Muziektheater Transparant & I Solisti del Vento & Barokorkest B'Rock

'Songs of War' is a project in which three exceptional scores form the occasion for a reflection on war. The evening starts with Monteverdi's celebrated madrigal 'Il combattimento di Tancredi e Colrinda', based on Torquato Tasso's masterly epic poem 'Gerusalemme liberata'. The story of the tragic single combat between the crusader Tancredi and his beloved Clorinda dressed as a warrior is a metaphor for every war. It is an indictment of the absurdity of violence and extremism and the madness of war. Heiner Goebbels' 'Songs of wars I have seen' is also a musical indictment. This meditation on the effects of war on women is based on extracts from Gertrude Stein's memoires of life in Vichy during the Second World War. Goebbels' work was composed for both historical and modern instruments. He underlines the combination of the two spheres of sound in the music by using excerpts from Matthew Locke's 1674 score for 'The Tempest'. Luciano Berio's 'Sequenza 3' for female voice is set between these two works as a wordless reflection of the madness of war. The director Wouter Van Looy puts the project in a contemporary context by taking as a basis the living witnesses of recent wars: comments by the radio reporter Jef Lambrecht; pictures taken by the cameraman Daniel Demoustier in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. It is completed by the testimonies of people who are fleeing the violence in their own country and have found refuge in asylum centres in Belgium. In this way this scenic concert becomes a ritual that is part of a multimedia set-up.