Moers Festival
May 21–25, 2026
Moers, Germany

The Moers Festival may well be one of the globe’s most anarchic, weirdness-drenched, chaos-driven music weekenders, continually reshaping itself to refresh creativity, and to unhinge its loyal acolyte attendees. Fortunately, the organizers maintain a high degree of time-control and logistic deftness, to facilitate the exterior appearance of random improvisation, crazed happenstance, and all-are-welcome sonics. Originally devoted to free jazz at its 1972 genesis, the festival has steadily mushroomed ears to invite non-jazz performance into the Whitsun weekend arena. Now, more than ever, there is a pronounced presence for out-there, moderne sounds, whether acoustic or electronic, solo or orchestral, old (perhaps the 1950s) or new (perhaps right now, as scored modules are spontaneously arranged).

Besides harboring very recent works, the festival characteristically features retrospective celebrations, with clusters of such performances running through its five days. In the name of change, Moers has added an extra day to its accustomed old four, and most crucially, moved back into the city center (from its park-side place), recalling the old 1970s when the stage was close to the castle. Now the main outdoor stage squats right in the central Moers square, surrounded by victual stalls and trucks. Many satellite venues are used, both indoor and outdoor, but they mostly lie within the bounds of a five minute amble.

In this year of his centenary, Morton Feldman was strongly represented, particularly on the Sunday. There was also a co-running György Kurtág focus. These multiple gigs presented compositions from across the lifetimes of these composers. With Feldman, there was an extremely perverse strategy of presenting three concerts simultaneously, each at 11:55 p.m. Your scribe can imagine no earthly reason why this was the case. Two of the Feldman works happened in churches, at different corners of the square. The third had violinists Ronja Sophie Putz and Myrsini Bekakou improvising around For Aaron Copland in the castle park grounds. The Saint Josef church hosted Piano And String Quartet, while the Stadtkirche presented Crippled Symmetry from 1983. It was this latter that your scribe selected for his midnight meditation, with its unusual line-up of piano, vibraphone, and flute/bass flute. This has a variable duration of around ninety minutes. In many ways it’s reminiscent of Feldman’s Why Patterns?, an extended experience penned in 1978, and heard to bewitching effect (in the middle of the night) at Ostrava Days in the Czech Republic in 2021.

Stadtkirche is painted white, with large arched windows, pillars, balconies to each side, and movable wooden chairs rather than pews. A large metal chandelier dominates. The audience is select in numbers, and destined to lose around a third during the performance. Considering the gently uncurling music of Feldman, the mere three instruments sound peculiarly dense amidst the reverberant qualities of the church, with its very high rafters. There is much detailed activity, but paradoxically, a sense of undisturbed calm. Repeats resound, eaten by echo, overlaps made in the listener’s mind (and possibly external reality), rewarded by the rich sound of the bass flute during its repeated alternations with its smaller sibling. The swaps happen quite quickly. Around halfway in, there is an almost perceptible gear-shift, a soft shunt into another phase, something which subsequently happens with increasing (slow) regularity. The piano wanders lower, the vibraphone clouding, suspended, and becoming strangely changeable. There is a solitary doom-piano instance, a fibrillating flute, a growing vibraphone rhythm. Unfortunately, it is now after 1 a.m., and this music has a tendency to lull the consumer. Would the bright afternoon have provided a preferable setting, or did Feldman prefer this composition to inhabit the deep night?

Your scribe will never know what went down in Saint Josef’s, where the Chroma Kollektiv interpreted the piece that was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, being one of Feldman’s key compositions (and recordings). He wonders whether that might have been a wiser, superior decision, enfolding though Crippled Symmetry was.

There were some earlier evening Feldman works that provided different challenges. The Moers Festival has a marked love of extreme volume and strength variations, as the Indonesian onslaught duo of Senyawa combined ultra-amplified bamboo/string armageddon and hyper-distorted two-microphone vocals on the main stage. Lacking much time to calm themselves, the audience remained for some Feldman, as Two Pieces For Cello And Piano were played from a hydraulic platform, hoisted into the air above. The crowd was remarkably attentive, swiftly re-calibrating post-Senyawa, but there were still stray sounds from the streets beyond: a pooch-in-pain, a yelled human exchange. Pauses were sometimes profound. Was this courage or folly, on this pre-holiday night?

Soon, on the main stage itself, Rothko Chapel shimmered even closer to silence. The interpreting ensemble was quite large, and severely underused, with just violin, bells and soft glimmer vibraphone to the fore, for most of the thirty minute duration. Rivulet piano entered later, but here outside, there were perhaps sonic details that eluded the ears.