The 7 world premieres in Braga's Semibreve line-up this October
Fennesz plays with the Sinfonietta de Braga, Marta Salogni brings a co-commissioned piece to a seminary chapel, and the festival opens with a surprise concert in a basilica. The day-by-day programme is out, and the dates are 22 to 25 October.
Seven of them carry an asterisk, which is how the festival marks a piece nobody has heard anywhere yet. Semibreve returns to Braga from 22 to 25 October with seven world premieres — the full set is flagged on the official line-up, and they belong to João Carlos Pinto, Malcolm Pardon and Gustaf Broms, Nuno Canavarro and Bruno Miguel Pinto, PYUR and Tarik Barri, Qasim Naqvi and Steven Wendt, Ricardo Jacinto, and System Sophie.
An eighth new work sits in a category of its own. Marta Salogni’s “a,drift” was co-commissioned by Semibreve, Berlin Atonal and Unsound, and it plays on the Saturday at 5.30pm in the chapel of the Seminário Menor.
The buildings are half the point
Braga has no festival field and Semibreve does not pretend otherwise. It borrows the rooms the city already had.
Thursday night opens with a surprise concert in the Basílica dos Congregados, followed by Suzan Peeters. The headline sets run at the Theatro Circo, and the small hours move to the two rooms at gnration. On Sunday afternoon Ricardo Jacinto performs in the medieval hall of the University of Minho rectory, before Fennesz and Oscar Jockel close the festival alongside the Sinfonietta de Braga.
What else is on
Around the concerts, the day-by-day programme carries installations at gnration and Muzeu, talks, film screenings and two masterclasses — Marta Salogni on mixing and tape as a creative tool, and Qasim Naqvi at the Calouste Gulbenkian conservatory.
Semibreve has been doing this since 2011, which goes some way to explaining how much of its audience arrives from outside the country. If you are building an autumn around festivals, it is worth looking at DocLisboa’s opening film by Edgar Pêra as well, and at how Aveiro’s Festival dos Canais scattered free art through the city on the same use-the-city logic.
Image: Joseolgon / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
