How does the leadership of Festival 20·21 experience that motto themselves?
Anyone who unsuspectingly went to the concert hall in spring to enjoy a piece of classical repertoire or to have a pleasant chat during intermission with like-minded music lovers sometimes comes away disappointed. Take BOZAR or Flagey during the recent Elisabeth piano competition. You are guaranteed to see and hear young talent performing magnificent virtuoso work from the standard repertoire. But there is always a surprise in between: that famous mandatory work by a contemporary composer. For the semi-final there was a magnificent work by Canadian Ana Sokolovic, two studies for solo piano, and for the final there was Music for the heart by 'our' Kris Defoort.
Well, the musical autumn in Leuven will sound completely contemporary again. And that thanks to two musicologists who have been committed to this for years. They are the duo Bergé-Beirens. Pieter Bergé as programmer of Festival 20·21 and Maarten Beirens with his truly contemporary Transit weekend in the midst of those few weeks of modern musical pleasure. We asked them both directly what actually prompted them to take hold of precisely that music and say, that will be it for me. It turned out to be simply their personal interpretation of the festival motto: open your mind, open your ears.
Maarten Beirens had to reach far back into his memory for an answer: "Because, as far as I can remember, I was always curious about new music, about music that went beyond the great 18th and 19th-century repertoire. As a teenager I listened to everything I could get my hands on in the discotheque. I was then (and still am) a kind of musical glutton. Since then I have always looked with great interest at what is happening in music. I had that then and also now, always already. So for me it doesn't feel like something I stumbled into in some weird way or had to specifically dedicate myself to or anything like that. No, it seems to have come naturally and it has continued. So yes, it continues and can only continue because new things keep being written. That's what's great about the Transit festival. We bring so much truly new work from composers who are active now. Those composers always surprise you and that can be good or bad. But it's in any case a kind of exciting ride with a destination that is never quite clear."
But are there names among those new composers that you can say will become the new classics of the 21st century? Beirens does not want to go further than a personal subjective preference. He finds that difficult to answer. Yet there are a number who gain a certain status through continuously delivering high-quality work. Difficult to predict whether that work will survive the centuries, but he can't help but mention a name that will again be on the programme at that Transit three-day festival from 17-19 October, Swedish composer Lisa Streich.
"As far as I'm concerned, she could well develop into someone who can become a landmark in that new music. But there are also factors needed that have nothing to do with the quality of your work. You have to have a major publisher behind you, the major festivals have to play your work, orchestras have to take the trouble to commission a work from you, so you have to become embedded in that quite specific corner of the music sector that looks toward renewal."
So at Transit, which as always has a very diverse character both in terms of composers and performers, although this time alongside a broad international line-up it also brings a striking number of Flemish names.
And how did musicologist Pieter Bergé come to this, what sparked his interest in that time period? Bergé: "I think that has to do with the fact that I am happiest when I can link an experienced experience to intellectual work. And that intellectual work satisfies me most when it concerns a period that I can understand from within. That is what I enormously missed when I was dealing with the music of the 18th and 19th centuries. I find the music of Mozart and Co fantastic and I studied that music gladly, but I could not penetrate the context of those 18th & 19th-century composers. I cannot imagine the life of Mozart, of Haydn, of Beethoven or of Wagner. Whereas the life of Schoenberg or Stravinsky and all those great 20th-century names, I can imagine that, I know that, because those are people of my grandfather's generation. It is that proximity in time that gives me much more the feeling that I am involved in it. That distance to them is much smaller than that of people who lived in a much more distant past."
Yet there are many of those composers who remain absent from concert halls, do not reach the concert circuit. And yes, there must be a minimum of accessibility, a sense of recognition, and that goes slowly.
Bergé: "Perhaps Ligeti is one of the clearest certainties from that 20th century that is really played a lot. And of course also those American minimalists for example. And then you're stuck with that balancing act between easy and difficult music where appreciation is linked to the accessibility of the music. And there is certainly a minimum of accessibility needed to survive. You can say: Schoenberg survives, but you don't hear him that much in concert halls, he survives at the universities, among the musicologists, but in the programming...? And I'm not talking about 'Verklärte Nacht'. There remains a discrepancy between what survives from a music history perspective and in the concert hall."
To form your own opinion, it's best to come and listen to several of the concerts that this excellent festival has to offer. Yet the festival couples old with new to open on 22 September: Bach and Shostakovich. Anyone who knows Bergé knows that 'his' festival cannot do without his beloved Russian. And pianist Hannes Minnaar, third laureate of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 2010, made brilliant recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations, now he brings 'Das wohltemperierte klavier', a work that inspired Shostakovich to create his own series of '24 preludes and fugues' which are also featured on the opening concert. Old and new are not so far apart after all……