Kai Schumacher & Benedict Kloeckner

In the organizer's words:

"I could compare my music to white light, in which all colors are contained. Only a prism can separate these colors and make them visible; this prism could be the mind of the listener." (Arvo Pärt)

In their new project Fratres, pianist Kai Schumacher and cellist Benedict Kloeckner embark on a search for Arvo Pärt's brothers (and sisters) in spirit. Taking Pärt's eponymous composition as a starting point, the two musicians take different paths through the Estonian composer's musical cosmos, allowing Fratres to appear again and again in new facets through a kaleidoscopic interplay of original works, their own arrangements and commissioned compositions.

Arvo Pärt, a magician of sound, was targeted early on by Soviet cultural functionaries - whether due to his initially serial and therefore "Western decadent" compositional style or the often religious content of his works. After a creative crisis, he returned to the scene at the end of the 1970s with a completely new musical form: his so-called Tintinnabuli style broke with the musical zeitgeist and strove for reduction and a focus on the essentials - the true core of music. Fratres was written in 1977 as one of the first pieces in this new style and quickly became an iconic work of contemporary composition.

Sounds of beguiling beauty, repetitive structures and contemplative expansiveness are also reflected in the other pieces on the program: whether in the subtle changes of Philip Glass' Metamorphosis Two, the seemingly electronic spheres in Christopher Cerrone's The Pleasure at Being the Cause or the elegiac soundscapes of Gavin Bryars and Valentin Silvestrov. The almost transcendental in Franz Liszt's late works, the deeply felt religiosity in Olivier Messiaen's Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus or Georges I. Gurdjieff's ritualized songs and dances in turn illuminate Fratres from a different perspective. They open up another dimension in Pärt's music - a music full of spiritual power between mysticism and minimalism.

The composition Reminiscenza by Sophia Jani, commissioned especially for the project, and Kai Schumacher's own piece A Line refer to "Fratres" in different ways. They use the work as a playground for associations - sometimes in tonal reduction, sometimes in energetic condensation, thus forming an ideal complement.