Musical Utopias #8 | The Nature Editon | 15-18 January 2026
From 15 to 18 January 2026, it’s time to immerse yourself in the latest music and inspiring performances during our annual Musial Utopias festival!
This year’s subtitle is The Nature Edition, encouraging us to reflect on our relationship with nature.
The first three evenings will take place at our regular partner Korzo, but we are delighted that this year, for the first time, we can expand the festival a little across the city with a closing concert at Amare!
Buy your tickets for the performances on 15, 16 & 17 January at Korzo here!
The programme includes iconic works and artists alongside brand new creations: Heiner Goebbels, Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, Kika Sprangers, Ela Orleans, Lise Morrison, Pauline Oliveros, Ivan Vukosavljevic, Michael Gordon, and many others.
Whether you are a curious listener, or a seasoned adventurer in new music, Musical Utopias is the place to start your year sparkling and inspired!
Check out the full program below!
Buy your tickets for Walden on 18 January at Amare here!
Thursday 15 Jan Korzo
7 PM
Shadow Forest by Go-Eun Im (ongoing installation)
Shadow Forest is an immersive installation and performance by Korean artist Go-Eun Im that continuously adapts to its surroundings and its audience. Through film, live drawing, shadow play and a layered soundscape, a living environment emerges in which visitors are free to move and shape their own experience.
On 15, 16 & 17 January Go-Eun will present a special live performance within the installation, 19.00-19.45. There’s only space for a small audience, so arrive on time, first come, first serve!
After that, the installation will be open to visitors throughout the evening.
8.15 PM
Sharing Space (with a river). Alison Isadora & Luna Quartet
Isadora’s Sharing Space (with a river) is based on field recordings made in the floodplains of Meinerswijk. During the piece the quartet traverses through the seasons, sometimes in dialogue with recordings or projected collages of photos from the area. Composer and sound artist Alison Isadora hears our human activities as being part of nature: the construction site, the motorbike and chainsaw existing in the same space as the shag, the willow tree and the duck.
Can we find a way to share space with the river, the marshes and all that live within to create a flourishing collective ecosystem? You are invited to listen along!
In De Volkskrant
Alison Isadora:’I am not advocating ecological perfection. I believe that everything we do is also part of nature. But humans are only one of the stakeholders, not the centre of attention.‘
You can read the entire conversation that Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant had with Alison Isadora about Sharing Space (with a river) (in Dutch) here.
Six for the new time (Pauline Oliveros) – Dario Calderone & Ensemble KlangEnsemble Klang will perform Six for the New Time by Pauline Oliveros together with bassist Dario Calderone this evening. Deep Listening, as developed by Pauline Oliveros, explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening. The practice includes bodywork, sonic meditations, and interactive performance, as well as listening to the sounds of daily life, nature, one’s own thoughts, imagination, and dreams. It cultivates a heightened awareness of the sonic environment, both external and internal, and promotes experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness, and other creative skills vital to personal and community growth.
Oliveros: “For me Deep Listening is a life long practice. The more I listen the more I learn to listen. Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard, expanding to the whole field of sound while finding focus. This is the way to connect with the acoustic environment, all that inhabits it, and all that there is.
Deep Listening is a practice consisting of listening and sounding exercises and pieces I and others have composed since 1970. The results are processed by group discussions in workshops and retreats. Deep Listening is for musicians as well as participants from other disciplines and interests. Previous musical training is not required.
The key to multi-level existence is Deep Listening – listening in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time. Deep Listening is exploring the relationships among any and all sounds whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered or imaginary. Thought is included. Deep Listening includes all sounds expanding the boundaries of perception.
We open in order to listen to the world as a field of possibilities and we listen with narrowed attention for specific things of vital interest to us in the world. Through accessing many forms of listening we grow and change whether we listen to the sounds of our daily lives, the environment or music. Deep Listening takes us below the surface of our consciousness and helps to change or dissolve limiting boundaries.
Deep Listening is a birthright for all humans.”
Alison Isadora
Friday 16 Jan Korzo
7 pm
Shadow Forest by Go-Eun Im (ongoing installation)
Shadow Forest is an immersive installation and performance by Korean artist Go-Eun Im that continuously adapts to its surroundings and its audience. Through film, live drawing, shadow play and a layered soundscape, a living environment emerges in which visitors are free to move and shape their own experience.
On 15, 16 & 17 January Go-Eun will present a special live performance within the installation, 19.00-19.45. There’s only space for a small audience, so arrive on time, first come, first serve!
After that, the installation will be open to visitors throughout the evening.
