Belgian National Orchestra, Sirvend & Gringolts

About the Event

With “The Unanswered Question,” American composer Charles Ives transports the listener into an existential space. A simple, almost timeless question is posed again and again, while the attempted answers sound increasingly tense and desperate, until only silence remains. Music as thought, without resolution. At the heart of the program is Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto “To the Memory of an Angel.” Composed after the death of Manon Gropius, it is not a virtuoso showpiece, but a musical farewell: tender, fragile, and deeply felt. Grief and memory merge into music that does not glorify loss, but gently bears it. The solo violin is not a soloist in the conventional sense, but a human voice in search of comfort. Ilya Gringolts lends this voice an intensity that is impossible to ignore. After the darkness comes the light—albeit tentatively—in Robert Schumann’s Second Symphony. Not a triumphant victory, but a hard‐won return to joy and inner balance. Under the baton of Jesko Sirvend, this evening leaves questions unanswered and is all the more moving for it.