Past projects

Creating order with opposites

What a mess this is! - is a phrase that comes up constantly in everyday family life.

In the mediation project of the Basel Chamber Orchestra together with "Basel gyygt" and the band "Cell Of Hell", 30 children work out the myths about chaos and order together with director Selina Thüring.

Around the work "Les Éléments" by the baroque composer Jean-Féry Rebel, they will work playfully in workshops with the violin, viola, cello and double bass on the music that chaotically layers all the notes on top of each other. What does it sound like? Like a building site, the SBB railway station, an untidy room, fireworks, a primeval forest, the formation of the earth, a dream or like a quarrel?

During 13 workshops, musical, scenic and choreographic research will be carried out on the theme of chaos and order and developed together with the children.

In this music education project, a group of people from the most diverse cultural backgrounds come together and try to approach a cross-generational music theatre between baroque and popular music, between individual language and movement, between sound and supposed disharmony, and to find an answer to the worldly disorder, the "chaos under heaven".

An education project by the Basel Chamber Orchestra and the REHAB Clinic for Neurorehabilitation and Paraplegiology Basel.

Together with director Salomé Im Hof and choreographer Jeanne Lehnherr, musicians from the Basel Chamber Orchestra and patients from the REHAB Basel are developing a choreographic-musical synthesis of the arts.

Inspired by Peter Handke's literary model "Die Stunde, da wir nichts voneinander wussten" (The hour when we knew nothing about each other), moving and moving scenes are created. A square, a staircase, a corridor become places of encounter or missed encounter - a coming, a going, a waiting. Fixed expectations are disappointed, the resulting free space for something new is tentatively played with. Dancing bodies move to music that also sets the souls in motion.
With the musical works "Relâche" by Eric Satie and "La création du monde" by Darius Milhaud, both originally conceived as ballet music, the boundaries between theatre, music, dance and film are dissolved.

The two performances provide insight into a collaborative, searching process involving all participants.

The project is supported by:
Stiftung Denk an mich
Stiftung Symphasis
EHW-Stiftung
Schweizerische Stiftung für den Doron Preis

«Suite de danses expérimentales» | Trailer

A cultural education project by the Basel Chamber Orchestra in cooperation with the Fachmaturitätsschule Basel-Stadt

What happens when 16 students aged 16-18 from the Fachmaturitätsschule Basel-Stadt experiment together with seven musicians from the Basel Chamber Orchestra and the dancer Andrea Tortosa Vidal over a period of five months? Music becomes dance, dance becomes music. They merge, belong to each other, cannot do without each other. The experimental approach of the experimental trio known from the Nachtklang concerts of the chamber orchestra, which is supplemented here by four additional musicians, is combined with the search for adequate forms of movement in dance.

The two elements complement each other, enrich each other and find each other. The result is a play between fixed and free parts, between solo and tutti, between form and fantasy.

The project has been running since September 2019 at the Fachmaturitätsschule Basel Stadt.

The project is supported by:
Anita Adler-Stiftung
Ruth und Paul Wallach Stiftung
Wilhelm und Ida Hertner-Strasser Stiftung
Scheidegger-Thommen-Stiftung

«Haydns Schöpfung reloaded» | Trailer

At the end of the 18th century, Joseph Haydn's oratorio "The Creation" made an impact like hardly any other musical work before it; indeed, during the composer's lifetime, its perfection was virtually treated as a "second creation". The composed chaos, the sudden flashes of light, the roaring lions remain famous to this day.

But what does all this have to say to us today, in the age of knowledge about the Big Bang, the Quark era and volcanism? And it wasn't that simple with mankind either, after all, there was a "reset" with the Flood and Noah's Ark.

Under the overall direction of Tom Ryser, a music-theatrical clash of the biblical story of creation and natural science based on Haydn's "Creation" is growing until the end of January for more than 120 participants, including the choir of the Gymnasium Kirschgarten, the Basel Chamber Orchestra and three school classes.

While the 60-strong choir rehearses its part, classes 1e, 1f and 1g develop their own performances together with the musicians of the Basel Chamber Orchestra Eva Miribung (violin) and Jan Wollmann (trumpet) and work intensively on the staging of their ideas - from the Science Slam to theories such as the Big Crunch or the flying spaghetti monster to a Scientology cartoon or a planetary company whose objects are created by pure chance. And, last but not least, face the question: what about our Earth is really worth protecting?

