Transart is contemporary culture for everyone wishing to understand the essence of our times. At its fifth edition, the festival proposes an extremely diversified landscape, comparable to a creative geographical map that places contemporary music at its centre… in order to subsequently spread it towards the boundaries of diverse and remote territories.

Contemporary classical music inhabits the core of the festival. With the inaugural concert, taking place in the now renowned Officina FS in Bolzano, the Haydn Orchestra, musical pride of the area, goes for the first time on Transart’s stage. The works of two of the best composers of the new generation will be performed under the direction of Johannes Kalitzke: Bernard Lang, pupil of Vinko Globokar and extraordinary expert of the contemporary repertoire, and the young and talented Chinese-Venezuelan Jorge Sánchez Chiong. Lang presents DW8, “work for symphonic orchestra and record player”, where DW stands for Differenz, difference, and Wiederholung, repetition, a work that transposes on pentagram the loop techniques of electronic music composers, subjecting them to a symphonic orchestra. It follows the world premiere “trapos/catwalk en Guantanamo”, for orchestra, record player and electronic instruments: after astounding the international audience for a couple of years, Jorge Sánchez Chiong proposes a piece where the orchestral tradition trespasses into electronic music and theatre. In the same trajectory of contemporary classical music takes place the concert of the Britannic string quartet Arditti. Founded in 1972 by Irvine Arditti, the quartet has gained international reputation performing a contemporary repertoire by means of working directly with the composers: this practice is the fundamental matrix of the interpretative process at the origin of their success. For this occasion they will present Luigi Nono’s Fragmente – Stille an Diotima, inspired by Hölderlin’s poetry, and, with the technical direction of IRCAM, Quartet N.4, of the English composer Jonathan Harvey.

Whilst Museion, Bolzano’s contemporary art museum, celebrates The Perception of the Horizontal with an exhibition, transart05 proposes a parallel musical homage to the horizontal; this constitutes the common thread of an evening where works of Morton Feldman, Steve Reich, Felix Resch and Arnaldo de Felice are performed, under the direction of Kaspars Putnins, by the Rigas Kamemurziki quartet and the Latvian Radio Choir, one of the most prominent east European chamber choirs.

Frank Zappa’s apotheosis, performed by Absolute Ensemble, presents a reinterpretation of the rock & roll tradition in a contemporary classical fashion. A DJ meeting with the most celebrated exponents of the field sees Darren Price of the Underworld as a special guest.

Following this, we reach the trespassing… between video art and cinema takes place the exceptional presentation of the Cremaster cycle, created by the most acclaimed American artist of the decade, the visionary genius Matthew Barney. The Cremaster cycle is a magnificent hybridization, both narrative and symbolic-allegoric, combining video art and experimental cinema. The five episodes of this filmic saga will be presented in Bolzano and at Rovereto’s MART. Along this line finds place VAL, Video Art from London, a video program proposing the recent production of emergent artists based in London.
Electronic resonances and visual fascinations will form the heart of two Italian premieres presented in Brunico, in collaboration with the Elektra Festival of Montreal, Canada. The Canadian duo Purform (Alain Thibault and Yan Breleux) presents the project Black Box, a sort of translation into music and images of the cybernetic chaos previous to the advent of global communication. Moreover, Jan Pichè offers to the public a series of “acoustic shorts”, presented as a triptych. In the same wake of video-acoustic innovation finds place, once again in Brunico, Flüux:/terminal, celebrated winner of the Linz Ars Electronica prize, a performance of SKOLZ_KOLGEN, exploring the tight connections between visual expression and musical impulse.

Two projects in collaboration with La Biennale di Venezia, 37° Festival di Teatro exemplify a “concealed” theatre, exploring the foundations of a philosophy of contemporary representation. Weather Report, a theatre piece of incorporeal and acoustic presences, is dedicated to the listening of different climatic systems, from the equatorial Africa to the polar ice, explored, sounded, investigated by the English Chris Watson; this is a specifically theatrical project, conceived through a dramatic representation of presences in the form of sounds. Physical Interrogation Techniques, of the Swedish artist and composer Carl Michael Von Hausswolff, sees the extension of a protagonist voice, straight and stentorian, apathetic and tough, reciting parts of Physical Interrogation Techniques, a manual of instruction written by Richard W. Krousher, inspired by the interrogatory methods used by the CIA to wring information from prisoners through torture. Von Hausswolff brings the performance “onto” the public, and through a blend of frequencies represents the theatrical efficacies of a politics that pursues the Truth as its object.
Along the line of this research, finds place the versatile genius of Jan Fabre, with Angel of Death, a performance where different arts, from music to live performance, video, dance and theatre, are mixed together in a ceaseless dialogue.

It is music, again, which closes the festival, with a Dionysian homage to Plato! Seven hours of wine-tasting will be accompanied with music, performed in eight parts by Klangforum Wien on the scores of Donatoni, Sciarrino, Haas, Xenakis, Ablinger, and many other contemporary composers.
New to the 2005 edition is a program for kids, with a symphony of abandoned objects conceived by Max Vandervost, a Tyrolean version of Peter and the Wolf performed by Swarovski Musik Wattens, and an interesting project by Stump-Linshalm: a version for children of Stockhausen’s Tierkreis.