European Bridges Ensemble - Concerts

Concerts

The founding event of EBE was the Lange Musik Nacht on 17 June 2005. Conductor Georg Hajdu and performers Ivana Ognjanović and Marlon Schumacher were in Stuttgart, Kai Niggemann in Münster, Johannes Kretz in Wien and Andrea Szigetvári in Budapest. The piece played was Bridges, and it demonstrated that the idea of playing music via Wide Area Network is possible. This same piece was performed again on a concert a year later, where the whole Ensemble played in a Local Area Network at the Making New Waves 2006 festival in Budapest, Hungary.

This concert was followed by a long pause: next time the band appeared again on stage was only in early Autumn 2007 at the Music in the Global Village Conference Budapest (this was the first international conference dedicated exclusively to network music composition and performance). Here, the opening concert was played by the EBE, together with Anne La Berge and the LOOS Ensemble. The conference itself was part of Projekt-Bipolar, a two years long German-Hungarian cultural programme. The Ensemble had two more concerts organized by members of Projekt-Bipolar during October 2007 in Berlin, Germany. These included the closing concert of Projekt Bipolar and also the closing event of a young composers' competition.

During 2008 the band played on five concerts at three festivals: two subsequent nights during the ICMC 2008 at the Whitla Hall in Belfast., two concerts at the Klangwerktage 2008 festival in Hamburg (from which one was a Wide Area Network concert with ensemble member Johannes Kretz playing from Krems, Austria) and one at Making New Waves 2008 festival in Budapest, Hungary. After this last concert, the Hungarian Television made an interview presenting the Ensemble.

In 2009 the Ensemble had concerts in Prague at the Enter4 festival, the Klangwerktage 2009 festival in Hamburg, the Making New Waves 2009 festival with its second edition of the Music in the Global Village conference and a Wide Area Network concert at the SIGGRAPH Asia conference with ensemble members playing from Yokohama, Lincoln, Budapest and Belgrade.