Ars Musica - At Expo 58, Varèse’s Poème électronique was performed in the Philips pavilion, which briefly put Belgium at the peak of developments in electronic music. On this night of electroacoustic music, while lying or sitting on cushions, you will be able to discover (or rediscover) the work of the pioneers, performed by the Orquestra del Caos, an orchestra without musicians.

Ars Musica - Over the last fifteen years, the French Accentus ensemble, led by Laurence Equilbey, has become one of Europe’s most renowned choruses. At Ars Musica, together with musicians from the Orchestre National de France, they will be performing a programme of religious works by Anton Bruckner, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti and Pascal Dusapin.

In Zeitung, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and pianist Alain Franco, together with the Rosas dancers, go in search of the unstable combination of music and dance, choreography and improvisation, romance and disillusion and of the essential building blocks of choreography. Alain Franco provides live piano accompaniment for the nine dancers.  The music is by Bach, Webern and Schönberg.

The BL!NDMAN saxophone quartet celebrates its twentieth anniversary with a concert involving the artists Anouk De Clercq and Kris Verdonck. Works of a.o. Ockeghem, Bach, Mozart, Cage, Xenakis and Harvey will be performed and Eric Sleichim is composing a new work. No less than twenty musicians will appear on stage: the ‘mother quartet’ and the four junior quartets (voice, drums, strings and sax).

In 2006 Jan Decorte staged his first opera, Dido and Aeneas by the English baroque composer Henry Purcell. Together with the English conductor Richard Egarr and a select cast, Decorte made it an unforgettable event. De Morgen: ‘A gem of simplicity, rightness and emotion.’

One of the high points of last season was the performance of Georges Aperghis’ breathtaking 14 Récitations. Aperghis is joining us again this season, with Avis de tempête, a ‘miraculous, hallucinatory’ piece of musical theatre, first performed by Ictus at the Opéra de Lille in 2004. It was directed by Aperghis himself. Le Figaro: ‘Une oeuvre d’art totale.’

The Prometheus Ensemble presents a well-considered mixture of classical and contemporary music. In this concert, Mauricio Kagel will be conducting three of his own works. Kagel is a major figure in the music of our time, an undogmatic composer who is not averse to introducing a boisterous and provocative humour into his work.