8.15 pm
Wonder Turner Pieces (world premiere)
Lise Morrison, Alex Pearl & Ensemble Klang
Composer Lise Morrison has roots in South Africa, and her instrumental and electroacoustic works explore repetition and subtle changes within fragile environments.
Together with visual artist Alex Pearl, she creates a hypnotic collection of flickering images and music, full of illusion and magic, inspired by historical thaumatrope devices to contemporary GIFs.
Please note: during Wonder Turner Pieces by Lise Morrison and Alex Pearl, flashing images will be shown.
Swarms (world premiere)
Anna-Louise Walton, Wim van Egmond & Ensemble Klang
Micro-videographer Wim van Egmond captures stop-motion films at the intersection of science and art, that play with human perception. Together with composer Anna-Louise Walton he created a brand new work exploring the magic of organic systems.
Reflecting on his work, Wim told us: ‘I’ve been doing this for about thirty years. Every time I discover a new little creature, I see things I’ve never seen before. It’s an endless world’.
That sense of wonder was present in everything he showed us. Not as something grand or dramatic, but as a quiet, contagious curiosity. It’s exactly this spirit that flows into the new work he created together with composer Anna-Louise Walton for Musical Utopias.
A collaboration that explores the magic of organic systems, translating microscopic movement and structure into an immersive musical experience.
Hyper (Michael Gordon)
Ensemble Klang & Schupp & Van Dijk
A hyperactive, hyper-energetic, ever-circling adventure into wonderlands of impossible geometric shapes and forms, Michael Gordon’s Hyper takes as its point of inspiration the Penrose Stairs, used in M.C. Escher’s art, to conjure a musical work in continual ascent.
Performed in an arrangement for Ensemble Klang, Hyper is a true Klang classic and is reinforced for this performance with video art by Schupp & Van Dijk.
The film by Schupp & Van Dijk was recorded and made during the first corona-lockdown (March-June 2020): each performer recorded their part individually to be then layered on top of each other for the finished result.
The musical and visual content, can be seen as a metaphor for that lockdown situation: a controlled stasis, a recurring day, with recurring patterns and behaviours that collectively blurs time to create an altogether ‘other’ experience.Hyper’s live performance during Musical Utopias promises to be a unique experience!
Dr. Moon – Schupp & Van Dijk
The starting point for this real-time performance is an American popular science series from the 1950s by the Moody Institute of Science. The bizarre and hypnotic images from the series are remixed live by Sjeng Schupp, supplemented with sound collages by composer Michiel van Dijk, who draws inspiration from electronic music from the same period. This results in a highly interactive and fragmented performance, performed by two soulmates who are perfectly attuned to each other.
9.45 PM Korzo Studio
The Way Wild Rivers Flow (NSJ Compositieopdracht 2025: Kika Sprangers)
Kika Sprangers & band
In the Studio saxophonist and composer Kika Sprangers presents her latest work: The Way Wild Rivers Flow, an adaptation of the composition she wrote this summer for North Sea Jazz 2025. In this quintet, Sprangers delivers a dynamic performance in which her characteristic lyricism and rich harmonies play the leading role.
Sprangers’ music is melodious, compelling, and layered, with a refined interplay between composition and improvisation. Expect a concert full of imagination, emotion, and ensemble playing of the highest quality.
Hyper - Michael Gordon (Ensemble Klang) Video: Schupp & Van Dijk
Saturday 17 Jan Korzo
7 PM
Shadow Forest by Go-Eun Im (ongoing installation)
Shadow Forest is an immersive installation and performance by Korean artist Go-Eun Im that continuously adapts to its surroundings and its audience. Through film, live drawing, shadow play and a layered soundscape, a living environment emerges in which visitors are free to move and shape their own experience.
On 15, 16 & 17 January Go-Eun will present a special live performance within the installation, 19.00-19.45. There’s only space for a small audience, so arrive on time, first come, first serve!
After that, the installation will be open to visitors throughout the evening.
8.15 PM – Grote zaal
Forma Nubium (Ela Orleans)
Ensemble Klang & Pavla Beranova
Ela Orleans, Associate Maker for Ensemble Klang, is a Polish audiovisual artist and composer who blends image and sound in surprising ways.
Forma Nubium is a large-scale interdisciplinary work for sound, film, light, and text by composer Orleans, created in collaboration with Ensemble Klang and light designer Pavla Beranova.
The piece originated from a moment of quiet transformation: during a flight descending through clouds, city lights appeared and disappeared in the mist, offering a sense of consolation through motion and change. From this experience emerged a work that reflects on perception, impermanence, and the fragile beauty of transition. The title itself evokes this idea: forma meaning shape, nubium meaning of clouds.
