Lunalia is the Festival of Flanders Mechelen’s new spring festival celebrating contemporary and vocal music. As part of the festival, Evgenia Brendes and Séverine Ballon give the Première of Noorderlicht, a storytelling concert with live music, for children aged 7 to 99.
Noorderlicht is based on the story of the same name from the book Hoofd vol klanken by Annemarie Peeters and Emilie Lauwers, and set to Kaija Sarriaho's work for Sept Papillons.
The story, by Annemaries Peeters, introduces 'Little Kaija' in the tale. Here is a brief synopsis.
Kaija closes the book with a bang. She’s angry. It was a book about Mozart. She’d found it in the library and started reading it straight away... only to discover that little Mozart could already play the piano at the age of three and wrote his first music when he was five. Kaija is already ten – almost eleven! – and she’s never written any music at all, although there is nothing she wants to do more. She’s sure about that. She doesn’t know quite how she’s so sure, because she isn’t normally sure about anything much. Sometimes in the morning she spends so long deciding which socks to wear that she’s late for school. But she has never had the slightest doubt that she wants to make music. And not just any music, she wants to compose it herself. She just doesn’t know where to start. And that book was no help at all. What is she supposed to do now?
