Acht Brücken day 1I am in Cologne for the next ten days for the Acht Brücken music Festival. They commissioned me for a sound installation (I will write about this later) and I decided to take this chance to spend some time in Cologne and go to the amazing lineup of concerts. The featured composer is Gyorgi Ligeti so there are lots of his works being performed.Yesterday the festival kicked off to a great start, which is a great sign for the rest of the days.The 1st concert I saw was the young Cologne ensemble ‘hand werk’: young lion virtuosos with a program mix of theatrical, electro-acoustic and traditional new music works. Nice program which stayed fresh the whole way through, including some nice fresh notes from Harald Muenz. During the slippery non-stop Enno Poppe trio it was nice to see the violinist play with an extra page turner next to the cellist who played from PDF’s on the ipad with foot pedal page turner. CR pointed out that they both can go wrong. Indeed. I always feel there are two great advantages to using the iPad for music to read off of: 1, when you mount it alone on a microphone stand it leaves much more space for the audience to see the performer and 2, it has its own lighting so you are free from making sure there is enough stage light to see your music. Of course, there’s nothing like reading off of paper…2nd concert was a conglomeration of saxophones plus viola and piano playing Ligeti inspired cluster atmospheres. Led by Hayden Chrisholm, it was beautiful and mesmerising, and Simon Nabatov played tastefully over the texture.In another part of the old warehouse there were trashy video’s where they alternated between Kubrick’s 2001 and various famous scenes from old classics, except during 2001 they put the music from Gershwin’s American in Paris and the haunting Ligeti music was put over the other scenes. Crazy effect!https://www.facebook.com/achtbruecken