Het Collectief olv. Reinbert de Leeuw & Katrien Baerts

When it comes to modern music, Het Collectief has certainly been at the top of the game for some years. From twentieth-century masterpieces to notes whose ink is not yet dry, the Brussels-based quintet have it at their fingertips. For this concert, the company will be going back to the roots of the modern repertoire and taking us through a selection of fin-de-siècle classics. Soprano Katrien Baerts will be impressing us with Berg's 'Sieben frühe Lieder' and Zemlinksy's bewitching 'Maeterlinck Gesänge'. Fans of instrumental music can indulge themselves with Webern's 'Passacaglia'. One small problem: how does a chamber ensemble adapt a repertoire written for either piano or orchestra? Well, it looks for arrangements. Luckily, director Reinbert de Leeuw still had a whole heap he had done himself. Indeed, the fact that, in 1920s Vienna, musicians didn't shy away from an arrangement or two, is proven by the beautiful chamber version that Erwin Stein distilled from Ferruccio Busoni's 'Berceuse élégiaque'.