Ars Musica - Lastly, while still blissfully stretched out on your cushion, Café Ars Musica will take you on a trip with music from the seventies and eighties.

Ars Musica - At the end of November La Monnaie, Bozar, the Kaaitheater and Ars Musica Winter presented Georges Aperghis’ Avis de Tempête, an event of the highest order. Gives you an appetite for more. Machinations, first performed in 2000, is pure Aperghis and is the liveliest and most moving piece he has ever written. Music, text, video and performers enter into an alchemical combination.

Ars Musica - Le Grand Gamelan is the title of a suite composed by Bo Van de Werf of the Octurn jazz ensemble for an imaginary gamelan group comprising the eight musicians of Octurn and the five percussionists from Ictus. The spirit of the ‘gamelan’ is evoked by the expanded percussion section (marimba, vibraphone, celeste, gongs, glockenspiel and tubular bells, and traditional elements of the gamelan).

For her latest music project, Bast, Laïla Amezian took her inspiration from the mystical The Prophet by the Lebanese-American poet Gibran Khalil Gibran. The text will be performed partly in English and partly in Arabic, set to music that opts decisively for a mixture of eastern and western influences and which is permeated with world music, electro and jazz.

They grew up in the USSR, where several of them were musicians on the underground scene in Moscow, and after the fall of the Wall they left for Berlin, where, in 2006 and on the initiative of the artist, poetess and singer Irina Doubrovskaya, they formed the group Ersatzmusika. It has a sound all its own, in which one hears traces of dub, urban folk, world, minimal, gipsy music and musical cast-offs from the Soviet period.

Three composers, Iannis Kiriakides, Dimitri Kourliandski and Serge Verstockt, are each composing a work for the combination of Champ d’Action and Slagwerkgroep Den Haag, a combination of three to six percussionists, an equal number of ‘ordinary’ instruments and live electronics. This is the sound of the 21st century!

There are more than 6000 names for the wind around the world. Fascinated by this almost ‘virtual’ natural element, the choreographer Karine Ponties, composer Dominique Pauwels and artist Lawrence Malstaf are creating a performance about invisible forces and their visible traces, and on the impact of elusive energy and endless movement.

Two Belgian ensembles join forces for a project that brings old and new music together in a refreshing programme. It centres on a new composition by Eric Sleichim called Isotropes de l’ombre. The creation is based on a piece written by Leonardo Da Vinci. The programme also includes mediaeval chants and modern compositions by John Cage and Jonathan Harvey.

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.