Benjamin Glorieux

A very warm welcome to Klarafestival!

Flanders Festival Brussels, Klara and our partners are delighted to greet you once again. “I believe audiences aren’t just listening. They are actively contributing”, festival artist Barbara Hannigan remarked in an interview. Concerts are an interaction between the audience, artists and anyone who is contributing to those magic moments in front of or behind the scenes. Together we ‘become’ music. 

As a conductor and soprano, Hannigan is a global reference point. With her, classical music becomes a contemporary and unique experience. This is an inspiration to Klarafestival as the largest broadcast festival in Belgium. Her versatile talent is sure to enrapture you, as is that of the many Belgian and international artists who connect past and present with musical stories.

Klarafestival opens in style with Hannigan as conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. After that, you will hear and see her with young musicians from her mentorship project Equilibrium Young Artists. In no fewer than 25 concerts, we present top talent including Les Talens Lyriques, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and Vilde Frang, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with Víkingur Ólafsson. Klarafestival also treasures creation. The film concert Reich/Richter as a symbiosis of Gerhard Richter’s paintings and the music of Steve Reich; the music theatre production Prey by Kris Verdonck with a composition by Annelies Van Parys; or Benjamin Glorieux's exciting take on Bach's cello suites will surprise you!

This and all other concerts are possible thanks to the collaboration with our cultural partners: Bozar, Flagey, Kaaitheater, Théâtre Varia, Muntpunt, Concertgebouw Brugge and DE SINGEL. Thanks to our private partners KPMG, Proximus, Brewery Omer Vander Ghinste, Belfius, Interparking and the players of Belgium’s National Lottery. We are grateful for the support of the Flemish Community and the Brussels Capital Region. And finally, thanks to Klara and VRT: there would be no broadcast festival without their valued collaboration.

Joost Fonteyne

Intendant Klarafestival

Bach’s path

Cellist Benjamin Glorieux will be performing J.S. Bach’s complete cello suites on 11 March 2023, during Klarafestival. In preparation, he literally followed in Bach’s footsteps in December 2022: with his cello on his back, Benjamin trod the same route as Bach took 300 years ago, from Arnstadt to Lübeck, where he heard his great hero Buxtehude play. Artist Emilie Lauwers translated Benjamin’s travel experiences into a visual installation, an “antechamber” in which the audience discovers the six cello suites in a new way. Dramaturge Lalina Goddard spoke to Benjamin and Emilie about being away and coming home, and about how these two things are sometimes the same.

In recent years, you have always approached Bach’s cello suites from a different angle: electric or on gut strings, with surround sound or improvisation… The suites continue to fascinate you.

Benjamin: I remember since childhood the mythical aura that hangs around the cello suites: it is the summit, the mountain that every fully-fledged cellist must climb. Nevertheless everyone can play these first notes, and that simplicity has always fascinated me. It annoys me when people claim it’s a mistake to start on Bach too early. You’re never too young to play Bach, the cello suites are really intended as a learning piece. Over the years the music becomes a part of your life, it grows with you. You continuously discover new layers in it, you try out all sorts of things. But whatever you do, it remains intact.

What gave you the idea to draw inspiration this time from a walk that Bach undertook hundreds of years ago?

Benjamin: It started as a whim. I read about this week-long walk of Bach’s and that sparked a memory of a long time ago. For my eighth birthday, I wanted nothing more than to go on a hike. You know, with a knapsack into the big wide world. Ultimately my parents arranged it in such a way that I was allowed to walk to my aunt’s house and had to immediately phone home when I arrived. Truly, all the pleasure had gone out of it for me. I just wanted to get away! 30 years later, I thought: now it’s possible. Now I can finally get away. It was only later that it dawned on me that it could also change the way I look at Bach’s music. And only during the hike did I understand something else: it is impossible to get away completely. You stay connected to yourself and your environment. There’s also no point in getting away completely. There’s no point in withdrawing yourself, you have to grasp life with both hands. 

What was it like for you to follow the journey from home, Emilie?

Emilie: Although I knew that Benjamin had to make the journey alone, I wanted to stay connected to him somehow. I also wanted to mark his journey in a certain way. “What can my role be as the one who stays at home?”, I asked myself. We had spoken at length about taking things with him, but it also seemed a good idea to me to leave something behind, a trace. So I printed out Benjamin’s GPS routes and sewed the paths onto patches of fabric. For every day I sewed a single patch. I put the patches into a little box, which I gave to him to take with him on the day he left. 

Benjamin: It was crazy when you gave me that patchwork quilt, as if the trip was already there, before I had travelled it. Suddenly the journey became literally tangible. I think that’s why I contacted you in the first place, to bring out that experience of walking, to externalise it.

Emilie: When Benjamin first called me, I immediately knew that I wanted to do this. Paying attention and being open, observing and cherishing things: that’s something I do myself all the time. For me, it’s not only my feet, but also my hands with which I’m away from the world for a while. I always seek out something different that occupies me in a mechanical way: woodcarving, embroidery, weaving... Just like with walking, you occupy your body, which gives your mind space to be away, and this allows you to come to yourself.  

When we spoke about this project for the first time, together with Joost Fonteyne (intendant of Klarafestival, ed.), it was clear that you wanted to leave the process open as far as possible. Why was that so important for you?

Emilie: As a society, we are so focused on the feasibility of everything that we also feel constantly responsible for how everything goes. For me, this journey symbolised the opposite of that: letting life happen, actively looking back and joining the dots. More than ever, the phrase “it is not the destination, it’s the journey” was relevant. But once it was completed I did want to preserve the experiences in a little box with great care.