The performances will take place at the Museum Tinguely at the end of January 2019 under the direction of Thomas Herzog.

Hysteria, ecstasy, vulnerability: like pop stars in high falsetto, countertenors electrify classical audiences with a sound that is almost addictive and fascinates audiences unaccustomed to classical music. And with their seemingly superhuman timbre, they conjure up a past universe shrouded in scandal: that of the castrati whose arias the countertenors sing today. In the coming season, the Basel Chamber Orchestra will present four programmes with countertenors on the concert stage and is therefore seizing the opportunity for a mediation project with the aim of a participatory music theatre in which the phenomenon of these artificial-seeming voices takes centre stage.

Auto-Tune (Automatic Pitch Correction) is a procedure for changing pitch in music production. How nice it would be to have a "tuner app" at one's everyday disposal.
Over the period from autumn 2017 to summer 2018, a class together with musicians from the Basel Chamber Orchestra, countertenor Terry Wey and director Barbara Tacchini will explore the phenomenon of the voice in all its facets. Findings and insights from myths, their own life stories, pop songs and baroque operas grow together into a very personal music theatre.

Arthur Honegger's "La Danse des Morts" is the lynchpin of this extraordinary education project. The Swiss composer wrote his oratorio in 1938, commissioned by Paul Sacher, on a text by Paul Claudel, who was heavily influenced by the latter's depictions of the dance of death in Basel.

The choir of the Gymnasium Muttenz under the direction of Christoph Huldi accepts the challenge and rehearses the complex and demanding work. The young people are confronted with the music of Arthur Honneger and the history of the Dance of Death in Basel, but also explore the question of how death is dealt with in non-European cultures: Death rituals can be found all over the world - from deep seriousness to whimsical lightness - often in a combination of music and dance. Together with the director and musicians from the Basel Chamber Orchestra, the young people explored the question of how death is dealt with in different cultures.

When a youth ensemble makes music, it can sometimes get a little loud. Even without a microphone and amplifier. Especially when everyone plays a wind instrument. The supersonic jets are such an ensemble from the Basel Music School. When they get going, there is one thing above all: energy! Lots of energy!

So what happens when such an ensemble meets a traditional orchestra? An orchestra that hones the finest shades of sound, whose musical language plays with a vocabulary that has grown over centuries. It could be that for both sides, the world of the other remains foreign and incomprehensible. But it could also be that a musical collision between the two ensembles will release completely new energies and that an encounter will change both sides a little.

The composition Drundalg, commissioned by the Basel Chamber Orchestra, enables the two ensembles to meet in music that unfolds its own musical power full of surprises in the play with boundaries.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, his "Ode to Joy", is the occasion for an education project by the Basel Chamber Orchestra and a class at the Dreirosen School. The pupils experience the symphony and set out to understand what meaning is attached to it and where links to their own world appear. It is the very big themes that are connected with this masterpiece: The message "All men become brothers", the anthem and the basic idea of Europe.

The journey takes the pupils out onto the seas that surround this continent. There they meet Jim Knopf, who had arrived in a washed-up package on an island that had good people but no place for a homeless person. They meet their grandparents, fathers and mothers who set out in hard times to find a place in this world where their family and children will one day be better off. On a big ship, they meet the Basel Chamber Orchestra: musicians who are on their way as ambassadors of our culture to travel with the Ninth to Japan and South America. The students give them questions and our greetings. The message is clear: you are welcome here.

In 1973, the Swiss composer Frank Martin wrote a commissioned work for Yehudi Menuhin, a Passion for violin and string orchestra, the work "Polyptique". In Siena, he was inspired by the altarpieces of the Renaissance painter Duccio di Buoninsegna.

Without the music being underpinned by text, language is present in the part of the solo violin. Frank Martin composes emotions such as hate, love or consolation, which in their intensity form a subtle and at the same time very touching "soundtrack" to the Passion. Martin's Passion music, which points 2000 years into the past, is juxtaposed with the performance of the Schüler:innen, who have also worked intensively on the theme of the Passion: The children listened to the composition, drew pictures, discovered traces of feelings and themes from their everyday lives in it and recognised relationships to the altarpieces. Suffering and forgiveness are thematised in their idea of Passion and shaped with their musical and theatrical means.