VOICES BERLIN FESTIVAL: Wanderer

Batalov's journey through piano music leads from early Romantic expression to the experimental avant-garde of the late 20th century and invites listeners to enter diverse soundscapes in which the piano appears not merely as an instrument, but as a site of transformation, introspection, and the conceptual exploration of acoustic potential.


The piano concerto "Wanderer" invites both performer and audience to re-engage with the question of what music can be.


Helmut Lachenmann's "Serynade" (1998), a radical reinvention of pianistic music-making, forms the foundation of the program. Here, traditional piano techniques take a back seat to a careful exploration of resonance, friction, and physical gesture.


Written a year before his death, Giya Kanchelis's "Sarabande" (2018) focuses on conciseness and emotional restraint. This short work, imbued with restrained expressiveness and spiritual depth, reveals Kanchelis's signature style: quiet, modal, and characterized as much by silence as by sound.


In sharp contrast, Leonid Hrabovsky's "Homeomorphy II" (1968) applies the logic of mathematical transformation to sound. Drawing on topological concepts, Hrabovsky creates a sparse, highly concentrated sound world in which small tonal and rhythmic cells are developed through subtle permutations.


Franz Schubert's "Fantasy in C major, D. 760" ("Wanderer Fantasy," 1822) concludes the program with bold formal innovation and thematic coherence. In four intertwined movements, the work integrates song, variation, fugue and sonata into a seamless whole.