Tabula Rasa

What challenges and discoveries does the present-day musical landscape have in store for a baroque orchestra? B’Rock devotes a two-day festival at Flagey to this question, under the title Tabula Rasa. Together with such musical guests as BL!NDMAN and Uri Caine, the B’Rock musicians explore the fascinating border region between early and contemporary music and historical and current performing practices. B’Rock is not afraid to use the same range of instruments to tackle both Arvo Pärt‘s meditative Tabula Rasa concerto and the whimsical orchestral suite Les Elemens by the baroque composer Rebel. And what about Alfred Schnittke on the B’Rock repertoire?! Like Pärt, this 20th-century composer also liked to let the past resound in his music. His intense 1971 work Kanon in Memoriam Igor Stravinsky gave new substance to the age-old canon form, which enjoyed its heyday in the work of Bach. From Rebel to Pärt, and from Schnittke to Bach. By throwing convention to the winds and giving free rein to their imagination, the B’Rock musicians and their musical companions demonstrate that the story of the early music movement is by no means over.

*arrangement by Rodolfo Richter