»Love Fragments« | Musik 21 Festival

Portrait Concert: Ashkan Behzadi; featuring Charlotte Mundy (soprano) and Marina Kifferstein (violin)

Ashkan Behzadi (b. 1983) is an Iranian-Canadian composer based in New York. He earned his Doctor of Musical Arts in composition from Columbia University, where he studied with Fred Lerdahl, George Lewis, and Georg Friedrich Haas. Prior to that, he earned a Bachelor’s degree in composition and music theory from McGill University, where he worked on composition with Chris Paul Harman and Brian Cherney. Ashkan Bezadi is the recipient of the 2026 Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the 2025 Ernst von Siemens Composition Prize, and a 2021–2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition.

On his compositional work

In recent years, the themes of genre identity and the crossing of genre boundaries, as well as the dialectical relationship between cutting-edge lyric poetry and contemporary music, have formed the core of Ashkan Bezadi’s aesthetic concerns. Structurally, his music is characterized by great attention to detail and evokes a delicate, lyrical landscape on a small scale. By using techniques of allusion and pastiche as a foundation, his music ultimately seeks to evoke the collective memory of folk music. In the portrait concert “Love Fragments,” soprano Charlotte Mundy and violinist Marina Kifferstein perform his works.

“What Kind of Times Are These?” – The Musik 21 Festival 2026

Silence or a cry? Act, react—but how? Or look away? Caught between power and powerlessness, between a cry and silence, the Musik 21 Festival 2026 unfolds its program and takes up Bertolt Brecht’s question: “What kind of times are these?”—a question that remains as relevant today as ever.

“What kind of times are these?” wrote Bertolt Brecht in 1934 in his poem “To Those Who Come After,” lamenting that a conversation about trees was almost a crime because it implied silence about so many atrocities. In this way, he responded artistically to the silence surrounding the atrocities of his time, which are likely similar to our own: fascism, militarism, the threat of war and annihilation, and, not least, a hegemonic callousness.