We are delighted to announce that tickets are now on sale for the remaining events of Season 2: RESIST! – The Sound of Defiance. From February to June 2026, we continue our exploration of music as an act of resistance, bearing witness to authoritarian violence, censorship, exile, and the power of humanity’s enduring resilience.
We’d like to remind you as well that tickets are on sale for our Carte Blanche concerts, the first of which takes place on 16 January 2026 at 19:00 at Tonhain! We will be joined by special guests from Paris - the M Sphère collective - for a program of Brahms and Mozart’s masterful clarinet quintets, along with a contemporary clarinet quintet by GRAMMY-nominated Irish composer Emma O’Halloran.
Next Season 2 Concerts:
Interlude: Human Acts (20 February 2026, 19:00) brings together the music of Isang Yun with selections from Nobel Prize-winning author Han Kang’s novel Human Acts, read aloud in German translation by renowned philosopher Florian Goldberg. Yun’s works are shaped by his experience as a political prisoner and self-exile in Berlin, while Kang’s text speaks to the human cost of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea.
Concert: Dream Portraits (20 March 2026, 19:00) takes its title from Margaret Bonds’ Three Dream Portraits, songs set to poems by Langston Hughes, which reflect African American aspirations for dignity and equality. Songs by Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler respond to the rise of fascism with satire and solidarity, while Maurice Ravel’s Chansons madécasses address colonial oppression. The evening culminates in Olivier Messiaen’s masterpiece Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, composed in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp.
Concert: Musica non grata (24 April 2026, 19:00) is dedicated to composers whose music was banned, censored, or suppressed under totalitarian regimes. Works by Gideon Klein, Bohuslav Martinů, and Erwin Schulhoff reveal extraordinary creative courage in the face of persecution, while Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s early String Sextet evokes a musical world soon to be eclipsed by fascism. This concert honors artistic voices that survived despite the countless attempts to silence them.
Interlude: Spectacle (15 May 2026, 19:00) celebrates women’s artistic self-determination across history. Framed by a conversation with fashion designer Jenny Lai on the suffragist movement and clothing as political expression, the program features music by Amy Beach, Lili Boulanger, and Theresa Wong, works that reclaim space for female voices long excluded from the canon. For this concert, the musicians will perform in special outfits by Jenny Lai, designed specifically for this project. Inspired by suffragette fashion, they will also make the evening a visual political statement.
Concert: Defiance (12 June 2026, 19:00) concludes the season with music rooted in cultural memory and spiritual resistance. Reza Vali’s Folk Songs Set No. 11b reimagines Persian traditions censored in Iran, while Sofia Gubaidulina’s Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten embodies unwavering artistic conviction forged under Soviet repression. Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 6 and André Jolivet’s Chant de Linos confront the devastation of war with fierce emotional honesty and lamentation, affirming music as an act of survival.
We warmly invite you to join us for these remaining events of Season 2, and to celebrate the enduring power of artistic expression.
