Upcoming Events

Volta la carta (“Turn the Card”) is an interdisciplinary project by TRIO vis-à-vis that combines music, visual art, symbolism, and performance into a performative journey through museum spaces. Rather than following the format of a conventional concert, it creates an open model of experience in which the audience encounters art intuitively, associatively, and emotionally.

The project takes its starting point from the song Volta la carta by Fabrizio De André, which intertwines everyday scenes with symbolic and existential motifs. The principle of “turning the card” structures the entire evening: tarot cards determine the route through the museum, linking individual artworks with musical interventions by the ensemble.

The journey begins in the museum foyer with a performance of the song. A magician appears as a card reader, acting as a mediator between music, image, and audience. The cards that are drawn lead to new rooms, artworks, and musical situations. It deliberately remains unclear whether the path truly emerges by chance or forms part of a hidden dramaturgy. The tarot cards thus function both as instruments of meaning-making and as a play with illusion, projection, and deception.

Throughout the experience, archetypal symbols of the tarot are connected with selected artworks and musical improvisations. The music does not merely serve as accompaniment but becomes an independent space of interpretation, opening emotional and imaginative approaches to the artworks. Meanings arise situationally through the interplay of sound, image, symbol, and individual perception.

The project is realized by TRIO vis-à-vis in collaboration with a magician and is developed in cooperation with the Tarot Museum in Leinfelden-Echterdingen, which provides faithful reproductions of historical tarot cards. Each presentation is adapted to the specific exhibition setting.

Volta la carta conceives the museum as a performative space of experience situated between concert, exhibition, and ritual, in which perception, chance, symbolism, and interpretation are structured in a dynamic interplay.

The concert program Schwellen (“Thresholds”) brings together works of contemporary music theatre that engage with states of transition, instability, and the reconfiguration of the subject. At its core lies the idea of the threshold as a space of in-betweenness in which fixed categories begin to falter: between interior and exterior, body and voice, individual and society, privacy and publicity. The threshold is therefore understood not as a clearly defined passage, but rather as a condition — a moment of tension, uncertainty, and transformation. Within this intermediate space, new forms of perception, identity, and expression emerge. The works in the program explore these conditions from different perspectives and translate them into sound, movement, and performative action.

The voice forms the central medium of these negotiations. In O Yes & I, a fragmented stream of consciousness unfolds, loosely referring to Molly Bloom’s interior monologue from Ulysses. Voice and bass flute intertwine in a state suspended between language, breath, and sonic dissolution, where inner world and acoustic space merge into one another.

In the world premiere by the Chinese composer Jiaying He, the threshold becomes audible as a condition of cultural and biographical transition. Migration and the loss of stable systems of orientation generate an inner tension between freedom and emptiness, materialized in a three-layered sonic texture of voice, flute, and violoncello.

Public Privacy #6 examines the threshold between public and private space within the context of digital cultures. Voice, electronics, and video create a fragile “I”-figure that appears simultaneously constructed and withdrawn — a subject oscillating between visibility and dissolution.

At the same time, the body itself becomes a threshold. AnnA shifts the threshold into the realm of the body: voice, touch, and movement are inseparably connected here. Sound emerges as a form of “visible music,” in which gesture and physical interaction structure the musical space and create a fragile balance between proximity and distance. In But I’m in fact also relieved. And I’m ashamed of it, the threshold becomes an emotional borderline experience. Personal experiences of illness are translated into simple, repetitive musical structures in which ambivalence, vulnerability, and emotional layering materialize.

Everything you won has been taken to a depot somewhere expands these threshold spaces toward performance, media art, and theatre. Body, voice, and electronics merge into a hybrid form reflecting fears, loss of control, and the fragility of modern subjectivity within a fragmented scenic structure.

Deserteur works with a literary collage of war texts, letters, and historical fragments. Here, the threshold appears as a boundary between the individual voice and collective history, between memory and political experience.

Finally, Seul avec des Ombres focuses on sonic space itself as a threshold: sounds emerge as multidimensional shadow-like formations oscillating between presence and withdrawal, generating a state of permanent uncertainty in listening.

The program thus sketches a panorama of the present as a threshold condition: a space in which identity is not stable, but is continually re-formed within the tension between perception, body, and sound. Meaning does not emerge as a fixed result, but rather in the very moment of performance — at the threshold between hearing, seeing, and experiencing.

PROGRAM

1. Charlotte Seither: Seul avec des Ombres (2011), for alto flute
2. Brigitta Muntendorf (*1982): Bright no more. Public Privacy #6 (2017), for voice, effects pedal, tape, and video
3. Emil Kuyumcuyan: Deserteur (2025), for bass flute, voice, violoncello, synthesizer, and finger cymbal
4. Yiran Zhao: AnnA (2014), duo for two performers
5. Astrid Solberg: But I’m in fact also relieved. And I’m ashamed of it (2026)
6. Jiaying He: N. N. (world premiere), for voice, flute, and violoncello
7. Jennifer Walshe (*1974): Everything you won has been taken to a depot somewhere (2013), for three performers
8. Rebecca Saunders: O Yes & I (2017–2018), for soprano and bass flute

More Information: https://www.unerhoerte-musik.de

TRIO vis-à-vis will lead a series of masterclasses on extended techniques for cello, voice, and flute for students at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional d’Amiens.

As part of the project, students from the composition class will compose short works for the trio under the guidance of their composition teacher. In addition, the composition teacher will write a new, larger-scale work especially for TRIO vis-à-vis.

The newly composed student works, together with the teacher’s new composition, will be performed by TRIO vis-à-vis in a public concert on 19 May.

TRIO vis-à-vis plays contemporary music.
The programm has to be confirmed.