From Tsoupaki’s floating sense of time to Mahler’s intimate heart and Dvořák’s warm expansiveness. An evening that begins gently and ends in sunlight.

Calliope Tsoupaki, former Composer Laureate of the Netherlands and a close artistic ally of the Residentie Orkest, explores in Falling how we, as human beings, search for new meaning in a world that has become unstable. The piece is compact—just thirteen minutes—but intense and full of movement. Mahler then turns emotion inward with one of his most beloved song cycles: the Rückert Lieder. Five miniature mirrors in which longing, calm, introspection and wistfulness are revealed without drama. Barbara Kozelj makes the songs almost tangible with her warm, resonant mezzo.

In Thin Air, Tsoupaki’s second work this evening, we return to a piece born out of compassion and solidarity. Originally written during the pandemic (and premiered in this orchestral version by the Residentie Orkest), yet so timeless that it may resonate even more powerfully now than it did then. Dvořák’s fascinating Fifth Symphony closes the evening not with spectacle, but with sunlight: warm‑blooded, playful, dancing. A symphony that smells of grass, earth, sun and evening air. It is Dvořák at his most open, most free, most blissful. Conductor Antony Hermus weaves a magnificent, breathing programme between Tsoupaki’s air and Dvořák’s earth.