Het Collectief, Katrien Baerts

The chamber music group Het Collectief was founded in 1998 in Brussels. Working consistently from a solid nucleus of five musicians, the group has created an intriguing and idiosyncratic sound, achieved by an unfamiliar mix of strings, wind instruments and piano. The ensemble loves inviting other musicians to work on new projects, and this time they will take on board the soprano singer Katrien Baerts. As regards repertoire, Het Collectief returns to the Second Viennese School, the roots of modernism. Starting from this solid basis, Het Collectief explores important twentieth century repertoire, including the very latest experimental trends. In addition to that, the group creates a furore with daring crossovers between the contemporary and the traditional repertoire and with adaptations of ancient music.

The 7 Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok were commissioned by Mstislav Rostropovich and written in 1967. The dark themes of Blok’s poetry have found their way into Shostakovich’ shuddering music, uniting the emotions of both artists in times of war and Soviet repression.

Transfigured Night, op. 4 is perhaps Schoenberg’s most popular work on account of its literary origins and its hyperemotional content. The poem of the same name from the collection Weib und Welt (Woman and World) by Richard Dehmel is a poetic rendering  of a dialogue, in which a woman confesses to her lover that she is expecting a baby with another man. During the fin-de-siècle period in Vienna, themes such as these, alluding to Freud’s eros-thanatos  theory, were particularly fashionable. Het Collectief will be playing Schönberg’s ‘symphonic poem’, originally written for string sextet, in a colourful version for piano trio by his pupil Eduard Steuermann.

Flagey