And always new works from that special repertoire from the 20th and 21st centuries and always new names who want to interpret them. And this year too there are discoveries to be made, even though the well-known Erik Satie gets a special themed day in the program this time. The motto is "Open mind, open ears". What else can one expect from a festival director like musicologist Pieter Bergé.
Just at the opening concert in the Leuven Pieter de Somer Aula on 25 September you can open your ears to Ferruccio Busoni, listen with an open mind to the Maeterlinck songs by Alexander von Zemlinsky and enjoy a still romantic (!) Schoenberg: his symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande. All this performed by the Brussels chamber music ensemble "Het Collectief", active for many years in that "modernist" repertoire.
Want to hear lesser-known work from that genre? Come listen to a duo for cello and piano and the clarinet trio by Russian Galina Oestvolskaja. The performers? Trio Khaldei and clarinetist Benjamin Dieltjens, in the atmospheric Sint Geertruikerk. If those sounds seem too harsh to your ears, you get Béla Bartók's Night Music as a "soothing refrain" for free.
And want to hear a young violinist with a famous prize collection? Go for Sylvia Huang (laureate Elisabeth Competition 2019, Klara-Canvas audience prize and also that of RTBf-Musiq3 and now concertmaster of the Munt Symphony Orchestra…!) So go on 2 October to the Irish College where she will perform, together with Anthony Devriendt (horn) and Jan Michiels (piano), the horn trios by both Brahms and Ligeti.
The Sunday themed day (8 October) goes under the name "Satie s'amuse". There will be three very special concerts in the Leuven Stadsschouwburg with of course Jan Michiels and Inge Spinette (piano) and Lore Binon (soprano). Without a doubt they will amuse themselves in turn and together. Pieter Bergé, just back from a visit to Satie's birthplace Honfleur, will oversee everything with a solid introduction to the work of that unguided projectile, the unabashed Erik Satie. And not only on that spectacular day but also during many other concerts you can get acquainted with the always surprising video work of Lise Bruyneel.
Two more places that will bring surprises to this Festival: the church of the Keizersberg Abbey and a forest near Leuven. One concert is called "Eternal Light" and brings together composers such as Rachmaninov, Ligeti, Pärt, Vasks, MacMillan and Esenvalds. The other is simply called "Wald." The four horn players of the Korpus Kwartet bring their instrument to where it belongs, the forest.
Yet two more suggestions. By Mieczyslaw Weinberg, another composer who is too little known, the refined Quator Danel performs his string quartet op.130 together with the string quartet no. 15 by Shostakovich. A restrained concert under the title In Memoriam in the atmospheric Sint Geertrui church. A somewhat jazzy atmosphere can also be picked up by the way with a few names that were inspired by that new American genre with among other things music by of course Duke Ellington and Gershwin but also by Martinu, Schulhoff and Poulenc.
So you see that Festival 20·21 can once again offer you a whole series of enrichments from a sometimes too little-known oeuvre that we still call contemporary today. And for those who want to taste that "contemporary" straight from the source and really hear "new" music, there is of course the three-day Transit festival (20-22/10) where diversity, as it manifests itself in our living world today, is musically omnipresent.