Revue Blanche

After the successful production of Misia, Revue Blanche presents a new performance with sound artist Katharina Smets, this time in the company of composer Frederik Neyrinck. Nenia - literally ‘song for the dead’ - is a kaleidoscopic exploration of loss. How do you cope with the death of a loved one? What does it mean to continue living in the presence of absence? Is there hope in memory, in the arts, in meeting with others? Revue Blanche asks these and other questions in a performance that takes the listener on a rollercoaster of mourning.

Four narrative layers resonate in this polyphonic project. There is a contemporary narrative by Katharina Smets, where autofictional and documentary elements come together. There are testimonies from experts in the field, offering reflection and solace. There are field recordings that anchor the narrator’s journey in a sometimes urban, sometimes natural sonic landscape. And of course, there is music. Frederik Neyrinck arranges, transcribes, and transforms timeless repertoire on loss. In doing so, he is inspired by the figure of Orpheus, the mythical singer-songwriter who attempted to retrieve his beloved Eurydice from the underworld. Drawing from the rich orphic tradition, Neyrinck paints in Nenia a highly personal musical landscape. From opera arias to elegies; from exuberant danses macabres to contemporary funeral songs: the most diverse sounds metamorphose into a new composition tailored to this unique quartet.

In five-voice counterpoint with Katharina Smets, Revue Blanche enters the twilight realm between concert, audio documentary, and narrative; between dream and parable; between darkness and light.

This program follows the call of the redshank — the bird that gives voice to the passage between life and death in Beamish’s Between Earth and Sea — as a guiding thread through longing, memory and melancholy, from the English Renaissance to the twentieth century.

Dowland’s songs whisper of heartache, Korngold’s Desdemona’s Song and Marietta’s Lied add romantic warmth, and the English songs of Quilter and Vaughan Williams give voice to the transience of life with subtle power. Joan Baez’s folk ballads bring hope and longing in contrast, earthy and direct. Gurney’s songs deepen the contemplative atmosphere, while Britten’s folk song arrangements add a touch of colour and story.

Each work reveals a different facet of longing: the searching, the loving, the finding of solace in music – just like the redshank, calling out over the water for what will not return.

With Debussy’s groundbreaking sonata as its foundation, Revue Blanche explores the sound world of nature in all its nuances: from breath and wind to garden and summer light.

In And then I knew ’twas wind, Takemitsu weaves the trio into a soundscape that gently breathes, whispers and ripples. The three instruments move like currents of air that touch and release one another – sometimes like a light breeze, sometimes like an unexpected sigh. It is not the climax that counts, but the subtle shift: the listener stands in the middle of a garden and notices how nature tells its own story.

That same garden returns in Gubaidulina, where joy and sorrow intertwine into an intimate, almost spiritual space. Vasks’ Little Summer Music throws the windows open: fresh rhythms and sparkling melodies let the feeling of summer in. Finally, Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye lifts the landscape into the world of fairy tales, enchanting and light.

Debussy himself had mixed feelings about it: “It is terribly melancholic. And I don’t know whether one should laugh or cry about it? Perhaps both?”

In Life/afterlife, we delve into the shadowed realms of existence, where the line between life and the mysteries that follow is blurred. The program invites you to explore both the intimate moments of daily life and the profound darkness of the unknown. We begin with Messiaen’s Pourquoi?, a haunting question that echoes in the void, setting the tone with its introspective exploration of longing, doubt, and the veiled mysteries of existence. The complex rhythms and harmonies mirror the inner turmoil of a soul reaching out into the darkness.

Gubaidulina’s Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten plunges further into this twilight zone, blending spirituality with modernism to create a soundscape that oscillates between light and shadow. The piece concludes with an open question to the audience: What lies at the true end? Is it light, or an all-encompassing darkness? Fafchamps’ Der Einsame deepens this exploration, reflecting the isolation and introspection of modern life. Here, darkness is not just an absence of light but a presence in itself—a companion to the solitary soul, expressed through a refined and subtle solo work for voice.

Murail, a master of spectral music, guides us into the hidden recesses of C’est un jardin secret for solo viola. This secret garden is not one of sunlight, but of shadows and whispered secrets, where every microtone and harmony teases the boundary between sound and silence, creating a landscape that is as mysterious as it is beautiful. Saariaho’s NoaNoapierces the darkness with the voice of renewed strength, yet it, too, is surrounded by an aura of the unknown. Through the fusion of flute and electronics, Saariaho crafts an ethereal experience that echoes the spiritual and existential explorations found in the diaries of Paul Gauguin—an artist often haunted by his own shadows.

Fall, a work for solo harp, symbolizes a descent into another realm, where darkness becomes a medium through which transformation occurs. Sinnhuber’s Cinq jours de Paul Klee translates the art of Paul Klee into an auditory journey through the chiaroscuro of life and creation, with each part of the composition bringing a painting to life within the interplay of light and dark. Finally, Messiaen closes the circle with Le sourire, a smile that emerges from the darkness—perhaps a final acceptance, or a glimmer of hope in the afterlife

The duality of love drives this English-inspired concert programme focusing on passion and despair. Renaissance composer John Dowland once phrased the two sides of love as ‘Can love be rich, and yet I want?’ The statement inspired Benjamin Britten in the 20th century to write his poignant ‘Lachrymae’ with the viola in a starring role.

