Klang Festival 2026: Program release

Råhuset

15. april 18.00

Program

18:00
– Velkomst ved daglig leder Filip Melo, Klang Festival

18:15
– Ilgin Ülkü: Denken, Sprechen

18:30
– Programpræsentation ved kunstnerisk leder James Black, Klang Festival

18:45
– Iannis Xenakis: Kottos
– Arnannguaq Gerstrøm: Broken Strings (uropførelse)

Klang 2026: Program release-koncert

Klang Festival – Copenhagen Experimental Music præsenterer årets program ved en koncert med modtagerne af sidste års Pellepris.

Årets musikindslag sker i samarbejde med cellist Andrew Power og komponist Arnannguaq Gerstrøm, begge modtagere af Pelleprisen 2025. I forlængelse af prisen har Klang bestilt et nyt værk af Gerstrøm, som opføres ved koncerten.

Derudover opføres Ilgin Ülkü Denken, Sprechen og Iannis Xenakis’ Kottos.

Om Pelleprisen

Pelleprisen uddeles til en komponist og en musiker, som har ydet en markant indsats for samtidsmusikken – enten gennem skabende arbejde eller gennem fortolkning og realisering af ny musik. Prisen er opkaldt efter Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen og uddeles i samarbejde med Edition Wilhelm Hansen og Karin Birgitte Lund.

Modtagerne af Pelleprisen 2026 offentliggøres under Klang Festival 8.–13. juni 2026.

Programme info:

Ilgin Ülkü: (b.1993): Denken, Sprechen

Denken, sprechen is a work for solo cello, composed in 2022. The piece explores the fragile boundary between inner thought and outward expression. In this work, I explore the human inner voice, its hesitations, fluctuations, and doubts, through the sound of the cello, as a means of expressing unsettling thoughts.

Rather than constructing a linear narrative, I am interested in a structure that unfolds through shifting intensities and interruptions. Silences, pauses, and broken figures create an inner dialogue that is constantly forming and dissolving.

The fragmented figures that emerge do not aim for continuity; rather, they reflect disparate ideas coexisting within a single body, representing a constant state of searching and the sudden appearance of thoughts. Denken, sprechen is less about conveying a specific message than about tracing the process by which thought turns into sound. By extending the cello’s conventional timbral range toward both higher and lower extremes, I refer to a sense of self-alienation as well as the process of reconstructing oneself.

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001): Kottos

Kottos (1977) was composed by Iannis Xenakis for the cellist Rohan de Saram. De Saram writes that, “when working on Kottos with Xenakis,” the composer explained that the recurring “grinding noise at the beginning of the work… was the sound of earth or rocks as Uranos thrusts Kottos into the ground.”

The title refers to one of the hundred-handed figures of Greek mythology, “one of the sons of Uranos and Gaia,” and the work draws on this pre-Olympian imagery. Xenakis indicates in the score a “bridge sound” for the opening, but, as de Saram notes, in rehearsal “what he wanted was obtained away from the bridge, with the bow nearer the fingerboard,” favouring lower overtones.

De Saram describes Kottos as “one of the masterpieces of the cello repertoire,” noting both its “tight formal structure” and its “primordial cosmic expression of the material."