In the middle of the hot phase of an election campaign that is likely to be charged and tiring, ECLAT invites you to a large, multifaceted narrative about what it is really about: us. All of us in our uniqueness, contradictions and fragility, about our claims and doubts, stories and longings, about our togetherness.

 

40 artists from 22 countries are organising 16 concerts, performances and concert installations, including 25 world premieres–imaginative and rich in different genres, styles and formats.

Perceiving oneself in the context of global challenges leads to personal, often speculative, dystopian or hopeful artistic statements.

 

Various images and ideas appear again and again in the projects, common threads emerge: the examination of home, also from the perspective of exile, questions of identity, the search for the divine, inspiration from historical models, surreal projections of the future, garishly colourful and grotesque comics–and play. Play as a communal moment, as a place of retreat, as a space of possibility.

 

International guests, as ECLAT debutants the United Instruments of Lucilin from Luxembourg, the Fabrik Quartet and Marco Fusi, and established Stuttgart players, including the SWR Symphony Orchestra and the SWR Vokalensemble, curated by Lydia Jeschke, as well as for the first time the echtzeitEnsemble of the HMDK Stuttgart, characterise five varied and exciting festival days in the Theaterhaus.

 

The offer to immerse ourselves in this diversity of current musical creation is also linked to the invitation to listen to each other. This is not just a phrase, but a change of method: we want to consciously broaden the way we communicate what we do and break new ground alongside the tried and tested method of showing how valuable and enriching the experience of (contemporary) music can be. As an organiser and producer, we want to listen and learn together with artists and develop artistic impulses from communicating with people from worlds that are far removed from our ‘art bubble’. One example of this is Uwe Rasch’s trilogy ‘Mit Ach und Krach’, which runs through the entire festival.

 

As a civil society, we have something to achieve together that we cannot delegate to the ‘top’. The ‘we’ and ‘togetherness’ need to be focussed on much more. Get out of the bubbles and away from lobbying on our own behalf. I am firmly convinced that we as artists can and must make a relevant contribution to cohesion in a stable democratic society.

 

‘If you can shape something, then you can cope better with the world,’ says Michael Zwenzner, who conducts numerous interviews with festival artists in the weeks leading up to ECLAT. You can discover these conversations and further details of the programme from January onwards in our portal on the ECLAT website. One of these interviewees is Alex Paxton. The Neue Vocalsolisten and Klangforum Wien will open the festival on 5 February with his grand celebration of sensuality: ‘Singing as play, listening as touch and harmony as life in a body.’

 

You are most welcome!
Christine Fischer
and the team of Musik der Jahrhunderte

 

Dear Audience,

 

This year, particularly many audience members and participants have expressed their excitement about the festival. We can look forward to a diverse programme featuring 40 international artists from the fields of composition, poetry, performance, visual arts, comics, and video animation, all contributing from a variety of perspectives, alongside wonderful performers on the stages of the Theaterhaus.

 

But behind this excitement lies something more: the expectation of a festival event as a moment of affirmation, as a »feeling of home« in a broader sense, as an aesthetic space where we can experience great emotions but also engage in controversies–all at a level defined by humanism, tolerance, calm, and attentiveness. In a heterogeneous community that is secure and aware of itself. And of course, we are doing everything to ensure that ECLAT 2025 fulfills this promise.

 

But is that enough? Is the offer of differentiated perception an offer for society as a whole (and do we have to offer something to society at large)? Can we, as artists, especially as organisers of contemporary music events, contribute to cohesion in our polarising world? How do we respond to global challenges that no longer seem manageable?

 

Art certainly does not arise in isolation from these contexts and questions. Some answer them with the complexity of musical expression, which is determined solely by the immanent laws of music. Others are driven to address issues in sound, image, and language, drawing attention and taking a stand. There are very different »red threads« that have emerged between the projects of this year’s edition.

 

The festival begins with the artistic response to a board game, The Game of Life, in which the goal is »to completely ruin all other players and end up as the sole winner with a pile of riches… I was so horrified that I thought I must consider it as material so that it doesn’t always irritate me so much.« Uwe Rasch’s DSDL is part of his trilogy Mit Ach und Krach, which runs throughout the entire festival.

 

Alex Paxton wants to make magical music: singing as play, listening as touch, and harmony as life within a body. He describes his art–a selection of his images is also featured in this booklet–as a »new maximalism«, fuelled by our maximalist world, the internet, social media, and the fast-paced nature of everything. »My subconscious, the magical unknown that writes art, has been fed by all these things.«

 

Thus, the overflowing, highly virtuosic, almost impossible-to-perform manically magical celebration of sensuality becomes an almost breathless dance on a volcano.

