The Ritual: War and Freedom features the NeoQuartet and Laurel M. Hiendl. The programme includes the premiere of this Hiendl’s compositions, as well as one of the most famous works by George Crumb, a classic of 20th century music.

String Quartet No. 2 for string quartet, electronics and video is Heindl’s work completed this year. Born in 1986, the artist was educated in Frankfurt am Main and San Diego. His compositions have been presented at many festivals devoted to the latest works. Heindl is fascinated by interdisciplinarity, in his works he balances on the border of traditional concert music, musical theatre, performance and installation; instruments are mainly used in conjunction with electronics. He is also interested in the relationship between live music and the body.

Born in 1929, the American composer George Crumb is one of the most recognizable figures of the 20th-century avant-garde, and Black Angels is one of his best-known compositions. There is an annotation on the score: ‘completed on Friday, March 13, 1970 (in tempore belli)’, which refers to the war in Vietnam. The subtitle of the composition is Thirteen Images from the Dark Land, and Crumb left an extensive commentary on this composition. In his own words, the aim of the work is to show the soul’s journey. Its three stages are reflected in movements of the piece: Departure (or loss of grace), Absence (or spiritual annihilation) and Return (or redemption). There are numerous encrypted quotations in the work: in one of the movements there is a fragment of the 14th String Quartet ‘Death and the Maiden’ by Franz Schubert, in another place there is a quote from the medieval sequence Dies irae, there is also often a tritone interval and the motif of the devil’s trill carrying devilish associations, which was borrowed from the works of the Italian Baroque composer Giuseppe Tartini.