09.02.26, 20:00, Susanna Braun, Liszt

Double bill with Klinck Trio and dudal & de Roover: from lovely soundscapes with a bite to mesmerizing tape loops. Klinck Trio creates slowly unfolding soundscapes where melody and silence are interwoven, resulting in a delicate, childlike space of intimacy and discovery. Dudal & de Roover brings tape loops that patiently and organically move toward grainy ambient.

About dudal & de Roover

The Belgian musicians Pieter Dudal and Adriaan de Roover explore the tactile, ritualized art of tape loops, where every gesture — cutting, shifting and layering tape — shapes the evolving sound. Their practice has developed through live performances at Meakusma Festival and residencies at arts centers such as VIERNULVIER, Ancienne Belgique and Volta, combining acoustic and electronic sources into immersive soundscapes that unfold with both careful craftsmanship and organic growth.

Based in Brussels, Adriaan de Roover has been carving a unique path in experimental electronic music for over a decade, with releases on labels such as [PIAS], Dauw, Consouling and Fog Mountain. He is an experienced collaborator, installation artist and commissioned composer — recently creating music for a fashion exhibition by Milk of Lime (DE) and a 4DSOUND project co-produced by STUK Leuven and MONOM. His latest album, Other Rooms (Dauw), was praised by Bandcamp, HHV and The Vinyl Factory.

Dudal is the moniker of Pieter Dudal, a Ghent-based sound artist and musician. He is the founder and curator of the labels Dauw and blickwinkel. His work intertwines lo-fi melodies with slowly evolving textures, resulting in delicate electroacoustic compositions. In 2021, he released his debut album Can You Say It Again, and he currently hosts a monthly show on Kiosk Radio in Brussels.

About Klinck Trio

With their debut album, My Hair is Everywhere, Klinck Trio—Elisabeth Klinck (violin, vocals), Adia Vanheerentals (saxophone, vocals), and Maya Dhondt (piano, vocals)—unfolds an intimate language in which melody and silence hold each other in a fragile balance. Rooted in improvisation, the music exudes an openness in which every sound and pause is given meaning.
The album sounds like an invitation to attentive listening: from whispering details and breathing spaces to playful melodies and tender resonances. Inspired by artists like Meredith Monk, the music moves between lightness and melancholy, searching for a fragile beauty that only fully unfolds in silence.

Elisabeth Klinck is a contemporary violinist, composer, and performer from Brussels, known for her timeless, profound soundscapes. Her albums ‘Picture a Frame’ (2023) and ‘Chronotopia’ – selected by The Quietus as one of the best albums of 2025. In 2025, Elisabeth was selected as one of radio station Klara’s De Twintigers, a group of promising young artists who are shaping the future of Belgian classical music.

Adia Vanheerentals is one of Belgium’s most promising young musicians. She was selected for Klara De Twintigers (2024) and is also the driving force behind Bodem, her trio with Anke Verslype and Willem Malfliet, with which she toured during JazzLab in 2025. Her solo LP ‘Here Are 5 Reasons to Meditate’ was released in 2024 on Ultra Eczema, and her next album ‘Taking Place’ on Relative Pitch Records is scheduled for release in November 2025.
Maya Dhondt is a Brussels-based pianist and abstract virtuoso whose practice ranges from glitch-pop experiments to contemporary piano works. She has performed at festivals such as Rewire (The Hague) and Fifty Lab (Brussels), and her debut album ‘wow, x’ was released in 2024 on VIERNULVIER Records.

Support: GAME (Hui Chi Lee, Julen Latorre)

Plastic Air is a piece for flexible duo, live electronics, and video by the Portuguese composer Igor C. Silva. Lights, noise, jazz grooves and plastic ducks come together in an intense and sometimes overwhelming audiovisual setting, where humour and rough energy play an important role.

The piece moves between tightly shaped moments and more open situations, allowing sound, image and physical presence to interact freely. Hui Chi Lee and Julen Latorre have arranged the work for bass clarinet and drums, using improvisation as a way to stretch the material and respond in real time to what is happening on stage.

Cellists Jorge Gimenez and Maxim Calver are preparing for the Queen Elisabeth Competition. They are accompanied by Katsura Mizumoto. The program includes works by Shostakovich, Boulanger, Bloch, Beethoven and Boccherini.