 

At the end of the evening, once again, the game. Christian Winther Christensen sketches fragility and poetry with a sound-image of a child absorbed in play with building blocks. »I just want to build something when so much is being destroyed out in the world,« he says in an interview with Michael Zwenzner, whose conversations with festival participants enrich our PORTAL on the website.

 

Ahead of us lie five rich festival days. I would like to thank our fantastic team, who have carefully and effectively supported the complex productions and ensured the smooth running of the festival. All staff members in the organisation and technical departments are listed on the page eclat.org

A heartfelt thanks also goes to the Theaterhaus team for their collegial cooperation.

 

Now, I wish us all an inspiring and joyful ECLAT 2025!

 

Christine Fischer, Artistic Director

Today, the day this preface is being written, elections are taking place in Belarus. One of the world’s longest-serving dictators is deploying all the forces of manipulation and suppression to legitimise himself through a seemingly democratic election. Against the last sham election in the summer of 2020, hundreds of thousands protested. The state’s response was brutal and thorough, silencing the country. Our colleague and friend, Maria Kalesnikava, an icon of the Belarusian democracy movement, which now largely operates from abroad, is one of the country’s most prominent political prisoners. In her honour, and because the events in Eastern Europe are so directly linked to our political reality, we offer a platform to artists in exile from Belarus and other countries ruled by autocracies–and more than that, we fight for their art to not only receive solidarity-based attention but also genuine recognition and integration into our art system.

 

The Belarusian poet Vera Burlak left her homeland with her family just over a year ago, due to the threat of arrest. Her son, Kastuś, who has autism, had received important support in Minsk, which now has to be painstakingly rebuilt in exile–in a foreign language. To learn how to express his feelings: Vera describes in this booklet, and in the comic book that will be released as part of the project, poignantly what this means in the face of a manipulative, post-Soviet education system that trains children to conform. Together with Kastuś, a highly gifted artist, she invented the ABC of Exclamations, where each of the 34 letters of the Belarusian alphabet is transformed into an exclamation and a corresponding narrative. The animator Monika Nuber brings the comics to life, and Georgia Koumará embeds everything into a spatial sound narrative. The performance is on view from today until Saturday in P1–don’t miss it! I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Philipp Haußmann and the Klett Group for their generous support of this project!

 

The concert of the SWR Symphony Orchestra opens, in many ways, utopian spaces. Johannes Maria Staud passionately describes the possibilities of music, which »cannot be instrumentalised or corrupted and can show reality–indeed, also as a model for politics and society–as it really is: vibrating, oscillating, flickering, trembling, quivering. Iridescent and multifaceted in the richness of the possible spaces of meaning…« Lydia Jeschke, the curator of the two concerts that the SWR has kindly included in the festival, writes about the concert: »In the sounds of an orchestra, much is possible, and there are hardly any limits to the musical correspondences. The composers of this year’s orchestral concert of the SWR NowMusic are particularly interested in the in-between notes: between events and also between the real, existing and the imagined. As Elena Mendoza writes, in the experience of wars and crises, one must not give up the search, the question of another reality.«

 

Sarah Nemtsov explores Jewish mysticism in her cycle SEPHIROT and the Kabbalistic concept of the Tree of Life, which connects the divine forces that make us who we are. She has written the pieces for the soloists of the Musikfabrik and guitarist Yaron Deutsch, whose abilities and passion for challenges she knows well, and in whose hands her powerful music finds a secure place.

 

Christine Fischer

»Consolation–Criticism–Experiment–Harmony. The components and perspectives of contemporary composition are diverse, perhaps never more so than today. When Polish composer and singer Agata Zubel began working on her choral piece, she envisioned abstract images by Gerhard Richter in her mind’s eye: art where multiple layers of paint and abrasions form a complex graphic landscape, constantly creating new effects of colour and light. For Ulrich Kreppein, a text by the committed Spanish poet Federico García Lorca serves as the starting point for a piece that blends song and noise. For Younghi Pagh-Paan, late poems by Rose Ausländer provide the inspiration for a choral work that deals with death and the possibility of what comes after. Two instrumental premieres complement the three world premieres of the choral works: The duo Saviet/Houston performs new works by the young Turkish composer Zeynep Toraman and the Darmstadt-based Arne Gieshoff. Both composers capitalise on the duo’s great experimental spirit, creating a unique poetry of their own.«–Lydia Jeschke

 

The broad compositional range of the evening concert is complemented in the late-night concert by a conceptual format that we have been experiencing regularly at ECLAT in recent years: a type of total artwork, where a composer, starting from the music, also controls all the theatrical aspects–text, dramaturgy, direction, stage design, video, and even the rehearsal process.