While Orleans’ earlier work Night Voyager looked outward into cosmic space, Forma Nubium turns its gaze closer to Earth, into atmospheric space. The ever-present yet elusive realm between sky and ground. Clouds become both subject and metaphor: familiar and mysterious, stable only through constant change.
At the heart of the work lies a long human fascination with clouds, spanning ancient and medieval symbolism to early scientific inquiry. Central to Forma Nubium are the optical writings of Roger Bacon from the Opus Majus, in which clouds function not only as veils but as lenses. Spaces where light multiplies, refracts, and forms phenomena such as the rainbow. Fragments of Latin text from these writings are whispered and sung, surfacing and dissolving like passing thoughts carried on air.
Rather than depicting clouds as images, Forma Nubium explores them as states of perception. Sound, image, and light continuously shift, blurring the boundaries between clarity and obscurity, order and flux, consciousness and dream. The work becomes a meditation on how change can hold stillness, how loss can coexist with beauty, and how the ever-shifting sky can, at times, feel like a place of belonging.
Ensemble Klang stands at the core of Forma Nubium, shaping its musical language and expressive depth, and bringing this contemplative exploration of light, sound, and transformation vividly to life.
9.30 PM – Studio
A Mind in the Heart (worldpremiere)
Ivan Vukosavljevic & Joana Gama
You can also listen to a brand new project by Ivan Vukosavljevic. A mind in the heart is his 3rd album, created in collaboration with Portuguese pianist Joana Gama. Consisting of 8 movements, it is composed under the veil of sounds of sacred music from Ivan’s homeland of Serbia. The work is immersed in the classical sound of the piano, the mystery of the Orthodox chant, the horizontal play of drone and melody, and the eternal presence of the sacred in music.
Ela Orleans at Musical Utopias 2024
Sunday 18 Jan Walden Amare
Heiner Goebbels, Ensemble Klang, Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, Keir Neuringer, Marc Thein
19.30 Pre-concert talk, foyer Conservatoriumzaal Amare
20.15 Conservatoriumzaal, Amare
Composer Heiner Goebbels’ Walden revolves around texts by 19th-century essayist and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, a pioneer in both modern environmental activism and civil disobedience. In his work Walden (1854), he describes his attempt to live simply in harmony with nature for two years, secluded in a cottage near Walden Pond, located near Concord, Massachusetts. During this concert, music, text and a special lighting design bring Walden to life.
Eighteen years after the first ensemble version of Walden for Ensemble Klang, Goebbels has now joined forces with the group again, and together with lighting designer Marc Thein created a brand new production. The regular line-up of Ensemble Klang is now complemented by Germany’s finest string ensemble, Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, and the voice and saxophone of Keir Neuringer (Irreversible Entanglements).
A number of specially constructed instruments, including the “steel cello” and “bow chimes” designed by American painter, sculptor and musician Bob Rutman, to whom the work is dedicated, enrich the unique and lively soundscape.
‘Klang and Kaleidoskop beautifully bring the magnificent textures of “Walden” to the surface.’ (****)
– De Volkskrant about our perfomance of Walden at the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ on 8 January 2026.
Read the full review (in Dutch) here.
You can buy your tickets for Walden at the Amare website
Walden is made possible by support of the Goethe Instituut and the Siemens Foundation.
15-17 Jan - Club Korzo
Shadow Forest by Go-Eun Im (ongoing installation)
Shadow Forest is an immersive installation and performance by Korean artist Go-Eun Im that continuously adapts to its surroundings and its audience. Through film, live drawing, shadow play and a layered soundscape, a living environment emerges in which visitors are free to move and shape their own experience.
Inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and the forest as a utopian space, Shadow Forest invites moments of stillness, attention and renewed sensitivity to the small, fragile and more-than-human life around us.
Go-Eun Im: “I hope the audience experiences this work like being in a forest: unexpected, layered and alive.”
On 15, 16 & 17 January Go-Eun will present a special live performance within the installation, 19.00-19.45. There’s only space for a small audience, so arrive on time, first come, first serve!
After that, the installation will be open to visitors throughout the evening.
Credits Shadow Forest
Direction and Production: Go-Eun Im
Performance: Go-Eun Im, Igor Sevcuk
Music: Heiner Goebbels, Post-Industrial Boys (George Dzodzuashvili)
Cast: Marika Asatiani & Lila Dzodzuashvili
Commissioned by National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul and Busan Museum of Contemporary Art
Tickets
You can get your tickets for the concerts at Korzo via the Korzo website.
Tickets for Walden at Amare are available via the Amare website.