Encounters 2021

with Tianwa Yang

This year's chamber music festival ENCOUNTERS, which has now established itself in Kassel's cultural world, moves between light and shadow. Initiated by Kassel-based violinist Tianwa Yang, the festival brings together renowned artists on stage and invites them to engage in musical dialogue. This year, the sounds of the small string and piano chamber music range from tenderly atmospheric to symphonic – "light and shadow" may be understood as a metaphor for hope and despair, but also for happiness and unhappiness, day and night, life and death ... The acoustically exciting spaces of Kassel's Friedenskirche and the Museum for Sepulchral Culture allow the music to resound from a wide variety of epochs. The work of Franz Schubert is the common thread running through almost every program; in addition to his music, however, music from the pens of Shostakovich, Debussy, Schumann and other composers will also be performed.

This year Tianwa Yang meets again Erika Geldsetzer (violin), Wen Xiao Zheng (viola), Michael Samsonov (violoncello), Markus Becker (piano) and for the first time Oren Shevlin (violoncello) and William Youn (piano).

Admission: 25 EUR

>> Tickets here

Konzert II

A Night Concert of fantastic kind, with music by Franz Schubert, Ernest Bloch, George Enescu, Frank Bridge and Markus Becker

The dark rooms of the Museum for Sepulchral Culture invite you to atmospheric sounds from Romanticism to Modernism. All works have a fantasy character, often gloomy and melancholic breathing. What might have been the fantastic thought behind the individual works? That may have differed considerably against the respective backgrounds of the genesis of Ernest Bloch's Trois Nocturnes (1924, Cleveland/USA), George Enescu's short Sérénade lointaine (1903, London), Franz Schubert's virtuoso Fantasie for violin and piano (1827, Vienna), and Frank Bridge's Phantasy Quartet (1910, England). An immediate rendition of fantastic moods of this year's Night Concert can also be experienced, in the improvisational performance of German pianist Markus Becker.