Britten and Debussy both depict the same myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses but from opposing perspectives; the tension between the feminine and the masculine, between innocence, desire, and love. For love touches us all. John Tavener weaves the vulnerability and tenderness of Yeats’ poetry into the spiritual song cycle To a Child Dancing In The Wind. With this concert programme, Revue Blanche makes you muse on youthful innocence and lost loves, on hope and unfulfilled desires, but above all on indomitable joy and quiet delight.

In 2025, Luciano Berio (1925-2003) would have celebrated his hundredth birthday, the perfect opportunity to revisit his work and reflect on his legacy. Remarkable about his oeuvre is that, alongside his clearly avant-garde art, he also showed interest in a completely different aesthetic - that of folk songs.

In his writing, Berio distinguished ‘official’ art music from folk music, without this seeming contradictory. He arranged various songs from the folk traditions of the United States, France (Auvergne), Italy (Sicily and Sardinia), and Armenia, and composed his Folk songs cycle as a tribute to the art and vocal intelligence of his wife, Cathy Berberian. Karl Naegelen intentionally wrote his Children’s folk songs for the same instrumentation as Berio’s version.

Naegelen is a young French composer passionate about improvisation and non-European music. He has made several trips to Surakarta (Indonesia) seeking to preserve the directness and spontaneity that characterize music in oral traditions in his own style, through a continuous search for nuances in timbre and richness in musical colors.

We present the world of folk music through the eyes of these fascinating composers.

It was Debussy who, in 1915, for the first time combined the flute with the viola and the harp in a trio sonata. The innovative sound with its enchanting, somewhat melancholic pallet, would go on to seduce many a 20th-century composer. Debussy himself reveled in the audacity of his felicitous find, but also realized that the sweet-and-salty flavor would take its time to become an acquired taste: 'I’m not sure if this music should make you laugh or cry. Maybe both.'

In this concert program Revue Blanche takes on Debussy’s groundbreaking trio together with a plethora of (original as well as arranged) repertoire for the same cast. Among the stylistically varied options: the illustrious clarinet trio of Brahms, key pieces from the French Belle Époque, as well as more recent compositions by Tōru Takemitsu and Sofia Gubaidulina (both conceived as dialogues with Debussy’s Trio) and work from the 1970s by Frits Celis and Mieczysław Weinberg. With this portfolio as a point of departure, the concert programmer is invited to compile his very own top pick of trios.

Misia Sert (1872-1950) was once known as ‘the Queen of the Paris salons’, but also of broken dreams and turbulent loves. Her glorious and tragic life inspired countless artists, from Proust and Renoir to Diaghilev and Coco Chanel. From Belgian-Polish descent, Misia was a key figure in the French music world at the beginning of the 20th century, but this flamboyant personality is all but known to today’s audiences.

For the development of the musical narrative 'Misia & Katharina', Revue Blanche collaborated with radio host Katharina Smets. It soon became clear that there was a treasure trove of unknown but highly interesting songs with a direct link to Misia Sert. Musicologist Sofie Taes was our guide on this quest. 'Misia' is a purely musical homage to this quintessential muse. The fall of 2021 has seen the release of the CD on the Antarctica label.

Following the success of Berberio (2016), Revue Blanche and Zonzo Compagnie are teaming up again to focus on an iconic composer: Maurice Ravel. WIThWIT will provide the scenography and, as with THELONIOUS (2019), it will be directed by Benjamin Vandewalle.

The mysterious dandy Maurice Ravel captures our imagination. He was a master at bringing different musical worlds to life, from folk melodies and fairy tales like Ma Mère l'Oye to structural experiments like orchestral music without music. The latter was how he described his Boléro; who would have ever thought that the whole world would be able to whistle this piece?

As a child, Ravel was strongly influenced by his father, who was an inventor. His fascination with mechanics is reflected in a scene constructed analogously. In UnRAVELed, we travel from outside to inside, from macro to micro. Starting with a large, open ocean, we zoom in on a city, a house, a room, on and on, until we enter the radar work of Ravel's own mind.

The scene itself builds up step by step, unfolding into a life-size set, into a machine that produces sound and a shadow play in which mysteries are hidden. Small spotlights illuminate scale models in Plexiglas into large, moving shadows that form the environment in which the performers find themselves. We hear mechanical machines that produce sound, movements that also make sound, loop stations where not only musicians are duplicated but the delightful music of the master himself, too.

We see Ravel as a child, and the child that remains somewhere in everyone's soul.

Maurice Ravel can be considered the master of the vibrant French musical scene of the first quarter of the 20th century, with his unmatched ability to blend the sounds of his time with traditional styles and unprecedented experimental timbres. The result: baroque that swings, jazz that sings, and a modernist spirit rising above impressionism, expressionism, and neoclassicism, before following its own path.

We faced the challenging task of selecting from his rich oeuvre and presenting familiar music in unexpected arrangements for our quartet.