After her studies in Paris, the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho chose the path of spectralism. Saariaho charted her own course with music moving on the verge between silence and fragility, with sounds like glass splinters and harmonies sounding as if scraped from ice. Her utterly personal and intuitive music language took definite shape in large-scale orchestral works and operas.

How do you find comfort in difficult situations? Psychiatrist Dirk de Wachter wrote a book about this inexhaustible theme and is coming to Hasselt to give us a glimpse of it. There is no doubt that music can provide an answer. Olivier Messiaen's 'Quartet for the End of Time' is a great example of this.

Unintentional or not, it is always easy to find links in music. In his ‘Fremde Szenen’, Wolfgang Rihm makes a conscious attempt to restore the bewilderment of Schumann’s first audiences. By transposing certain archetypically Schumannesque motifs into a twentieth-century sound language, he reveals formerly unheard resonances between the old and new.