The Ryelandt Trio, known for their recordings of Flemish music, expands to a quintet for the occasion, joined by violinist Linde Verjans and violist Séamus Hickey. This Ryelandt Ensemble pairs music by Sjostakovitsj with that of — how could it be otherwise — Joseph Ryelandt.

Although Joseph Ryelandt (1870–1965) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) lived in largely overlapping historical periods, the two composers could hardly have been more different. Ryelandt, a French-speaking aristocrat from Bruges, wrote music that never sounds dissonant in any way, whereas Sjostakovitsj’s work contains a grimness closely tied to the constant threat of persecution in Stalin’s Communist Russia. Ryelandt’s lyrical melodies thus form a welcome counterbalance to the urgency that speaks from every note of Sjostakovitsj.

Twenty-three years old and winner of the Queen Elisabeth Competition, the Dutch pianist Nikola Meeuwsen hardly needs an introduction anymore. He won over both the audience and the jury with sensitive and colourful piano playing. The versatile Variations sérieuses by Felix Mendelssohn fits Meeuwsen like a glove. In the theme and the seventeen variations that follow, he can showcase his refined virtuosity to the fullest. Scriabin’s dreamy Poème then sketches a completely different sound world. To conclude the programme, we hear a Carnaval à la Schumann — far more exuberant than we are used to from the composer: in this early work Schumann clearly still brimmed with vitality, though a darker edge already glimmers through from time to time. And so we end an evening that began in a serious vein on a somewhat lighter note after all.

Program

F. Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
– Variations serieuses

A. Scriabin (1871-1915)
– Poème op. 32  no. 1 in Fis majeur

R. Schumann (1810-1856)
– Carnaval op. 9

Until a century ago, it was taken for granted that a classically trained musician could also improvise. Cadences in concertos, for example, lent themselves perfectly to this. Soloists such as Paganini and Ysaÿe were renowned for their improvisational talent and their compositions. Why this skill has fallen into disuse is less important than the question of how it can be revived. Boyan Vodenitcharov intends to dust off improvisation and reintroduce spontaneity into classical music. His playing balances on the border between classical and jazz.  

Vodenitcharov was third laureate of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 1983. He has been a regular jury member for the competition since 2003. He passes on his knowledge at the conservatories of Ghent, Liège, and Brussels. 

When Franz Schubert began work on his fourteenth string quartet in 1824, he borrowed from his own repertoire: he recycled the theme from one of his songs, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ (Death and the Maiden), thereby giving the quartet not only its unofficial name, but also an intriguing second movement. It begins with a funeral march, immediately setting the tone: death is approaching, and although it occasionally shows its most charming side, the undertone is unmistakably threatening. 

The Barbican Quartet, which won first prize in the ARD International Music Competition in 2022, once again demonstrates its versatility. In addition to Schubert's classic, they perform Haydn's Opus 20, No. 6. They place this forefather of the string quartet alongside the lesser-known but equally interesting Szymanovski. Barbican chose his second quartet. 

Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata has often been a source of inspiration for other artists in the past — think of Tolstoy and Janáček — and the piece continues to provoke. This makes it ideal for Will to Wander, which shines a different light on classical works. 

Beethoven dedicated his 9th sonata to his good friend, violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer, who is best known among violinists for his etudes. The original commission was for Bridgetower, who premiered the piece but found it unplayable. To err is human: the work is now part of the standard violin repertoire and is performed frequently. Tonight, you will hear it first in its original form by Duo Altiler, who won Klara's Supernova competition in 2025 and also took home the audience prize. After that, Aaricia Ponnet & Haroun Iqbal will let their imagination run wild. 

If you ask Jeroen Berwaerts what he is working on, chances are that the answer will be extensive and varied. This internationally acclaimed soloist and teacher moves smoothly between all musical styles – mostly as a trumpeter, but sometimes also as a (jazz) singer. He performs as a soloist with various orchestras of the highest caliber, collaborates in chamber music with luminaries such as Alexander Melnikov, and regularly premieres new works. Rarely does a musician manage to convey such a rich range of styles and roles with such conviction.

