This promises to be a very special concert! 

At Amy Norrington’s request, the festival musicians will step out of their comfort zone and reveal themselves in a personal outpouring: ‘bring music from your own homeland, or bring something very personal and share it with the audience with room for improvisation.’ The structure of the programme is therefore not yet fixed, but will be filled in during the musicians’ meetings in Halloy. And that promises to be inspiring! 

A key link here is accordionist Philippe Thuriot, master improviser! Who does not remember his impromptu improvised waltz musette two years ago when someone had to look for a forgotten score? 

One of the musicians will already make himself heard in overtone singing, another will improvise on a favourite song,…

Closing this concert is Charles Ives’ piano trio, a reflection on his student days at Yale. It is a surprising work with very contrasting movements. The second movement is entitled TSIAJ: this scherzo is a joke! Fragments of American folk songs are woven throughout the movement, although they are often grotesquely altered with regard to rhythm, pitch and harmonic connotation. Folk songs featured in the scherzo include ‘My Old Kentucky Home’, ‘Sailor’s Hornpipe’, ‘The Campbells Are Coming’, ‘Long, Long Ago’, ‘Hold the Fort’ and ‘There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood’, among many others… And although the composer himself acknowledged that the whole movement was a joke, it well characterises the unique and new musical world that only Ives had discovered.