The Linos Piano Trio looks forward to presenting its fourth annual Linos Festival in Cologne, Germany, running 15-17 September 2023.
This year’s festival is themed around light and darkness, and invites the audience to explore how light (or its absence) affects the way they hear and listen to music.
Subtitled ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, the opening concert on Friday 15th September presents Arnold Schönberg’s masterpiece Pierrot Lunaire , for which the Linos players are joined by mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean, flautist Júlia Gállego and clarinettist Carol McGonnell. The three parts of Pierrot Lunaire – representing love, violence and home respectively – are separated and paired with fantasies by Telemann and new commissions by Prach Boondiskulckok, theatrically guiding the audience through a transition from the real to the subconscious.
The second concert, ‘Into The Night’ on Saturday 16th September, explores the relationship between seeing and hearing through a gradual dimming of the lights in the concert hall. Beginning with Prach Boondiskulchok’s Night Suite, light levels will be gradually reduced during works by Schubert and Strauss, until Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1 ‘Métamorphoses nocturnes’ is performed in complete darkness by the Chaos Quartet.
The festival’s third and final concert on Sunday 17th September looks back to a time before electricity allowed us fully-lit concert halls, and is entitled ‘Candlelight’. Fittingly, the programme is made up of turn-of-the-century music composed around the time that household electricity was becoming available to the masses. Beginning with Ernő Dohnányi’s Piano Quintet No. 1 in C minor, exemplary of the 19th-century musical tradition, the musicians take a look at two different perspectives on early-20th-century modernity in chamber works by Zoltán Kodály and Maurice Ravel.
On both Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th, the festival musicians also present family concerts entitled ‘Light and Dark’ at 11am, offering families with children aged 6 and over the opportunity to experience a real concert in which the children can enjoy the music without inhibition. Everything is allowed – dancing, laughing, sleeping, playing – and the festival’s themes of light and dark will be explored in a relaxed and accessible way.
Tickets and more details are available via the Linos Festival website.
