Alexey Botvinov, Guy Danel & Sarah Bayens

In 2024, six European festivals commissioned Valentin Silvestrov to compose a piece. Inspired by the inexhaustible creative power of Scheherazade, the legendary Persian storyteller from the frame story One Thousand and One Nights, the Ukrainian composer wrote the piano trio Moments of Memory (V). The composition invites you to focus your attention on the expectations and silences between the sounds. Alexey Botvinov, pianist, artistic director of Odessa Classics and a good friend of Silvestrov’s, is travelling with the composition. After Istanbul, Bonn and Utrecht, he is now stopping off in Brussels, at the brand-new Atelier BNO. For the Belgian premiere, he will be accompanied by a pair of true-blue Brussels chamber musicians: cellist Guy Danel and violinist Sarah Bayens. In addition to Silvestrov's composition, they will perform Dmitri Shostakovich's equally fragile and poignant second piano trio.