Rainy Days Music Festival Returning to Luxembourg Next Week

The Philharmonie Luxembourg has announced that a new edition of the "rainy days" music festival is taking place at different venues across Luxembourg City from Wednesday 20 to Sunday 24 November 2024.

The motto this year is "Extremes". As the organisers explained, many things can be considered "extreme", and "art has always been a playground and test tube for all kinds of exaggerations, a place to push boundaries".

For this edition of the rainy days festival, curated by Luxembourg composer Catherine Kontz, a range of "extremes" will converge, establishing new relationships.

"Most audiences consider any contemporary and experimental music an extreme sound experience: unfamiliar and therefore alienating. To remedy this misconception, the rainy days festival invites you to jump in at the deep end and discover what qualifies in our ears as an extreme experience at this moment in time. Curiously, performances which throw the ball out of the park in such an intentional and radical way, will actually make for a very easy access to contemporary music as the ideas are often simple to communicate," explained Catherine Kontz.

Modern classics from composers such as John Cage, Morton Feldman and Erik Satie will stand alongside new works at the festival. "How extreme will our experience be today to music that caused scandals decades ago?" the organisers asked. On the one hand, the whole Luxembourg Philharmonic (orchestra) with soloists, and, on the other hand, the invisible interpreter in a new piano concerto without pianist by Liam Dougherty, mark extremes just as much as seventeen electric guitars or a single harp dom they noted. And the age and career spectrum of the participants also "holds extremes" with names such as those of the old masters of the Arditti Quartet standing next to participants in the composition workshop for children.

The festival programme is available at https://www.philharmonie.lu/en/programme/2024-25/festival-overview/rainy-days-2024-0000013e00000470.

The five-day festival pass costs €58; day pass prices range from €18 to €22.