listening to the change

extra information

LISTENING TO THE CHANGE

A club in Berlin. Five very different people from Brussels. The same number of musicians from Berlin with diverse international backgrounds. A quintet from the STEGREIF.orchester weaves ten biographies into a concert video about the coronavirus crisis.

The Brussels residents got to know the Berlin musicians through five personal interviews. They were asked how the crisis has been for them. Do they feel good or not? What are their hopes and fears? On the basis of these conversations, the musicians developed improvised compositions that they will perform in GRETCHEN, a club in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. In a production by Viola Schmitzer the musicians explore all four corners of the club, displaying their vulnerable, hopeful, longing and sometimes also lonely selves. These ‘selves’ are representative of their Brussels counterparts and, by extension, every one of us.   

A clarinettist dances around with his instrument, the trombonist briefly imagines himself back in his Scottish homeland, and the cellist misses her own cello. Melancholy sounds resonate, fragments of folk songs from all over Europe drift through the nightclub. Audio samples of the interviews are mixed into the improvised compositions of the STEGREIF.orchester and so create a bridge between Brussels and Berlin, between the new European friends.  

The ensemble comments on the crisis and expresses the possibility of greater connection between us. The STEGREIF.orchester presents the utopia of a unified Europe in microcosm. An idiosyncratic rendition of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy epitomises at the end of the concert the journey we can all undertake together: the dream of a collective route through the crisis, both in terms of the greater whole and on the scale of the smallest interpersonal relationships. May humanity, the hope of change and the Europe of tomorrow continue to resound loudly.