Ensemble Modern

“For me, Old Master painting is a means of distancing myself from and questioning history – a way of illuminating major existential themes, such as solitude, abandonment, and concepts of nature in the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder; or likewise religious themes, such as radical evil and divine wrath in ‘Hunters in the Snow’, which expresses a deep historical pessimism – or, similarly, the theological themes of the Flood in Poussin.” This is how Dufourt describes his relationship with the Old Masters.

Musically, Dufourt aligns with the writing and thinking of the French spectralists, who focus on the inner structure of sound, exploring it and turning it outward in the spirit of an “aesthetics of transparency.” His music also carries a dark tonal quality and is marked by fragmentation. Perhaps it is precisely these characteristics of Dufourt’s music that give the winter cycle its unique charisma – a work situated within the historical tension between a bygone painterly aesthetic and a sound language rooted in the present.

This very tension can be experienced by concertgoers themselves, and perhaps even personally understood, thanks to a special late opening of the Gemäldegalerie. The rooms remain open until midnight for intimate contemplation of the paintings.