KLANG Festival opening concert

In this year's opening concert, the Basel Sinfonietta presents a programme of music by five composers, all of whom represent very different musical traditions and compositional practices. While the programme reveals a wide range of stylistic approaches, the five composers, Isabel Mundry, Gemma Ragués Pujol, Ylva Lund Bergner, Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje and Cathy Milliken, are united by their courage to cross boundaries and explore new paths. Their involving, experimental or improvisational work surprises and reveals new perspectives – not only in a musical sense.

In the orchestral work Endless Sediments, the German composer Isabel Mundry explores traces of music that are temporally or spatially distant. In her differentiated tonal language, a reflection on the relationship between time, space and sensation flows through the work. Temporal distances are also a key element of the Australian composer Cathy Milliken's work Ediacaran Fields. For this work Milliken drew inspiration from 500 million year old fossils found in South Australia. Likewise, it is in the natural world that the Swedish-Danish composer Ylva Lund Bergner drew inspiration for the orchestral work dOWN, commissioned by KLANG, which explores the interaction between the wind and the trees.

In a combination of orchestral music and performance art, the young Barcelona-born composer and performance artist Gemma Ragués Pujol, commissioned by the Basel Sinfonietta, has written a new work in which the orchestra echoes and colours a narrator's words to create a piece of musical cubism, and where rhythm and text plays a leading role. And in Considering Icarus, a trombone concerto by Norwegian singer and composer Maja SK Ratkje, soloist Stephen Menotti is encouraged to pursue his highest ambitions and thus set the music free.

The concert is supported by

• Canton of Basel-Stadt
• Pro Helvetia
• GGG
• Dr. hc Emile Dreyfus Foundation
• Platform Leimental
• Ernst Göhner Stiftung
• Förderverein Basel Sinfonietta
• Heivish
• Fondation Nicati-de Luze

KLANG Festival

KLANG Festival is Denmark's largest festival for contemporary classical music. The festival embraces the music from after the Second World War, but primarily focuses on the latest music. KLANG takes place every year on a large number of Copenhagen's stages.