 

One of these composers is François Sarhan, whose large-scale music theatre La Philosophie dans le Boudoir we produced at ECLAT in 2017. In Les Murs Meurent Aussi, he responds to the ongoing situation of war that Europe has faced for three years. This documentary music theatre piece raises questions about borders, walls, and the human conflicts that arise from these structures, and the impact on daily life. It is based on existing (YouTube) material and interviews with musicians who present their personal experiences–or those of their families–as if they were invited to a talk show or interviewed because they represent something extraordinary. »So sad, yet sometimes also hopefully amused by the state of the world«–this is how François Sarhan comments on his work.

 

Christine Fischer

Saturday at this festival is a day of chamber music. It begins with a focused solo and ends with a chamber music joint venture from two rather eccentric »bands.« At the heart of the day are two »Chamber Plays«–world premieres of vocal miniature dramas, marking the start of a new anniversary concert series.

 

The Neue Vocalsolisten have something to celebrate: founded 40 years ago as a pool of freelance voice specialists, they have been a permanent chamber music ensemble since 2000. The seven soloists, ranging from high soprano to countertenor to bass, collaborate directly with composers to develop up to 30 new scores annually. Hundreds of new works have been composed specifically for them in these 25 years, as the nuanced vocal techniques, the instrumental possibilities of the voice, as well as text, subject matter, performance, and the personalities of the singer-performers often play an important role in these compositions. Over the course of these 25 years, a new genre has emerged: Vocal Chamber Music Theatre.

 

And this new genre is celebrated by the Neue Vocalsolisten with their concert series Kammer-Spiele, where they will invite audiences in the coming months to rediscover outstanding works from the most recent vocal literature. But at ECLAT, the future perspective is on the program. Six new works tell six often very personal stories: Stefan Pohlit reflects on his homeland, a fishing village on the German-French Rhine border, »in search of a new music that draws from the old, the lost, European social history.« Tomoko Fukui musically comments on an ancient Japanese myth, Fernando Manassero looks ironically into a dystopian future, and Elena Rykova examines the sadly dystopian methods of her Russian homeland. Finally, Kuba Krzewinski provides us all with an empathetic look at the psychological and social issues within the music scene.

 

The vocal chamber music is framed by two string chamber works where absolute music is at the forefront–even though Timothy McCormack, in his piece for Marco Fusi, explores the physicality of the viola, Salvatore Sciarrino (who has also written fantastic works for the Neue Vocalsolisten) makes the violin sing, and the three young composers accompanying the debuting Fabrik Quartet at ECLAT find strong metaphorical images for their works. Coincidentally, two world premieres–Sebastian Clarens’ String Quartet and Luxa M. Schüttler’s Vocal Sextet–will face each other directly in concerts 11 and 12, both of which take romantic works as their starting point.

 

Late on Saturday evening, there will be a cheeky, ironic-dystopian revue, where Annesley Black and Katrin Plavčak, together with their two bands, Kinky Muppet and The Nubes, will stage comic sculptures in a cheerful, coarse manner: a virtuosic mix of electronic experimentalism and Renaissance music, electro-pop, and punk rock, with a late-night singing performance as well.

 

Christine Fischer

With the third performance of DSDL, today featuring the protagonist Patrizia, and the world premiere of the KinderStücke, Uwe Rasch’s trilogy Mit Ach und Krach comes to an end. For Musik der Jahrhunderte, Pony Says, and the Neue Vocalsolisten, however, it is a beginning–an invitation to approach people who have not yet found their way to contemporary arts, and to create new spaces of perception together. More of this throughout the year and at ECLAT 2026.

 

The programme SurRealities by the Berlin ensemble mosaik, a discovery of three strong young artistic voices addressing the worldview and future perspectives of their generation, is dedicated to Bettina Junge, the long-time, wonderful artistic director of the ensemble, who passed away last year and who had a major influence on this programme.

 

At the end of this final festival day, the award ceremony for the 69th Composition Prize of the City of Stuttgart will take place. This year, the city will award the prize for the 70th time. Through this prize, Stuttgart not only supports composers of all generations and »paves their way into the public’s consciousness,« but it also promotes the freedom of the arts and their significance for an open society. We thank the city of Stuttgart and the state of Baden-Württemberg for their continued support of ECLAT and contemporary arts in the city and region–and for this clear commitment!

 

It is wonderful that today we will hear three laudations for the three awardees, from three different jury perspectives! This provides a bit of insight into the work of the jury, which, as I see it from the outside, requires careful, responsible, and–I would say–empathetic deliberation, with a great deal of time invested in choosing the prizewinners. For the recipients, this not only means (important) money but also, for over 30 years, a performance at ECLAT. Tomorrow, the newly constituted jury will meet for the first time. By tomorrow evening, I will know which programme items will »fall into my lap« for next year, and as always, these will have an impact on the overall programme.

 

I hope that in 2026, we will joyfully meet again and that we will have had a year of vibrant societal discourse, upheld by tolerance, diversity, openness, and mindfulness!

 

Christine Fischer