Avanti! Club: Talvi Hunt

Talvi Hunt solo and with the Avanti! musicians! This brilliant Estonian pianist, now based in Switzerland, is a sought-after guest with contemporary music ensembles across Central Europe. As a permanent member, she performs with no fewer than four chamber ensembles. Two of these have recently received ensemble awards from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation: Broken Frames Syndicate in 2024 and Ensemble for New Music Tallinn this year.

This program explores the meeting point of music, language, literature, and storytelling – a space where words begin to transform into sound. Where does language end and music begin, and what remains when words can no longer say what we need them to?

Tatjana Kozlova’s Mat’Selesnya evokes a mythical tree nymph whose song has the power to make everything become one. In Sarah Nemtsov’s moth, based on Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth, the brief and fragile life of a moth becomes a reflection on the force of life and the inevitability of death. Eric Wubbels’ Gretchen am Spinnrade brings us to Goethe’s Gretchen, caught in a restless cycle between fantasy and reality, desire and repetition. Asia Ahmetjanova’s work più piano... in a version for free instrumentation, the boundary between speaking and playing becomes blurred, treating language itself as musical material and allowing instrumental sound to begin to speak.

The program invites listeners to experience language not only as something understood, but as something heard, felt, embodied, and ultimately transcended.