6 performances
for which there are still tickets available

‘Two words were missing from his vocabulary: awe and reverence,’ Olivier Messiaen once recalled of his former student Pierre Boulez. The young composer not only had a penchant for mathematics, but was also gifted with an unerring outer and inner ear, capable of listening to music and language with a similar analytical attentiveness, of ‘hearing’ it in his mind’s eye: ‘Le compositeur, c’est l’œil qui imagine l’oreille.’

Plays never originate in an idea. Instead, they result from a perfect blend of life, theatre, things we want to achieve and others we don’t. As we were rehearsing a previous show, Players, Mao II, the Names after Don DeLillo, I imagined staging a classic like The Seagull, and wrecking the performance and destroying the characters right after Treplev’s show. Either by armed terrorists or by the progressive disappearance of people in costume from the stage.

Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, both iconic figures of early 20th-century music, were bound by a mutual sense of admiration and respect. They built a bridge between Romanticism and modernism thanks to their respective transformative visions. Performing their works in the same evening brings these two major artistic perspectives into dialogue with one another and invites us to listen to complementary answers to existential or intimate questions.

Are these their favourites? Just those they have played often? Or do artists enjoy trying out something new? In view of the great variety inherent in the solo recitals, such questions arise – and of course the answer is different in every case.

When asked about his text, the author offers an answer that looks to the future. ‘I love snow. A blanket of snow covers the earth and makes everything beautiful. There are the upheavals and all the contradictions of our everyday lives, and then it snows and the world is beautiful,’ says Vladimir Sorokin when talking about his novella. Like works by Pushkin and Tolstoy, it carries the title Метель (The Blizzard) and, at first sight, reads like an intertext distilled from the Russian snowstorm tradition. ‘If you’re outside and get caught in a blizzard, that’s it. It’s a beautiful phenomenon, but also a terrible, fateful event.