Manifest ENG

The concert cycle “Neue Musik in St. Ruprecht” aims to match the simplicity of the church’s interior. The concerts are held on selected sundays.The oldest church of Vienna serves as a backdrop for new music: The sacral building in the centre of Vienna with its atmosphere of calm and contemplation provides new space for presenting “peripheral” music of Austrian and international provenance, radical and diverse, unspectacular and consistent.Out of this (sacred) space, with its wonderful and unusual acoustics, which let you just be and listen for sounds, there emerges momentarily an atmosphere of deceleration, maybe; poetry: “Music”, as Levi-Strauss said, “as a mechanism to abolish time”.

Due to the intimate dimensions of the site, the audience remains in close contact with the musicians throughout, breathes the same air – and, sitting on uncomfortable church benches, listens carefully to “odd” compositions, improvisations and new soundscapes.

(Burkhard Stangl, translation by Lea Rennert)