The program brings together music by Henry Purcell, Domenico Scarlatti, Kate Moore, Edison Denisov, and Kaija Saariaho, spanning several centuries yet united by shared fascinations with transformation, timbre, and the reinterpretation of familiar musical language. Through thoughtful programming and informed performance-practice research, pianist Maria Nemtsova seeks to reveal unexpected dialogues between baroque counterpoint, post-spectral colour, minimalist energy, and late-20th-century harmonic innovation.

 

A central thread in this project is the artistic enrichment that arises from placing Hieronymus Bosch’s visual imagination in conversation with classical repertoire. Music, like Bosch’s paintings, is defined by constant change, transformation, and the re-shaping of meaning. Bosch alters familiar objects, granting them new significance, hidden layers, and symbolic depth; this program aims to illuminate similar processes within sound.

​

At the centre of the program stands Edison Denisov’s Variations on the Theme of Handel — a work of great technical and expressive intensity. Beginning with a classical passacaglia, its harmonies gradually become distorted, grotesque, and unsettling. This transformation of a familiar musical object closely parallels Bosch’s method of twisting the known to reveal the uncanny.

​

Contemporary music by Kate Moore adds another dimension. Her piano-and-electronics work layers live playing with recorded loops, creating dense, stratified textures reminiscent of aging surfaces in old paintings. Bestiary explores inner demons and darker psychological states, functioning almost as a musical counterpart to Bosch’s symbolic creatures and imaginary worlds.

​

In contrast, works by Purcell and Scarlatti offer clarity and luminous stillness. Their refined structures evoke a sense of serenity — a “heavenly” space that, in Bosch’s art, coexists with the fantastical.

 

The overall form follows a Gothic-arch form: opening with Moore, rising to Denisov’s Variations, and returning to Moore, with baroque works shaping the inner architecture. Maria Nemtsova thus constructs an imagined acoustic cathedral — a space where early and contemporary music meet, and where Bosch’s universe enters not only through image, but through sound.