Between light and verse lies a space for the unspoken. Fragments of memory, loss, birth - and cautious hope - meet in sounds, words and spaces in between, and the evening's compositions revolve around the incomplete, the processual: around light that does not dazzle, but illuminates our path. Works by Bushra El-Turk, Farzia Fallah and Elif Karlidag weave personal, political and poetic impulses from North Africa and the Middle East (MENA region) into an open musical texture.
Bushra El-Turk's music imagines the human from movement, instinct and instability: from a child's first perceptions of the world (Eating Clouds) to the destroyed city of Beirut (Saffron Dusk) and the intimacy of a birth (Painting Secrets).
Farzia Fallah's work "Wood-Hair-Breath-Light" develops from Alice Oswald's poetic line: "this loosening compression of hope". Hope is not formulated here, but opened up - as sound, as dissolution, as listening.
Elif Karlidag's fragments capture the political in the personal in a precise, fragmented musical language. Fragment I refers directly to the protests in Turkey in spring 2025 - as a sonic gesture of resistance, as a resonance to collective shock.
Poetry by Mahmoud Darwish, Alice Oswald and others leads through the evening without framing it - as a trace, as a voice, as delicate resistance. "Between Light and Verse" is not a concert about what was, but about what is currently forming - tentative, open, audible.

Performing:

Yun-Jin Cho (violin)
Seiji Okamoto (violin)
Muriel Razavi (viola)
Lionel Martin cello)
Homa Faghiri (lyrics)

Program items:

Bushra El-Turk (Lebanese composer)
"Eating Clouds" (2009), duration approx. 9 minutes
This work deals with basic human instincts and needs. The title refers to the view of a baby from a baby carriage and how the baby recognizes abstract shapes in clouds above it.

"Saffron Dusk" (2021), duration approx. 7 minutes
This work is dedicated to the victims of the explosion in Beirut in August 2020 and is based on poetry by Mahmoud Darwish - it is primarily about death. The following work (Painting Secrets) is the "sister work", writes El-Turk.

"Painting Secrets" (2022), duration approx. 5 minutes
This work is played after Saffron Dusk. In contrast to death in Saffron Dusk, this work is about hope, about life. El-Turk works thematically with the sounds and inspiration of the birth of her child.

Farzia Fallah (Iranian composer)
"Wood-Hair-Breath-Light" (2021), duration approx. 15:30 minutes
This work was premiered by the Sonar Quartet and funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation 2020/2021. Fallah wants us to look and listen very carefully. She refers to the poem "this loosening compression of hope" from Alice Oswald's poem "Walking past a Rose this June Morning".

Elif Karlidag (Turkish composer)
"Fragment I", duration approx. 4 minutes
"Fragment III", duration approx. 3 minutes