Stadtgarten

Venloer Straße 40

20:00Benedicte Maurseth
21:30Dirk Rothbrust & Jan St. Werner
22:45Georg Vogel

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Friday, 16 Oct 2026Fri, 16 Oct • 20:00 • Stadtgarten
Benedicte Maurseth Benedicte Maurseth
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Friday, 16 Oct 2026Fri, 16 Oct • 21:30 • Stadtgarten
Dirk Rothbrust & Jan St. Werner Dirk Rothbrust & Jan St. Werner
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Friday, 16 Oct 2026Fri, 16 Oct • 22:45 • Stadtgarten
Georg Vogel Georg Vogel
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What happens when an ancient musical tradition is allowed to gently drift into the present? Norwegian hardanger fiddle player Benedicte Maurseth approaches folk music as living material: fragile, resonant and open to transformation. At Three Skies, the distinctive sound of the Hardanger fiddle becomes the centre of a music suspended between traditional Norwegian music and contemporary composition and improvisation. Bowed strings shimmering, melodies emerging from drones, overtones and tiny shifts in intonation. Maurseth studied with legendary fiddler Knut Hamre and has worked with artists ranging from Jon Fosse and Rolf Lislevand to the Kronos Quartet. Her music never treats tradition as a museum piece. Instead, ancient forms become a starting point for listening differently – to resonance, silence, texture and the traces of music carried across generations.

Music as composed sound: echoes, artefacts, disturbances and unexpected noises move to the foreground, while melody and rhythm recede. Listening becomes an active, shifting act of decoding – a shared process in which meaning is never fixed, but constantly renegotiated between the ear and the world. At Three Skies, percussionist Dirk Rothbrust, a central figure of contemporary music and member of Ensemble Musikfabrik, and electronic musician Jan St. Werner, co-founder of the pioneering Cologne duo Mouse on Mars, push sound to its perceptual limits. Acoustic and electronic sounds collide, overlap and transform. Rhythms condense, fragment and dissolve; sonic identities disintegrate. Fleeting microseconds – the instant before a sound can be clearly recognised – are magnified and hurled into the space in explosive, microscopically processed bursts. The result is an ever-changing soundscape in which reflections, resonances and disturbances activate the room itself as a living instrument.

What if a piano had more notes than you thought possible? Austrian pianist and composer Georg Vogel has built his own instrument, the Claviton, around a 31-tone equal temperament. It opens a harmonic world far beyond the twelve notes of the conventional piano – a world of microtonal intervals, unfamiliar colours and unexpected resonances. But Vogel’s music is not an exercise in tuning theory. Jazz, spectralism, improvisation and historical tuning systems become practical tools for exploring how harmony can work when the rules change. At Three Skies, the Claviton becomes less an unusual instrument than a portal into another musical logic. Familiar gestures suddenly sound subtly displaced; chords reveal internal colours that conventional tuning normally hides. The result is music that can feel strangely familiar and completely alien at the same time – a piano concert from a world running on different acoustic laws.