphony does not offer comfort – it demands truth. Every gesture is stripped of expression, every sound reduced to essence. Played directly after Palestrina, it gives the word “thirst” an entirely new existential weight. After the interval, Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony enters as expansion and contrast – a vast sonic architecture in which transcendence becomes audible. In this context, Bruckner does not resolve what came before. He transforms closure into openness – a resonance that does not settle.
Lost Time
Samuel Barber – Adagio for Strings
Robert Schumann – Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129
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Valentin Silvestrov – Symphony No. 5
This program moves into regions where music ceases to unfold and begins to dissolve: into memory, into echo, into suspension. Barber’s Adagio opens with a gesture of clarity and mourning – not dramatic, but ritual: a single breath stretched into timeless longing. Schumann’s cello concerto follows not as heroic dialogue but as inner soliloquy – music as hesitation, as searching. Silvestrov’s symphony closes the evening with music that no longer progresses but hovers in stillness. Sound becomes recollection; the present yields to what is no longer. A romantic language slowed, fragmented, held in suspension.
Lost Time is not nostalgic. It is an invitation to encounter time as feeling, not as measure.
Three composers, three expressions of inwardness, three ways of losing oneself in sound – or perhaps: of being found.
The Celestial
Kaija Saariaho – Asteroid 4179: Toutatis
Richard Wagner – Lohengrin Prelude
Witold Lutosławski – Mi-parti
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Gustav Mahler – Symphony No. 4
This program begins with Kaija Saariaho’s Asteroid 4179: Toutatis – a compact sonic image of cosmic motion. Without pause, it leads directly into Wagner’s Lohengrin prelude – not as romantic dream, but as metaphysical elevation. The last harmonic glimmer of Saariaho flows seamlessly into Wagner’s shimmering violins. Witold Lutosławski’s Mi-parti continues the atmosphere of suspended radiance, expanding it into a polychromatic energy field that dissolves at its end into heights echoing Saariaho’s beginning. A circular motion is created – sound folding back into itself. After the intermission, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony enters as culmination – but recontextualized. Here, its supposed naivety becomes tension: What does the “heavenly life” mean when approached through cosmic distances and metaphysical intensities? The program does not resolve this question – it lets us listen into it.
Danse Sacrale
Claudio Monteverdi – Moresca from Orfeo
Rodion Shchedrin – Хороводы, Concerto for Orchestra No. 4
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Igor Stravinsky – Le Sacre du printemps
This program explores ecstatic states through paradox. It opens with a strange, ritualistic dance at the threshold of death and celebration. Shchedrin’s Khorovody – a Russian term for archaic circular dances – follows as a music that spins, cracks, whirls. It is not festive; it is possessed. After the interval, the stage is left to Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps – but heard now not as an isolated shock, but as part of a lineage of sacred dances. The violence of the Rite is no longer a scandal – it is a transformation. In this context, the work loses its modernist shell and becomes myth again.
A concert ends.
But something may remain.
If something remains after the last note, then the program has spoken.