Trauma / Healing

For her concert, conductor Elena Schwarz and the Basel Sinfonietta have crafted a powerful narrative. At its heart are traumatic experiences and ways of coping – articulated by women, but not limited to an exclusively female perspective. As a composer and music therapist, with experience working in psychiatric hospitals and prisons, among other settings, Joana Aderi closely connects her musical work with questions of mental illness and healing.

Cassandra Miller's "I cannot love without trembling" also brings this thematic focus to life. The title of the viola concerto, composed in 2022 and performed by Geneviève Strosser, who teaches in Basel, quotes a line from a letter by the French-Jewish philosopher Simone Weil: "Human existence is such a fragile thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling."

A central programmatic point of reference is Amyra León's "23 Days," an excerpt from her music-theatrical-poetic symphony "Blood & Thirst." The work's title opens up a multifaceted field of meaning: it alludes to historical, literary, and pop-cultural contexts, but for León, it primarily represents her twenty-year ordeal leading up to her diagnosis of endometriosis. She describes the disease as a systemic autoimmune disorder that affects the entire body and often remains undetected for years. In the work itself, this body becomes the orchestra: at times, it detaches itself from the libretto, acts independently, and reveals "what the body knows beyond language." "23 Days" was composed and written by Amyra León, with orchestration by Eliana Echeverry.

Making fragile, battered existences audible is also the focus of Sivan Eldar's "Una Mujer Derramada" ("A Woman Spilled," 2019). "To merge into many and yet move as a unity," is its programmatic statement. The text is by Amyra León, who co-developed the work with Eldar and also composed the vocal part. The figure of the woman caught between identity and external control forms a central theme in Eldar's work, for example in her chamber opera "Like Flesh" (2022), a contemporary reinterpretation of Ovid's "Metamorphoses.".

Sara Glojnarić's "sugarcoating #4" unleashes an unprecedented surge of power and energy. The Croatian-born composer is considered a rising star among the younger generation of composers; she was awarded the SWR Symphony Orchestra Prize at the 2024 Donaueschingen Festival. "sugarcoating #4" (2022) concludes the four-part "Sugarcoating" cycle: here, sonic fetishes from pop music are radically intensified – creating a high-energy, deliberately overstimulated soundscape.