Where are you now in the process? 

Emilie: At the moment we are working on the construction, together with David Carney from the Vonkfabrik. It became six hexagonal modules and each module represents a suite. Benjamin once played through all the suites for me. As he played, he talked about how the music felt, and I wrote everything down. A kind of scenario emerged of its own accord, of a character who we follow for six days. Thus every module becomes one suite, one character, one day in the journey of our character. A kind of visual score of the music, supplemented by Benjamin’s personal travel experiences.

Benjamin: With Emilie I have the feeling that we are looking at the suites at a micro level. My question to Klaas Verpoest, who is providing video projections for the concert, was whether we could design the suites in an architectural way, a ‘macro’ way, so to speak. Klaas then came up with the idea of making 3D scans. So we went back to Thüringen together to scan parts of the landscape there, such as footpaths or an old oak. The idea now is that the concert will become a musical expression of the landscape. Whilst what I do with Emilie, that is the inside, those are your senses, your soul, your heart, with which you absorb the landscape into yourself. 

Do you now play the cello suites differently to before the journey, Benjamin?

Benjamin: Each time after I had walked, I played one suite right through in my hotel room. It was unbelievable. It felt as if I was being pulled into the earth. When I played the suites previously, I did so very freely: in my head, everything was possible. I think that I therefore went in search of a framework. I was extremely curious about how the walking could influence the rhythm of the music. So I put a restriction on myself, but within that very restriction I found an enormous freedom. Apart from this groove, I was also curious about the changing landscape and the people who still share similarities with those from Bach’s time, or so I imagine. The surly looks in Türingen that become more open as you head north. I can well believe that Bach wanted to go to Lübeck: if you come from that closed community, Arnstadt, Lübeck must have felt like New York! The rhythm of the walking is now beginning to ebb away again. So I play Bach every day, and as I do so, I try to recall my steps as clearly as I can: left, right, left, right… Always back in the groove. 

Emilie: What Benjamin says about imposing something on yourself and finding the freedom within that, is also relevant to the installation: we allow the structure of six hexagonal modules to fill up in an intuitive, pieced-together, organically growing way. 

You said at the start of our conversation, Benjamin, that you realised something during the trip, namely that being away from the world is totally impossible, and is also pointless. 

Benjamin: on the fourth day I asked myself if I was truly getting all I could out of it. I understood that I needed to open myself up far more to my environment, to others. Then I thought: should I perhaps be approaching people? As a result I met Dorothea on her cross country ski poles in the snow, who has the same name as one of Bach’s daughters, and herself has a daughter who is a cellist. Or the day after that, when I fell in the water and Michaël saved me and brought me to the hotel, because my story made him think of his father. How you live your life, how you make contact, that determines everything.

Emilie: the great thing is that when we were doing the play-through, we noticed that something happens in between the third and fourth suites. A change in the landscape, a shift of perspective.

Benjamin: From inside to outside. 

Emilie: Yes, and the fact that you then also literally ask on the fourth day if you are making enough contact with the outside world. It’s almost as if during that play-through session, we had already predicted, manifested, how the journey would pan out. It’s also about the small, human scale versus these immense, world-famous suites.

Benjamin: That’s true. As a cellist, you would above all prefer to disappear. You are such a small point in the landscape of these suites. Absolutely. With my cello case in the world: trudge, trudge, trudge…

Benjamin Glorieux

Benjamin Glorieux is a cellist, composer and conductor. Since his studies in Ghent, Brussels, de Chapelle and Cologne, he has been involved in a variety of musical domains. From authentically early to experimentally new, he fluently switches from gut strings to choral conducting, arrangements or solos. Benjamin continually forges new contacts with musicians from different worlds and countries, and is often sought out by festivals or concert houses for unique in-situ creations. Benjamin is laureate of the Belgische Stichting Roeping [Belgian Foundation for Vocations] and was named Beste Jonge Belofte [Best Promising Young Musician] at The Klaras.

Emilie Lauwers

Emilie Lauwers trained as a Graphic Designer. She acts as a translator who visualises a particular content in an intuitive, but highly structured way. Her preference is to tell personal stories, such as in the installation for 'Verdwijntijd'. Since 2018 she has been the permanent designer for Lunalia. She has illustrated books, albums and concerts, and published her engravings in the book 'Sketchbook'. She has designed sets and costumes for Vox Luminis, L’Opéra du Rhin, OBV and La Monnaie, among others. Since 2020 she has been teaching at the RITCS.

Klaas Verpoest

Klaas Verpoest is active as a video artist and performer in numerous multimodal contemporary performances that are based on the improvised combination-cum-confrontation of multiple media. Since 2006 this has resulted in idiosyncratic creations with written contemporary classical music. In these Klaas is not searching for a concrete visual translation of the composition, but transforms it into a unique generative abstract image of the stage, which may be seen as an idiosyncratic visual response to the interpretation of the composition.

Johan van Mol

Johan van Mol studied product design and soon threw himself into the then emerging digital world. Alongside his career in the digital and creative sector, Johan immerses himself in the relationship between interactive media, creativity and technology. Johan also set up an indie music label – Buckminster Records – to support young bands in their first steps in the music world. In the performance Bach’s path Johan, together with Klaas Verpoest, explores the boundaries of generative artificial intelligence in the video projections.

18:00 - 18:20

Klarafestival LOUNGE (EN)

interview with Benjamin Glorieux

free expo in bozar

Revisit Benjamin's experiences in the antechamber specially designed for the occasion by visual artist Emilie Lauwers. You can visit the expo for free between 10 and 26 March 2023, in the Council Room at Bozar.