Concerts

For her concert, conductor Elena Schwarz has collaborated with the Basel Sinfonietta to create an impactful narrative. The focus is on traumatic experiences and strategies for overcoming them – articulated by women but not exclusively from a female perspective. Joana Aderi, a composer and music therapist, has worked in psychiatric institutions and prisons. Having been raised in a remote boarding school in central Switzerland, the connection between mental illness and music is a pivotal element of her work.

Cassandra Miller’s «I cannot love without trembling» further explores this thematic focus. The title of the 2022 viola concerto, performed by Geneviève Strosser, who teaches in Basel, quotes a line from a letter by French-Jewish philosopher and social revolutionary Simone Weil: «Human existence is so fragile and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling».

A central work in the program is «23 Days» by Amyra León, an excerpt from her musical-theatrical-poetic symphony «Blood & Thirst». The title opens a multifaceted field of meaning: while it references historical, literary, and pop-cultural contexts, for León it primarily represents her twenty-year struggle leading to the diagnosis of endometriosis. She describes the condition as a systemic autoimmune disease affecting the whole body, often undetected for many years. In the work, this body becomes the orchestra itself: it sometimes acts independently of the libretto, revealing «what the body knows beyond language». «23 Days» was composed and written by Amyra León, with orchestration by Eliana Echeverry.

Sivan Eldar’s «Una Mujer Derramada» («A Woman Spilled», 2019) also seeks to give voice to fragile, battered existences. «Passing into many and yet moving as one,» it reads. The text was written by Amyra León, who collaborated closely with Eldar and also co-designed the vocal part. The figure of a woman navigating identity and external control is a central theme in Eldar’s work, including in her chamber opera «Like Flesh» (2022), a contemporary reinterpretation of Ovid’s «Metamorphoses».

An unparalleled rush of power and energy characterizes Sara Glojnarić’s «sugarcoating #4». The native Croatian is a rising star of the younger generation of composers and was most recently awarded the SWR Symphony Orchestra Prize at the 2024 Donaueschingen Music Festival. With «sugarcoating #4» (2022), the four-part «Sugarcoating» cycle concludes: sonic pop music fetishes are pushed to extremes, resulting in a high-energy, intentionally overstimulating soundscape.