One of the leading European composers of our time, Yannis Kyriakides combines sound, performance and visual art in his work. The performance of his opera “Ask Ada” is the most important event in the “GES-2: Music” program, which represents the modern music scene as a space of cross-disciplinary search, a dialogue of arts.

The stage text and the visuals here are part of the score, and the composer acts simultaneously as a production designer. Kyriakides builds a complex system of reflections of the visible and the audible, where video, word, acoustic and electronic sound are in counterpoint.

The title character Ada Lovelace is the daughter of the poet George Byron, the first programmer in history. Back in the middle of the 19th century, she predicted the advent of the era of artificial intelligence. “Ask Ada” is not just a biography: the 36 episodes of the opera correspond to the number of years that Lovelace lived, as well as the number of lines in her computer program, the code of which, written in 1843, forms the basis of Kyriakides’ work.

What actually makes folk music, folk music? The Orchestra of the Komische Oper Berlin explores this question symphonically under the direction of Brandon Keith Brown. George Walker’s Lyric for strings, with its chant-like lines and catchy quality is one of the most important components of the American concert tradition. Luciano Berio took recordings and traditions of folk songs from all over the world as a model for his Folk Songs and made them into an exciting and colourful cycle. Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union, which opens the concert, shapes a massive monophonic timbre from 20 instrumentalists without limiting individual freedom. Gustav Mahler’s folk-infused 1st Symphony closes the concert: Here one hears everything the “Volxmusik Heart” desires—from the humming and buzzing of country landscapes to Austrian barn dances to the “Bruder Jakob” canon.