Bühne Kastellplatz
24 May 2026 at 23:15
Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel” is a quiet, contemplative work for mixed choir, viola, celesta, and percussion. It was composed in close connection with the Rothko Chapel - an interfaith space for prayer characterized by Mark Rothko’s large-scale, dark color fields.
Like the space itself, the music feels stripped down and inward-looking: floating soundscapes, delicate gestures, and long periods of silence create a meditative atmosphere. Feldman translates the visual experience of the chapel into sound—time seems stretched out, and form recedes in favor of intense perception.
At the centre of a special concert format is the work of Morton Feldman, whose 100th birthday is being marked this year. In a temporally expanded setting—from late evening deep into the night—key works such as Rothko Chapel, Two Pieces for Cello and Piano and others are performed.
This long, quiet, non-jazz programme explores the power of slowness and space. Through multi-channel sound transmission, a fragile sonic field unfolds in front of the main stage, dispersing throughout the performance area. The audience is free to move, to explore shifting sound positions, and to lose itself in the environment—later extending into surrounding churches, parks and dark pathways.
The “melancholy of disappearance” becomes physically perceptible: the music gradually dissolves, space sinks into silence, and listeners are left alone with their own associations.
Feldman’s music—defined by suspension, stillness and the absence of conventional dramaturgy—opens microscopic sonic spaces in which time expands and meaning dissolves. As in the paintings of Mark Rothko, sound becomes a condition, a surface, a duration.
The programme “Melancholy of Disappearance” is an invitation to contemplative listening and to immersion in an alternative, dreamlike reality.