Ars Musica

Ars Musica takes place in Brussels until 25.04. It is one of the most interesting festival of contemporary music. See the program in English here

French-speaking podcasts (I): Musiq3

For those who want to practise their French while listening to music, I’ll list the best available podcasts I know from French-speaking radios. I begin with the Belgian radio Musiq 3 dedicated to classical music. Their podcasts are available here and one can download all of them through this link
Here is a brief description of the most interesting podcastable programs:

The principle of “table d’écoute” is nice: the same classical piece is listened to several times through different interpretations and the guests (generally musicians or musicologists) have to vote for one of them and explain their choice. Quite instructive about classical music.
“terre de sons” is about world music

“noctuor” presents especially long pieces which cannot be displayed in day time (mahler’s symphonies, beethoven quintett, etc)

“musique et autres muses” presents musical portraits of writers, painters, films directors, choregraphers (eg sartre, stendhal, delacroix, matisse, etc). the idea of the producer is that musical passions often reveal well the personality.

“les classiques de demain” is dedicated to contemporary music (anthony braxton, giacinto scelsi,etc)

“carnet de notes” dedicates each session to one composer in particular

“appassionato” receives each week one guest, a musician, a writer or any other artist, and this guest presents her/his own musical program

Isabella Pitisci

Isabella Pitisci is a Belgian photographer settled in London. She studied Romance philology and Art History in Bruxelles

Zeitung, by Rosas

Rosas has a new show called Zeitung, on the music of Bach and Webern.

11 January 2008 will see the world premiere at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris. The performance will then immediately commence a tour of France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain.

Together with the Rosas dancers, the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and pianist go in search of the unstable combination of music and dance, choreography and improvisation, romance and disillusion. In a broad historical gesture, Bach, Schoenberg and Webern traverse the geometrical principles and improvisational wild cards of the Rosas choreography. In harmony and difference, in unison or counterpoint. In Zeitung, music and dance do not meet on the basis of any similarity or parallel, but on the intersection of the two. Alain Franco provides live piano accompaniment for the nine Rosas dancers. By the way, Alain Franco is an enigmatic guy. I have vaguely the impression that he was assistant of the Sartrian philosopher Pierre Verstraeten at the Université libre de Bruxelles, but I might confuse him with somebody else. I also have the vague impression that he has something to do with the great bar walvis at the end of the antoine dansaert street in Bruxelles, but again, maybe I’m wrong. I also have the vague memory that he founded a literary review with a guy using to work at this horrible bookshop Filigrane, but again…What is sure is that he directed the Ictus ensemble (see previous post) for some time.

Aglaia Konrad reist viel

Aglaia Konrad was born in Salzburg in 1960 and now lives and works in Brussels. Over the years she brought together an enormous archive of images shot in such diverse cities as Sao Paulo, Beijing, Chicago, Dakar, Tokyo, Cairo or Shanghai. Her pictures are always very strong, dry, very beautiful. Her book “Elasticity” provides a “strong dose of the thrill and horror of the late 20th-century metropolis” (…) her work documents “the global centers of late capitalism in all their frightening glory.” (R. Smith in NY Times 2004). A catalogue of an exhibition of her in Antwerp is available here.

(c) Aglaia Konrad