Belgian National Orchestra, Sirvend & Gringolts

With The Unanswered Question, American composer Charles Ives places the listener inside an existential space. A simple, almost timeless question is posed again and again, while the attempted answers grow increasingly tense and desperate, until only silence remains. Music as thought, without resolution. At the heart of the programme lies Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, "To the Memory of an Angel". Written after the death of Manon Gropius, it is not a virtuoso showpiece but a musical farewell: tender, fragile and deeply lived. Grief and memory merge into music that does not glorify loss, but gently carries it. The solo violin is not a soloist in the traditional sense, but a human voice searching for consolation. Ilya Gringolts gives that voice an intensity that is impossible to ignore. After darkness comes light — though cautiously — in Robert Schumann’s Second Symphony. Not a triumphant victory, but a hard-won return to joy and inner balance. Under the direction of Jesko Sirvend, this evening leaves questions unanswered, and is all the more moving because of it.