Browse through selected performances below, or find the full festival programme here >>
9/6 Opening Concert - Athelas Sinfonietta
The honour of opening this year's festival is bestowed upon KLANG's house ensemble, Athelas Sinfonietta. The programme includes the world premiere of Nicolai Worsaae's Gekido written specifically for the concert and to the two soloists Andreas Borregaard and Asbjørn Nørgaard.
11/6 Lars Kynde: Uspået frugt
In collaboration with puppet maker Gertrud Exner, Lars Kynde has invited a group of children to create new playful instruments and develop a piece that will be premiered at KLANG Festival 2023. At this event, the audience gets a sneak peek at the work process.
11/6 + 12/6 Line Tjørnhøj: SPRING
Line Tjørnhøj's new work, SPRING [LEAP], goes beyond all regular categorizing frameworks. SPRING is at once a work of sound art, a piece of musical drama, a ritual feast, an act of activism, a virtual 3D experience, an NFT, a tribute to nature and a portrait of Secretary-General of DanChurchAid, Birgitte Qvist-Sørensen.
Tjørnhøj describes the work: "SPRING is a work that highlights the activist aspect of sound art. The woman, technology, and the climate. In this work, these three elements mix with each other as a common symbol of the present we are part of and the future we want to – and should – create."
12/6 Educate·S
True to tradition KLANG i KU.BE sets the scene for a concert where young musicians perform pieces from the publication series Educate·S.
The concert follows a workshop facilitated by composer and teacher Østen Mikal Ore. The programme includes pieces by Fuzzy, Jexper Holmen, Kasper Rofelt, Nicolai Worsaae, Ejnar Kanding, Ylva Lund Bergner, Ib Nørholm, Martin Stauning, Line Tjørnhøj and Morten Olsen.
12/6 ReConvert: Music in everything
The percussion duo ReConvert presents a concert for children, featuring a large selection of works by Simon Steen-Andersen. The works all include objects that are not usually seen as musical instruments.
13/6 Duo Dan/Nie: Project HoMe
Duo Dan/Nie performs works by Aya Yoshida, James Black, Xavier Bonfill and Bára Gísladóttir in the concert HoMe. Common to the composers is that they all live in countries that are not their home countries, and HoMe is precisely a study of how encountering new cultures, new languages and new sensory impressions affects the compositional work. The concert programme includes:
- Aya Yoshida: Decode
- James Black: Colossi
- Xavier Bonfill: 2x2
- Bára Gísladóttir: Prussian Blue
Read our interview with James Black here >>
15/6 Modern Monday on a Wednesday: Ensemble K!ART
It will be nothing less than a marathon of a concert when the concert series Moderne Mandag joins forces with KLANG festival on a Wednesday. The programme spans from modernist classics to new pieces written for the occasion, including:
- Gunnar Berg: Tronqué (1969)
- Ylva Lund Bergner: BE: all-out (”Speak, Dodona”) (world premiere)
- Axel Borup-Jørgensen: Carambolage (1976-77)
16/6 Hommage á trepartita
Helligåndskirken (Church of the Holy Spirit)will be filled with new organ music, when Peter Navarro-Alonso sits behind the church's famous organ celebrating the composer Per Nørgård who turns 90 years this summer. Nørgård is celebrated with an organ concert presenting among others a selection of works by his colleagues including:
- Mette Nielsen: Contour (2009)
- Kasper Rofelt: Trichotomy (world premiere)
- Simon Christensen: Passacaglia Nor Allemande (world premiere)
16/6 Ly Tran: The Nerves are more Crazy than Me
The worlds of music and literature collide in this concert, where composers Mette Nielsen and Marcela Lucatelli have written new works based on collections of poems by Asta Olivia Nordenhof and Olga Ravn
The singer Ly Tran performs the works accompagnied by eight prominent musicians including Marcela Lucatelli.
- Mette Nielsen: det nemme og det ensomme (world premiere)
- Marcela Lucatelli: SLAVE SLAVE SLAVE(world premiere)
16/6 Rolf Hind plays Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen
The internationally renowned British pianist Rolf Hind will premiere Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen's Piano Sonata. Piano Sonata is an intense musical study of- and response to melancholy. Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen wrote the piece while he was deeply affected by the violent and devastating forest fires in Australia. "Initially, in the process, I thought of the word sonata, and I immediately envisioned a romantic, virtuoso piano music fighting for its life in the almost inhuman atmosphere of our time," the composer explains.
17/6 + 18/6 Simon Steen-Andersen: Walk the Walk
Simon Steen-Andersen's Walk the Walk is performed for the first time in Denmark. Walk the Walk is written for four performers, treadmills, objects, light and smoke and will be premiered by the Swiss percussion quartet Ensemble This | Ensemble That.
The starting point for the performance is the act of walking: One of the simplest actions that can take place on a theatre stage, but also inherently musical and inseparable from the notions of pulse, speed, rhythm, direction, synchronicity, and kinetic energy. Walking can define a space, carry semantics and expectations, and is not without reason a historically favourite theme of comedians on stage, film and TV, ranging from understatement to slapstick. Inspired by the experimental settings and documentation of early movement researchers, Simon Steen-Andersen sets out to deconstruct the phenomenon of walking as theatrical and musical material in a virtuosic game of causality and stage mechanics.
18/6 Jacob Kirkegaard: CROSS FIRE
The Danish composer and sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard is not afraid of dealing with big, complicated topics. With his latest work, KRYDS ILD [Cross Fire], performed by the Royal Lifeguards Music Corps, Kirkegaard has taken war as the subject of his investigative gaze. KRYDS ILD consists of sound recordings of firearms and artillery that are transcribed for orchestra, and the work thus mimics the sound of a war zone. Because what does war sound like? Jacob Kirkegaard has listened attentively to the mechanics of the weapon, the cutting of the projectile through the air and the deep echo after the grenade explosion.
The work is orchestrated by Connor McLean and published by Edition·S.