21st IDO Festival: Songs Against the Night – Organ, Voice & Ensemble
This concert takes us right to the very limits of our existence and is like an existential journey of the soul through the realms of human pain, resistance and spiritual transformation.
The programme opens on an intimate, understated note with the Baroque gem *Bist du bei mir*, which lovingly confronts the inexorable encroachment of the night of death. This is followed by Daniel Glaus’s haunting work *Sing against the Breaking Night* – a sonic act of indomitable resistance against the horrors of Russia’s war of aggression. The ethereal, floating transition is shaped by György Kurtág’s four-hand transcriptions of Bach, which transform the sorrow of mortality into a comforting, contemplative order.
At the heart of the evening is the world premiere of *Meet Me at the Edge* for organ and ensemble by Laura Marconi and Gianluca Castelli. The work was visually inspired by the art of Chiharu Shiota. The artist explains that clothing represents a ‘second skin’ that preserves the memory of the person, and that the boundaries of our existence – ‘such as those between the inside and outside of our bodies, between the visible and the invisible, or between the microscopic and the macroscopic’ – are illusory.
This transcendent experience corresponds with Robert Wright’s book *Why Buddhism Is True*, which discusses how, through meditation, pain can be viewed as an event outside one’s own body, ‘just like the song of a bird or the ringing of a bell in the distance’. Starting from the separating note G sharp, a dialogue unfolds, “an attempt at togetherness, a dance between two souls which, although still clearly separate, strive to unite”. Marconi and Castelli ask: “Will a new boundary then take shape, only to disintegrate and then reform again and again, ad infinitum?”
Featuring Christina Daletska, Frederike Möller and Odilo Klasen. (Source: IDO Festival)