Passage

Young musicians pull us from the screen and out into the streets.

The concert begins indoors with Julian Sartorius's RLLRLRLLRRLRLRLRLLRLRLR, performed by FRAMES Percussion. The title is the piece: a 23-beat sequence of right- and left-hand strokes, played continuously on whatever is placed in front of the performers. A fifth performer keeps adding instruments, objects and materials to the tables, the music growing ever more intricate and frenetic.

Then Alberto Bernal's Passage begins. Four percussionists play against projections of what fills our days: reels, selfies, gossip, politics — a world lived largely through the screen. Music students from Oslo kulturskole join them as the performance moves slowly into the surrounding streets and public spaces, unfolding through the encounter between music, performers and whatever the city offers that day.

The piece was first performed in Barcelona in 2024 during the Mixtur Festival. This is its Oslo premiere, created with and for the people and spaces around Voldsløkka.

Programme

Julian Sartorius
RLLRLRLLRRLRLRLRLLRLRLR (2019) for percussion quartet and conductor

Alberto Bernal

PASSAGE #2 “OSLO” (2024, revised 2026) for percussion, video and thirty or more musicians

Want to know more?

• In Julian Sartorius' RLLRLRLLRRLRLRLRLLRLRLR, each letter is a performance instruction. R for right hand, L for left. The title is the score, a 23-beat pattern repeated continuously as the instruments and objects around the players accumulate.
• Alberto Bernal often brings music into public space. In 300kg of Music, he turns a thousand years of musical tradition into physical weight: a car is gradually filled with scores, instruments and loudspeakers until the performer tries to drag it through the street.
• In Passage, the students from Oslo kulturskole perform a choreography designed by Alberto Bernal and their teachers. They move between individual and collective action, sometimes alone, sometimes together, playing their favourite melodies as they meet in harmony and dissonance.
• Bernal's music is also presented at Ultima in Slightly Bent, performed by Miguel Ángel García Martín at Sentralen on 11 September, as part of the minifestival Ultima Thule. The closest possible sound.