The evening begins with silence that isn't empty. Hans Otte's Das Buch der Klänge builds cathedrals from single notes, each one allowed to decay into the architecture of the Auditorium San Fedele before the next arrives. Written in 1982, the piece remains a monument of European minimalism, though Otte rejected that label. He called it spiritual music, which sounds vague until you hear how each tone hangs in air like incense.
Emptyset, the British duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas, represents a radical approach to electronic sound. For years, they've explored the boundaries between electronic music, visual art, and architecture, building their aesthetic from essential sonic materials: impulses, noise, frequencies. They construct structures that tension acoustic space, transforming listening into a physical, almost tactile experience. Their work Disserver interrogates sound in its most primary dimension, destructuring and recomposing electronic signals into forms that challenge perception.
Emptyset's music It invests the body, vibrates the environment, creates instability that forces listeners to continually redefine their relationship with sound. Using analog synthesizers, contact microphones, feedback processes, and digital manipulations, they build soundscapes that are simultaneously physical and conceptual. The seven-part Disserver (comprising Gloam, Aether, Penumbra, Dissever, Lucent, Antumbra, and Dawn) works at the threshold between construction and destruction, order and chaos, form and matter. Each piece operates as a field of tension between structure and entropy, with abrasive materials, saturated bass, controlled distortions, and progressively fragmenting loops generating unstable, hypnotic acoustic landscapes. Their sound draws from power noise and industrial electronics while transcending genre labels, engaging sound's physicality and its capacity to destabilize and transform.
Alfonso Alberti brings a contrasting sensibility to the February 16, 2026 concert at Milan's Auditorium San Fedele. He interprets Hans Otte's Das Buch der Klänge (The Book of Sounds), a meditative cycle composed between 1979 and 1982. Alberti's performance emphasizes the intimate, contemplative dimension of Otte's writing, music conceived not for virtuosic display but as a means of opening spaces for listening, creating suspended time where perception dilates and intensifies. Otte's piano writing is simple and transparent yet profoundly deep: repetitions, minimal variations, and essential rhythmic figures that transform slowly, inviting contemplative experience.
What distinguishes this performance is Alberti's collaboration with Ars Discantica, who will process the piano's resonances through live electronics in real time. This isn't mere accompaniment but genuine dialogue: the acoustic sound extends, transforms, and multiplies through space, making subtle vibrations perceptible and hidden harmonics audible. The electronics become a natural extension of the piano, creating an immersive environment that actualizes Otte's work for contemporary technologies without betraying its original spirit.
The concert becomes a true itinerary through opposing musical philosophies: Otte's meditative spirituality inviting contemplation, and Emptyset's radicality engaging the raw force of sound. It's a rare opportunity to experience how both the most delicate piano resonances and the most confrontational electronic frequencies can push the boundaries of what we understand as music.
