Traveling, Oscar Wilde once remarked, is a way of losing oneself and then finding oneself again — usually in a worse state, but with better stories to tell. Today, Shirly Laub, together with students from the Royal Conservatoire of Brussels, invites us on a musical wander through time and space, with no luggage and no delays.
Our journey begins in the eighteenth century at the vibrant and baroque court of the Margrave of Brandenburg. It was to him that Johann Sebastian Bach dedicated six concertos he most likely never performed. Yet these works brim with the joy of movement, the exhilaration of imagined journeys, and the endless conversation between voices that listen to one another, seek one another out and ultimately come together.
From Brandenburg, we travel on to the plains and forests of Hungary, where Béla Bartók, an inveterate traveller, collected folk songs much as others collect postcards.
His Divertimento for Strings is a map of that inner landscape. Winds of celebration and unease, nostalgia and playfulness sweep through it, as though the soul of an entire people had decided, for one evening, to board a train. Along the way, you will encounter musicians who, over the course of successive festival editions, have themselves travelled a considerable distance through the musical world.
Today, they have chosen to share some of those journeys with you, not as lecturers, but as fellow travellers opening their notebooks and saying: come this way and take a look.
