SPRACHLOS | Azrieli Music Prizes in Concert

48 singers, four double basses, an array of percussion and some of the most compelling voices in contemporary music: at Basel’s Martinskirche, the BBC Singers, Basler Madrigalisten and Klangforum Wien come together for two extraordinary large-scale choir concerts – an evening of monumental sound worlds, lost languages, and the world premiere of a new work by Georg Friedrich Haas, alongside four works honoured with the Azrieli Music Prize (AMP), one of the world’s most prestigious composition competitions, created by Sharon Azrieli CQ for the Azrieli Foundation.​

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The first concert opens with Yair Klartag’s The Parable of the Palace, conducted by Benjamin Goodson. Written for large vocal and instrumental forces, the work draws on a medieval parable in its original Judeo-Arabic – a language once spoken by Jewish communities across the Arab world and now largely lost. Klartag takes this vanished language and the parable itself as the starting point for an intense musical exploration of knowledge and faith, navigating the fine line between rationality and irrationality.

 

This is followed by a world premiere from Georg Friedrich Haas: SPRACHLOS, a new a cappella work commissioned by Interfinity and performed by the Basler Madrigalisten under Raphael Immoos. The work dispenses with words altogether, using only phonemes. Towards the end, the choir quite literally dissolves: one by one, the singers leave the church while continuing to sing, moving through the audience as their voices grow ever more distant – until only silence remains.

 

The second concert, once again conducted by Benjamin Goodson, Chief Conductor Designate of the SWR Vokalensemble, brings together three further works from the 2024 Azrieli Music Prizes, each opening a window onto a different musical and cultural world. In Light to My Path, Josef Bardanashvili draws on his Georgian roots and texts from the Psalms, moving between doubt, ecstasy and gratitude. Jordan Nobles’s kanata unfolds through slowly shifting sonorities into a meditation on landscape, belonging and home. In Simetrías Prehispánicas, Juan Trigos turns to pre-Hispanic Mexico, bringing together Spanish and historical Nahuatl texts. The second concert opens with a short address by Sharon Azrieli CQ.

 

Between the two concerts, the featured composers will discuss their works and creative processes in a 45-minute panel conversation. At the same time, an apéro begins outside the Martinskirche and continues until the second concert.

 

In different ways, the works of the evening engage with languages, cultural traditions and forms of transmission that disappear, evolve or are rediscovered – from Judeo-Arabic and Nahuatl to musical reflections on home, belonging and cultural memory.

 

Both concerts will be broadcast at a later date on BBC Radio 3. On 8 June 2027, the concert will be performed again at the Opéra Bastille in Paris.

Free admission to the panel discussion; no registration required.

 

The evening is a two-part concert evening; both parts or concerts are sold exclusively together as one concert.