Orchestral Sessions: Works for orchestra from Grisey, Ives, Ligeti, Mozart, Caspi

A 60-piece orchestra, 22 gongs, horns ensemble, and divided strings converge in Halle am Berghain for the next edition of Orchestral Sessions. The program brings together Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546, Gérard Grisey’s Accords perdus, György Ligeti’s Ramifications, and a new work by Berlin-based conductor and composer Avi Caspi, composed for orchestra and 22 gongs. Set in total darkness inside the bare geometry of Halle am Berghain, orchestral music enters the club's acoustic and psychological intensity, transforming the room into another instrument that reshapes the orchestra as much as it is shaped by it.

In a rare performance of Accords perdus, Gérard Grisey reduces the spectral imagination to its most fragile state: two horns searching for a lost resonance and turning the intonation into a dramatic material. Harmony does not appear as a stable object: what begins as an attempt for fusion, slowly fractures into distance and collapses into friction and confrontation.

Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question is one of the great suspended and prophetic moments in twentieth-century music. In his own foreword to the piece, Ives imagines three musical worlds: the strings as an indifferent, eternal silence; the trumpet as the recurring question of existence; and the wind instruments as human beings attempting, failing, and finally mocking the possibility of an answer. The work does not resolve the question, but leaves it suspended in space, surrounded by silence.

Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546 is one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's most severe, uncompromising, and modern-sounding works. A fusion of Bach's structural rigor with Mozart's harmonic imagination. The fugue reveals terrifying harmonic language through the accumulation of irresistible energy of the individual voices. Many interpreters regard K. 546 as Mozart's darkest purely instrumental work, and one of the clearest examples that his late style could be as intellectually rigorous as it was emotionally intense.

Ligeti’s Ramifications pulls this instability into the nervous system of the string body itself. Written for strings divided into slightly different tunings, the piece creates a fragile, unstable organism that becomes a living interference pattern.

Caspi’s new work Prefix for orchestra, 22 gongs and horns ensemble expands the evening into a vast acoustic mass. Here, the orchestra becomes a seismic body: a total provocation of the architecture itself.

In order to preserve the natural acoustics of the space and ensure an intimate listening experience, tickets are limited.

Program:
Gérard Grisey: Accords perdus
Charles Ives: The Unanswered Question
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546
György Ligeti: Ramifications for strings
Avi Caspi: Prefix