Welcome to the Festival of Flanders Kortrijk, the most confident yet by far the quirkiest of the long string of festivals that dominate the Flemish musical life from April to October.
It wasn't always so. For years, Kortrijk's was a run-of-the- mill festival with a mostly classical programme lacking in adventure. When the Flemish government withdrew its funding in the mid-noughties, the festival was discontinued until local programmer Joost Fonteyne was asked to relaunch it last year.
Fonteyne saw the interruption as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean. He wanted to create something new, an event that would transform the city's soundscape and wreak havoc with the concert experience as we know it. "There was no point recreating what already existed," he says. "The festival belongs in the 21st century. It needs a new history."
Fonteyne was known at the time as the founder of Happy New Ears, a local sound art fest that had established provincial, drowsy Kortrijk as a pioneering capital of this fledgling art form he describes as "the twilight zone between the visual arts, music and sound". In 2008, British music magazine The Wire named the event "one of Europe's premier sound art festivals". Although it was suspended the following year, the revamped Festival of Kortrijk clearly follows in its footsteps.
Its centrepiece is the exhibition Klinkende Stad, which features half a dozen sound art installations. One of them is by Norway's Maia Urstad (the lady with the transistors), another by Belgian Pierre Berthet (who works with dripping water but also with doctored vacuum-cleaners). Yet another is the work of Dutchman Paul Devens, who records ambient noises as he cycles around Kortrijk, then works them into a riveting, seamless continuum. The idea behind all these works is to open our ears by focusing on the raw materiality of sound, undistilled into speech or music.
New public for new music
While Klinkende Stad draws devotees from across Europe, the rest of the programme is a merry jumble of concerts that attracts mostly local enthusiasts. These differ from the traditional concert- going public in that they don't mind the positively weird sounds of Heiner Goebbels' Songs of Wars I Have Seen, based on poems by Gertrude Stein, or the combination of professional and mentally handicapped musicians in the Wild Classical Music Ensemble's concert - an extraordinary aural equivalent to art brut.
"We're in the process of creating a new public," argues Fonteyne. "It's unlikely to happen overnight, though."
The classical repertoire features prominently, yet with none of the stuffiness associated with old-fashioned concerts. Acutely aware of the need to remove the mental barriers that make it so difficult for some to enter a concert hall, Fonteyne has gone as far as to redesign a local theatre into an ultra-cool club with soft lights and comfy chairs. Three performances will take place there, two of them featuring members of the celebrated Kuijken family.
"These are no second-rate concerts," emphasises Fonteyne. "They're an experiment - an attempt to show that there's more to classical music than red plush."
Elsewhere, the classics step down from their pedestal and mingle freely with other genres and styles. Take the Hilliard Ensemble's opening concert, which mixes Renaissance polyphony with contemporary sounds by British composer Gavin Bryars. Or Claire Croizé's The Farewell, a fluid choreography based on Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. Or The Arabian Passion according to JS Bach, the delightfully irreverent closing concert that presents music by the Leipzig cantor with a Middle-Eastern and very sensual twist.
If you can only devote one day to the festival, though, make it Sunday, 15 May, when several small concerts on the theme of "East meets West" will be staged around the city centre, from a piano recital by South Korean Tae-Hyung Kim (the revelation of last year's Queen Elisabeth Competition) to a demonstration of the Chinese p'i-p'a, the Middle- Eastern oud and other instruments from the lute family. Visitors can pick a programme and organise their visit as they fancy, as one orders a meal from a restaurant menu.
Enjoy it while it lasts, before the dull roar of everyday traffic sweeps over Kortrijk again.
Pictured: Seelenvoll, the final concert of the festival's East Meets West day, is as visual as it is auditory
The Festival of Flanders doesn't exist as such - it is a label shared by eight music fests, each with its own theme and personality, that dominate the region's musical life for six months every year.
This formidable machine, which began in 1958 with a handful of concerts staged in Ghent, is set into motion towards the end of April in Mechelen, which welcomes a fine programme newly devoted to the voice. It grinds to a halt in late October with the heady mix of chamber music and contemporary sounds served up by the Festival of Flemish Brabant. In between is a winding musical journey that takes us from Kortrijk to Limburg, a choice destination for lovers of percussion and carillon. But the Festival of Flanders' mainstays are four events huddled together in August and September. Staged at the height of summer, Bruges' MA festival, formerly Musica Antiqua, offers a zesty programme of concerts,
organised this year around the theme of artistic legacy, as well as a world-famous early music competition.
Antwerp follows a couple of weeks later with Laus Polyphonia, a treat for dyed-in-the-wool lovers of early music, but also for babies and toddlers, who will be catered for in a promising new concert series introduced this year.
Brussels' Klarafestival greets us back from the summer holidays with its trademark mix of high-profile concerts and more intimate events in parks, metro stations and private homes. Utopia is the flavour of the year, with performances by René Jacobs, the Akademie für alte Musik Berlin and the London Philharmonic. Finally Ghent, where it all began, hogs the limelight with a star- lined programme, concerts on rivers and canals and even cycling tours.
There is no doubt about it: "Festival" is a Flemish word.
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