Agenda

The history of music includes thousands of works written for special occasions. A burning love, a birth, the opening of the Olympic Games, a cherished memory, or a cat or two. Big or small, serious or light: in What I Really Want to Say, the six instrumentalists of the New European Ensemble placed the ball entirely in your court, the audience’s.

It is up to composers Elizabete Beāte Rudzinska, Jasper de Bock, Alice Yeung, and Hesce Mourits to transform the most beautiful submissions into sounding notes. The result: a concert full of stories, wishes, and intentions from the audience.

So what’s on your mind?

The renowned Javanese singer and composer Peni Candra Rini—one of the jury members for the Gaudeamus Award 2026—presents her new work The Wheel for gamelan, in collaboration with the New European Ensemble. This 45-minute chamber piece reinterprets the traditional Javanese macapat cycle: eleven poetic songs in liturgical Javanese that trace the spiritual and existential phases of human life.

Rather than drawing on traditional repertoire, the work deconstructs and reconfigures the acoustic spectra of gamelan instruments, combining their distinctive timbres with the sound colours of a contemporary chamber ensemble. The resonance, overtone structures, microtonality, and cyclical temporality of the gamelan form the generative core of a new musical language. A piece in which the New European Ensemble invites you to dare to listen and discover an innovative interplay.

Steve Reich’s The Desert Music is an impressive choral and orchestral work that connects poetic language with the threat and uncertainty of its time. The title and lyrics are drawn from William Carlos Williams, whose words Reich brought together into one vast, breathing soundscape, based on Williams’ collection The Desert Music and Other Poems.

There is, however, more hidden behind that landscape: Reich deliberately chose texts from Williams’ post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki period, a time when ‘the bomb’ hung like a shadow over the world. The music reveals how human dreams and desires collide with the questions raised by our conscience—a tension that forms the heart of The Desert Music. ‘The desert’ remains ambiguous: a physical place, an inner emptiness, or a vision of the future.

Led by the Hague concert hall Amare, the ensembles NKK, Klang, HIIIT, New European Ensemble, and Het Muziek join forces with the Royal Conservatoire to celebrate his 90th birthday with a performance of his magnum opus, The Desert Music.

More information to follow.

In this theatrical concert, musicians from Aleppo join forces with the New European Ensemble to bring the rich musical traditions of their city to life. Together, they paint a new soundscape in which the ancient city comes into motion; ancient voices echo from houses of prayer and coffee shops, while car horns blare and the air carries the scent of coffee, pepper, and cinnamon.

A Ticket to Aleppo offers a warm-blooded musical dialogue between Arabic and Western traditions, showcasing the city’s enduring vitality. In this performance, the ecstasy and spirituality of Aleppo converge with Western timbre, harmony, and form. Instruments such as the oud, qanun, and riq are seamlessly woven together with violin, viola, cello, and flute.

Spoken word and narrations will be in English.

Resistance is more than an act; it is a voice that demands to be heard. In the moving song cycle Voices from 1973, composer Hans Werner Henze gives the floor to twenty resistance poets from across the globe. Written in the shadow of the Vietnam War, this ninety-minute masterpiece stands as an impressive tribute to the human spirit. New European Ensemble performs this timely work under the baton of conductor Carlo Boccadoro, alongside soloists Carina Vinke (alto) and Peter Tantsits (tenor). The instrumental line-up is unique: in addition to their own instruments, the musicians collectively play about seventy different instruments from various worldwide traditions — from Africa and Asia to South America. The result is a profound soundscape that invites the listener: dare to listen, dare to discover.

Henze himself was an outsider who left Germany for Italy, fleeing both homophobia and the strict musical laws of his contemporaries. He regarded Voices as his own ‘Lied von der Erde’, concluding with a hopeful vision: a pre-Columbian flower festival dreaming of a world at peace. This autumn, New European Ensemble brings this extraordinary composition to the Romaeuropa Festival. It is a rare opportunity to experience one of Henze’s most haunting works, in which the cry for justice resonates as loudly today as it did fifty years ago.