This recital also demonstrates that versatility is his trademark. Together with pianist Akiko Nikami, a much sought-after accompanist and soloist, he performs repertoire from the 20th and 21st centuries, from Théo Charlier and Toshio Hosokawa to Gershwin, Ligeti, and Rodgers.

At Will to Wander, you will hear each piece twice: first as it was written, then in a new guise. The central piece this evening is Steve Reich's Piano Phase. It is a constant shifting of similar material, divided between two pianos that seem to contradict, support, and complement each other. This is right up the alley of piano duo Simplexity, who want to understand how simplicity and complexity relate to each other. After the original performance, violinist Merel Vercammen will present her interpretation.

In the same vein as Piano Phase is John Adams' Hallelujah Junction, in which seemingly simple material is again divided between the two pianos in such a way that it produces an ‘acoustic version of a digital delay’. It sounds like a flight of starlings looks: like a cloud that keeps changing its mind. 

Merel Vercammen, in turn, explores the artistic possibilities of the electric five-string violin. Inspired by the characteristic repetitive patterns in the piano repertoire of Steve Reich and John Adams, she develops a new soundscape in which the violin transforms into a full-fledged sound orchestra. Piano Phase and Hallelujah Junction are built on layered repetitions and subtle shifts in rhythm and harmony. This structure forms the starting point for Merel’s approach. Within that framework, improvisations arise that develop according to Reich’s and Adams’ logic of gradual transformation, but with their own voice and dynamics. In this context, the electric five-string violin is amplified and expanded with a series of guitar pedals. This technology makes it possible to create a layered, pulsating and richly orchestrated sound field live, on her own.

Two idiosyncratic artists who actively unlearn tradition in order to create highly intuitive compositions that convey their very personal styles through guitar, woodwinds, and electronics.

Double bill with classically trained guitarist Chuck Roth on a curious musical exploration of the world of electronic music, and Lea Bertucci, the self-taught and idiosyncratic composer who weaves field recordings and noise techniques with woodwinds into installation art and creative masterpieces full of strings, wind instruments, percussion and creatively misused audio technology.

About Lea Bertucci

Lea Bertucci is an experimental musician, composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates spatialized speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology. In recent years, her projects have expanded toward site-specific and spatially aware projects that initiate new access points to architecture. Her approach to music is marked by dense masses of sustained dissonance and a fascination with the sonic substance of common experience.

Her discography spans over a decade, with eight full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. In 2018 and 2019, she released solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field on NNA Tapes, and has since gone on to found her own label, Cibachrome Editions, with 2021’s A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release followed by 2022’s Murmurations, a duo with Ben Vida.

About Chuck Roth

Chuck Roth’s music wanders. The New York-based guitarist’s inquisitive style builds from rippling patterns that center the physicality of his instrument, roaming wherever they take him. watergh0st songs, his Palilalia debut, collects songs from the past half-decade, presenting an intimate snapshot of his music that draws from an eclectic background in classical guitar, electronic music, and improvisation.

Though Roth’s music often feels quite direct, there is a dreaminess that lives inside of it. His lyrics don’t feel too hot or cold, instead they have a wistfulness and melancholy of what it feels like to live through every passing day. His exploratory style bolsters these lyrics, giving the music its sense of ennui, as does his focus on texture. Each track takes on a different structure: “Bunny Hop” unfolds like a squirrel jumping from branch to branch of a tree, while “Private Boy” has a slower approach, growing from delayed harmonics that almost sound like bowed strings. His textures range from metallic and bristling to soft and feathery, evolving with gentleness. It is about ending up somewhere different than where it started, and watching the notes that fall in between.

About Sarah Grace Graves & Ali Choupani

Representing the GAME ensemble, Sarah Grace Graves and Ali Choupani bring Swallow’s Embrace, two works that approach the intimate, interior space joining voice and instrument. In Swallow’s Dream, Choupani traces the border between wakefulness and sleep, where sound drifts into dream and memory and imagination intertwine. In Embrace, the voice folds in on itself by way of multiphonics to create a tactile field of sound that feels both solitary and shared. Ali Choupani is a flutist, improviser, and sound designer whose work moves between classical performance, experimental practice, and sound research. Sarah Grace Graves is a singer and composer working where recital meets ritual. Her solo album Three Names was released with Elektramusic in 2025. They are both students in the advanced master contemporary music at KASK & Conservatorium.