I SOLISTI & SPECTRA

I SOLISTI unites top musicians who have each built a solid reputation as soloists, orchestral or chamber musicians. A permanent core of about twenty musicians is expanded or reduced depending on the project. The musical heritage of 250 years of wind (r)evolution from Mozart to today is the leitmotiv and is carried out with devotion but also continuously questioned and renewed.

SPECTRA is an ensemble that is curious for new music, with Filip Rathé as artistic director and conductor. The ensemble develops trajectories with composers living in Flanders and promotes their work in an international and historical context. SPECTRA premieres a lot of commissioned works in a continuous dialogue with referential masterpieces from the recent past.

Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) was a leading voice of her generation of composers, both in her native Finland and worldwide. Her characteristically luxuriant and mysterious textures were often created by combining live performance and electronics. Her compositions bear the mark of her relentless attempt to blend the scientific, technological and rational with an approach grounded in poetic inspiration and resulting in deeply sensorial and associative experiences.

Annelies Van Parys is one of Belgium’s leading composers. She writes solo and chamber music as well as large orchestral compositions. She has also focused much on the field of opera, music theatre and installation works, with the drama of these complementing her instrumental writing. Van Parys is resident composer at Muziektheater Transparant and professor of composition at the Brussels Royal Conservatory.

Saskia Venegas is a Spanish-Belgian composer, music theatre maker, and violinist based in the Netherlands. Her interest in human socio-political behavior and the urgency to raise awareness of social injustice fuel her writing. During 2024 and 2025, Venegas will be a composer in residence at the Dutch Festival Music Meeting, where she will write new work for cellist Maya Fridman and Kronos Quartet.

To what intensity do we experience the sound around us? What is the boundary between the sounds that surround us every day and music? In her practice as a composer, Ellen Jacobs (BE) tries to answer these questions by zooming in on sound and recontextualising it. She explores the boundary between electronic and acoustic music and uses both to shape her sound world.