Aldeburgh Festival, 2003

Extract

Mauricio Kagel's Eine Brise, a ‘fleeting action’ for 111 cyclists, was one of the signature events of the Aldeburgh Festival this year, a bizarre procession along the beach front, creating an evanescent, mobile performance of honking, whistling, and singing. It was a brilliantly absurdist gesture – and typical Kagel, you might think. But Eine Brise, composed in 1996, was the exception in Aldeburgh's focus on Kagel's recent music. Their mini-retrospective of his music of the last couple of decades revealed how the surrealist master of the 1960s and 70s has developed into a more complex figure, at once more conventional and more elusive.