In the Henry Le Bœuf hall, an afternoon concert took place on Sunday, May 3rd that was built with iron-clad intensity as a whole. Three musical worlds stood not side by side, but interlocked with one another: romantic imagination, contemporary urgency, and mythic memory. Under the direction of Michael Schønwandt, the Belgian National Orchestra (BNO) proved itself exceptionally flexible and expressive, both in sound and in approach. What was heard was not merely an ensemble playing, but an orchestra that convincingly mastered the different score logics and presented them as one continuous arc of tension. Nature functioned not as a backdrop, but as an active, guiding force.
Smetana reread
Vltava by Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884) opened like a seemingly familiar river image, but under Schønwandt's direction it quickly became clear that this was not merely illustrative Romanticism. The brisk opening, with refined woodwinds and warm string sound, immediately established tension. The beginning didn't sound like a simple brook, but like a directed movement toward Prague, while maintaining its organic character. Through the transparent orchestral sound, the music didn't come across as decoration, but as a clearly constructed musical stream. The middle section took on a restrained character, in sharp contrast to the underlying driving force. Thus Smetana's nature appeared not as passive landscape, but as a carrier of historical and national significance.
Sound as ecological tension
Then came the focal point of the afternoon: Mother Earth by Fazıl Say (b.1970). The work situates itself within Say's outspoken ecological commitment and his concern about the planet's fragility – a theme he expressed not in rhetorical images, but in intriguing musical tension and resistance. Whoever reduces the piece to nature commentary misses the core: it is not a pastoral lament and no programmatic warning in the narrow sense, but a work in which the earth itself seems to shift under pressure.
In contrast to Say's more introspective works such as Black Earth, in which sound still roots itself in an almost archaeological memory of Anatolian melody and silence, presented Mother Earth itself as a composition without a point of rest. Everything was under tension: lyricism was never innocent, rhythm never neutral. The richly layered orchestration continually revealed new facets: bird sounds, wind, rhythmic eruptions, and sound fields that emerged as different manifestations of the earth.
The piano part – played by Say himself – functioned not as a virtuoso showpiece, but as a catalyst of energy. His playing was physically charged, sometimes almost anti-lyrical in its directness. Chords were not built up but placed down; phrases not rounded off but broken or pushed through. In this way the piano didn't float above the orchestra, but dug itself into it. At the same time, the melodic piano solos and alternating rhythms remained an important vehicle of expression, in close symbiosis with the BNO. That orchestra didn't respond accompaningly, but as a counterforce and echo simultaneously. What emerged was not a dialogue in balance, but a system in tension – precisely where the work found its existential charge: humanity not opposite, but in the midst of an unstable nature.
It was precisely in that consistent build-up of tension that the impact of the performance lay. The work held you in its grip from beginning to end, raised questions without wanting to solve them, and thus established itself as a rarely convincing contemporary score. As a listener, you were kept in constant tension, waiting for what would unfold next. The fact that the BNO under Schønwandt's direction managed to realize the fragile balance between control and disruption so sharply, and that Say inscribed himself not as a soloist but as a driving force, made this reading all the more convincing. It resulted in a fascinating and challenging work that is clearly worthy of the repertoire, with fierce emotions and restrained lyricism, and an ending that faded away impressively.
The audience was clearly moved: the long, sustained applause, with the composer having to return repeatedly, underscores how exceptional this reception was for contemporary music. Hopefully this intriguing work will receive many more performances.
Mythic time and dissolution
After that contemporary friction, one entered a different temporal layer with Jean Sibelius's (1865-1957) Lemminkäinen Suite: not current, but archetypal. Based on the Kalevala epic – a 19th-century compilation of oral traditions – the cycle depicts not a linear story, but a mythic consciousness in which humanity, nature, and death are not separate domains. Central to it is Lemminkäinen: a restless, impulsive hero who moves through the world without fixed order or destination. His wanderings lead him from seduction to confrontation: he seduces the maidens of an island, ventures toward Tuonela, the realm of the dead, where he dies and dissolves, only to be – thanks to his mother – awakened back to life and return. This cycle of seduction, downfall, and return is not told by Sibelius as a linear narrative, but as a series of states in which action and environment flow into one another.
"Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island" opened as a play of energy and seduction, but beneath that lightness lay a structural instability. From the first horn entrance, it was immediately clear that an intense development would follow. The music remained in constant motion, as if it didn't quite trust its own equilibrium. The hero appeared not as a symbol of order, but of impulse. In the BNO's performance, the finely calibrated mobility was striking: supple strings, subtly coloring woodwinds, a delicate light triangle, and a conductor who didn't smooth out the underlying unease, but let it circulate within the phrasing.
"The Swan of Tuonela" served as both the still point and turning point of the cycle. Tuonela became less a place than a state in which time dissolved and perception slowed. The English horn solo sounded like an otherworldly voice, carried by an orchestra that pulled back its sound to the threshold of audibility without sacrificing tension. The solo cello also contributed sublimely to the sonic depth. Schønwandt chose intensity over dramatic effect: the music didn't happen, but hung suspended. Precisely because this section didn't sound like an isolated miniature but remained embedded in the whole, it gained its full weight.
"Lemminkäinen in Tuonela" shifted the perspective from observation to descent. The material fragmented, as if musical identity itself dissolved, yet the performance maintained remarkable clarity: sharp contours without massiveness, transparency without loss of intensity. Particularly striking was the moment when the first and second violins played together in an almost esoteric way, an effect that arrived like a sudden lightning strike.
"Lemminkäinen's Return" finally refused simple triumph. The energy was undeniable, but the underlying ambiguity remained. The music sounded as if it remembered what it had been through. Schønwandt kept that tension intact without neutralizing it into brilliance; the orchestra followed with utmost discipline and precision; the buildup was sharp but without gratuitous effect.
As a whole, the cycle was sustained by the exceptional control and imagination of the BNO and Schønwandt, who forged tension, color and form into a coherent and convincing whole.
A layered tension field between nature, humanity and myth
The strength of this afternoon ultimately lay not only in the contrast, but in the way each work mirrored the logic of the other without imitating it. The BNO and Schønwandt thus built a dramaturgy that was not linear but layered: a concert that couldn't be understood as a sequence, but as a tension field—a musical space in which nature, humanity and myth continually intersected and redefined each other. What remained was an experience that was hard to let go of: an orchestra and conductor making music at an exceptional level, with rare sonic richness and a performance that could effortlessly stand as a recording.
