KMSKA LATE - Spectra Ensemble - Sound & Color

What if colors could sing? That question serves as the starting point for 'A Red that Sings' at the KMSKA, where color is no longer merely visible but vibrates, moves, and becomes a sensory force. Artists such as Ensor, Wouters, and Schmalzigaug viewed color not as decoration, but as energy, rhythm, and intensity—a quality you can almost hear. It is precisely this idea that is central to this concert program by the Spectra Ensemble.

The three works on the program approach music as a play of light, shadow, and timbre. It is not melody or form that takes precedence, but the experience of sound itself: how a timbre brightens, thickens, changes color, or dissolves. In Debussy, sound takes on an impressionistic glow, in which harmonies move like light on water. In Brewaeys’ Painted Pyramids, sound becomes architecture: built from overtones, resonances, and electronic shadows, like painted volumes in a futuristic field of color. Murail, finally, allows sound to transform slowly, like a sunset unfolding in ever-subtler shades.

Just as in 'A Red that Sings', this is not about representation, but about perception and intensity. Sound functions as color, music as a living surface in constant transformation—singing, vibrating, and constantly in motion.

Program

Claude Debussy
La Mer (1905) part 1: De l’aube à midi (arranged for piano trio by Sally Beamish)

Luc Brewaeys
Painted Pyramids (2008) (for piano solo, ensemble, and electronics)

Tristan Murail
Treize couleurs du soleil couchant (1978) (for five instruments)