Name: journey to softness
Start: 2026-06-28T19:00:00
Location: CityPalais

Kunal Lahiry

Duisburger Philharmoniker

The Indian-American pianist Kunal Lahiry is known for his unique concert concepts. Under the title "trans*Winterreise," for example, he has retold Schubert's song cycle from the perspective of a queer identity. And the program he has compiled for his debut in Duisburg also follows a dramatic idea. "Journey to Softness," according to the artist, "takes Ligeti's 'L'escalier du diable' and Beethoven's late Piano Sonata Op. 110 as musical pillars to simulate the paradigm shift between the patriarchal 'staircase'—its relentless order—and the fugue as a symbol of queer liberation." Lahiry begins his concert with a movement from Alexander Scriabin's Piano Sonata No. 4, music full of "purity, bliss, and unadulterated, cosmic beauty." But Ligeti interrupts "what should have been an ecstatic conclusion to the sonata." What follows, he says, is an attempt to unlearn the conditioned movements required by this "staircase." Crumb, Glass, and Berio then "suggest hesitation and moments of fragility." Ravel's "Une barque sur l'océan" and Lachenmann's "Guero" introduce "water and sounds as interruptions, countering the rigid mechanics of the staircase with fluidity and rupture. Through the use of water as a transformative element, one ultimately arrives at the state of fugue"—in the third movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 31. "Karma Police" by the British rock band Radiohead "functions as the final folding of the abstract into the personal, where irony and protest meet."