Klang Festival 2026: Program release
Råhuset
15th April 18.00
Programme
18:00
– Welcome by Managing Director Filip Melo, Klang Festival
18:15
– Ilgin Ülkü: Denken, Sprechen
18:30
– Program presentation by Artistic Director James Black, Klang Festival
18:45
– Iannis Xenakis: Kottos
– Arnannguaq Gerstrøm: Broken Strings (world premiere)
Klang 2026: Program Release Concert
Klang Festival – Copenhagen Experimental Music presents this year’s program with a concert featuring the recipients of last year’s Pelle Prize.
This year’s musical programme is realised in collaboration with cellist Andrew Power and composer Arnannguaq Gerstrøm, both recipients of the 2025 Pelle Prize. In connection with the award, Klang has commissioned a new work by Gerstrøm, which will be performed at the concert.
The programme also includes Ilgin Ülkü’s Denken, Sprechen and Iannis Xenakis’ Kottos.
About the Pelle Prize
The Pelle Prize is awarded to a composer and a musician who have made a significant contribution to contemporary music—either through creative work or through the interpretation and performance of new music. The prize is named after Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen and is awarded in collaboration with Edition Wilhelm Hansen and Karin Birgitte Lund.
The recipients of the 2026 Pelle Prize will be announced during Klang Festival, 8–13 June 2026.
Programme info:
Ilgin Ülkü: (b.1993): Denken, Sprechen
Denken, sprechen is a work for solo cello, composed in 2022. The piece explores the fragile boundary between inner thought and outward expression. In this work, I explore the human inner voice, its hesitations, fluctuations, and doubts, through the sound of the cello, as a means of expressing unsettling thoughts.
Rather than constructing a linear narrative, I am interested in a structure that unfolds through shifting intensities and interruptions. Silences, pauses, and broken figures create an inner dialogue that is constantly forming and dissolving.
The fragmented figures that emerge do not aim for continuity; rather, they reflect disparate ideas coexisting within a single body, representing a constant state of searching and the sudden appearance of thoughts. Denken, sprechen is less about conveying a specific message than about tracing the process by which thought turns into sound. By extending the cello’s conventional timbral range toward both higher and lower extremes, I refer to a sense of self-alienation as well as the process of reconstructing oneself.
Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001): Kottos
Kottos (1977) was composed by Iannis Xenakis for the cellist Rohan de Saram. De Saram writes that, “when working on Kottos with Xenakis,” the composer explained that the recurring “grinding noise at the beginning of the work… was the sound of earth or rocks as Uranos thrusts Kottos into the ground.”
The title refers to one of the hundred-handed figures of Greek mythology, “one of the sons of Uranos and Gaia,” and the work draws on this pre-Olympian imagery. Xenakis indicates in the score a “bridge sound” for the opening, but, as de Saram notes, in rehearsal “what he wanted was obtained away from the bridge, with the bow nearer the fingerboard,” favouring lower overtones.
De Saram describes Kottos as “one of the masterpieces of the cello repertoire,” noting both its “tight formal structure” and its “primordial cosmic expression of the material."
Venue
Råhuset
Onkel Dannys Plads 7 1711 København V
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Andrew Power
British cellist based in Copenhagen, working with contemporary music and expanding the cello through collaboration, interdisciplinary performance, and new formats.
