Founded 1997 in Berlin, ensemble mosaik has evolved to become a particularly diverse and experimental formation in the field of contemporary music. Beyond their outstanding instrumental skills, they display creative individuality and a never-ending joy in experiments. In years of tight co-operation, they have created an entity of sound that is highest ranking both in artistic competence and openness to the most diverse concepts of contemporary music.

Close co-operation with up-and-coming composers and the tying in of digital media are key to the ensembles work in composition, interpretation, and presentation.

A special focal point is the reflection of new approaches in performance, such as including scenic and visual elements, and the trying of new concert formats, shedding light on shared contexts connecting individual works, consolidating current strands, and probing new perspectives. In cooperation with artists from other fields and musical genres, the concerts themselves become experimental designs.

During the Kalv Festival 2023 the following members of ensemble mosaik participates:

Christian Vogel – clarinet

Ernst Surberg – piano/keys

Chatschatur Kanajan – violin

Karen Lorenz – viola

Niklas Seidl – cello

About the concert 

Ensemble mosaic participates during the year’s festival in two concert programs under the motto Contact to earth. The first part of Contact to Earth shows, in a miniature, the broad sense, how experimental music, produced mostly outside of the mainstream, isolated at home, interacts with the external. While the structuralist Spahlinger, in his maybe most emotional piece, lets guillaume dufays chanson adieu m’amour shine through his theoretical soundworld, Antje Vowinkel, composer and improviser from Berlin, lends loudspeakers from swanky cars to give them a new home by trying out the bouncing effect of slow amplitudes on the membrane, using different textures and objects from daily life. Liisa Hirsch, who initially wrote her trio for baroque instruments, is in search for the dynamics of the instruments, that are guided by the intensity of bow-contact and through that finds an indirect gateway to the aesthetic of the art of playing early music.

Program 

Mathias Spahlinger – adieu m’amour – hommage à guillaume dufay [1982/83] – for violin and cello

Antje Vowinckel – Hubraum [2020/2022] – for two performers

Liisaa Hirsch – Dynamics of Contact [2017/2021] – for string trio

About the concert 

Ensemble mosaic participates during the year’s festival in two concert programs under the motto Contact to earth. The second part of Contact to Earth again, with Alessandrini and Valenzuela, has two recollections of early music, engraved in the title as well as in the music itself. Iannotta’s sensitive and sound-oriented music in her title recurs to an image, an instant story inside of the head. the image itself, the contact to earth, influences her music, whereas the music could also depict the situation mentioned. Ricardo Eizirik has a temptation to the earthly phenomena of society, manifested eg. in his junkyard-pieces. found objects, in this case rather of technical and rhythmical nature, form the music to a great extent. Contact to Earth: in the case of Love Carbin it is rather a case of first contact between the ensemble and the student (also between two slightly different cultures) from Gothenburg, who will write a string trio for us.

Program 

Patricia Alessandrini – Homage à Purcell [2010] – for clarinet, violin, cello, piano and electronics

Love Carbin – Il [2023], uruppförande – for string trio

Manuel Rodriguez Valenzuela – 64 daily self-portraits / micro-variations on a motif of Brahms

Clara Iannotta – The people here go mad. They blame the wind [2014] – for clarinet, cello, piano and music boxes

Riccardo Eizirik – obsessive compulsive music [2017/18] – for clarinet, cello and piano