Ars Musica: Arctic Fever

Three conductors, a choir, a big band, an orchestra and soaring ambition: that’s everything you need for Simon Steen-Andersen’s TRIO, a large-scale multimedia spectacle created in 2019. This monumental composition receives its Belgian premiere during Ars Musica. The Brussels Philharmonic, Brussels Jazz Orchestra (BJO) and the Vlaams Radiokoor join forces for a collage in which past and present, and the music of yesterday and today, blur into one.

In TRIO, Danish composer Simon Steen-Andersen weaves iconic fragments of music history into a sonic collision, confronting orchestra, choir, and big band with their own past. He curated the visual layer from over 400 hours of archival footage from the SWR vaults—with one legendary exception: a 1888 wax cylinder, the very first audio recording of a large-scale orchestra and choir.

These rapid-fire clips – some lasting only a fraction of a second – create a kaleidoscopic collage of musical memory in a live dialogue with 150 musicians on stage. With this grotesque and visually charged composition, Steen-Andersen solidifies his reputation as one of contemporary music’s most visionary voices.

The evening opens with a new creation by Oren Boneh, commissioned by Ars Musica. The young composer reimagines the orchestra as a ‘human jukebox’ – a versatile instrument capable of switching between and colliding musical styles in entirely unexpected ways.