At BOZAR, three concerts give musical history a present-tense charge

The coming concert week runs from Thursday 29 October through Sunday 1 November, yet one of its clearest threads is concentrated in two days at BOZAR. On Thursday and Friday, the Brussels arts centre presents three sharply different encounters with repertoire that carries a past inside it: Les Muffatti’s reconstruction of an eighteenth-century Brussels concert world, Camerata Salzburg and Vox Luminis in Haydn and Mozart, and Vijay Iyer alone at the piano. The connection is less a shared style than a shared alertness to lineage. Each programme asks listeners to hear inherited material as active musical matter, whether it comes through period instruments, a large vocal ensemble or a solo improviser-composer’s touch. That makes this a strong route for anyone seeking a weekend programme with room for detail, contrast and close listening.^[1]^[3]^[4]^[5]

Thursday: a Brussels concert society returns to Hall M

Les Muffatti and harpsichordist Anthony Romaniuk open the sequence on Thursday 29 October at 20:30 with Le Concert Bourgeois in Hall M. BOZAR places the programme within its Echoes of Brussels series, which follows the capital’s cultural history through composers and residents. Here the subject is Pieter van Maldere’s Le Concert Bourgeois, an eighteenth-century association modelled on Paris’s Concert Spirituel and central to spreading music in Brussels during the Austrian Netherlands. The programme moves from Henri-Jacques De Croes’s late-Baroque idiom through Van Maldere and Ignaz Vitzthumb to Haydn and Johann Stamitz, making the evening’s historical arc unusually concrete.^[1]

Romaniuk’s role gives that arc a useful hinge. He is listed on harpsichord for the Haydn keyboard concerto, and Les Muffatti’s own agenda confirms the exact Brussels date, title and pairing. The instrument matters here: its clipped attack, colour and rhythmic lift set the terms for a programme built around transition, with the orchestra moving from Baroque manners toward early classicism and Sturm und Drang. BOZAR also schedules a French-and-Dutch introduction with Klaas Coulembier at 19:45 in Hall M, a practical bonus for listeners who want the local context before the music begins.^[1]^[2]

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Friday: sacred scale, then solo piano

Friday 30 October begins at 20:00 in the Henry Le Boeuf Hall, where Camerata Salzburg joins Vox Luminis XL under musical director Lionel Meunier for Haydn’s Missa in Angustiis and Mozart’s Requiem. BOZAR frames the pairing through the unusual texture of Haydn’s mass, whose wind parts were taken by organ amid economies at the Esterházy court, alongside Mozart’s unfinished Requiem as completed by his former pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr. Those are specific historical circumstances, yet the concert’s shape is immediate: soloists, vocal ensemble and orchestra gathering around two late-eighteenth-century sacred works with very different emotional weights.^[3]

Vox Luminis brings a close relationship with early repertoire to the collaboration, while Camerata Salzburg’s current season also foregrounds the ensemble’s first work with Vox Luminis and Meunier. The BOZAR programme identifies Gwendoline Blondeel, Maria-Henriette Reinhold, Raffaele Giordani and Sebastian Myrus among the soloists, alongside concertmaster Gregory Ahss. For listeners drawn to ensemble balance, this is the evening’s expansive option: a full hall, choral mass and the long-breathed architecture of Haydn and Mozart.^[3]^[5]

Friday night: Vijay Iyer’s wide historical ear

At 20:30, Vijay Iyer takes over Hall M for a solo piano concert. The timing creates an overlap with the Haydn-Mozart programme, so Friday calls for a firm choice. Iyer’s appearance supplies the weekend’s most compressed form: one pianist, one instrument, and a musical language informed by jazz history, South Asian and West African rhythmic traditions, and the African American creative music movement. His own biography names Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Alice Coltrane and Geri Allen among the composer-pianists central to that language; BOZAR likewise presents the solo concert as a meeting point between tradition and avant-garde practice.^[4]^[5]

This is where the three-event route becomes especially satisfying. Romaniuk addresses the keyboard through historical sound and eighteenth-century repertory; the Camerata Salzburg and Vox Luminis concert places sacred vocal writing inside a large collective frame; Iyer arrives with piano as a complete orchestra of attack, resonance, rhythm and space. The common thread is listening for how musicians make history audible in the present, with each room offering a radically different scale for that question.^[1]^[3]^[4]^[5]

Practical route

Start at BOZAR’s Hall M on Thursday 29 October at 20:30 for Les Muffatti and Anthony Romaniuk; the optional introduction begins at 19:45. Friday 30 October offers Camerata Salzburg and Vox Luminis in the Henry Le Boeuf Hall at 20:00, followed by Vijay Iyer in Hall M at 20:30. All three concerts take place at Rue Ravenstein 23, 1000 Brussels. Check BOZAR’s official pages again before leaving for current access, timing and ticket information, since these details can change.^[1]^[3]^[4]