The spider is a creature with an aesthetic disposition. She uses the finest threads and painstaking, meticulous detail work to construct her webs to fit perfectly into every nook and cranny. As a solo artist, however, she sometimes goes her own way, deviating from the predetermined pattern, pulling a corner longer here or leaving out a thread there. But the result speaks for itself: a web that may not be round, but is attractive from all perspectives.

It is precisely these complementary contrasts of predetermined structure and enriching deviations that unite in the concert evening The Spider as an Artist (mind you: not the other way round). In five solo pieces, the musicians weave nets only to tear them apart again straight away, testing the tonal tensile strength of their instrument and exhausting its possibilities to the last corner. In the work that gives the evening its title Franck Bedrossian an invisible poem by Emily Dickinson, as transparent as a spider's web, with the bow on the body of the cello, while Sarah Nemtsov Seven Thoughts - Her Kind is inspired by a poem by Anne Sexton.  Timpani Trek from Horacio Vaggione weaves a web of phase correlations and expands the timpani's sound space with strange materials and spatial electronics. With Bass Surface from Christof Dienz two players intervene in the solo performance of the double bass and enrich the performance with percussive elements, while in Alexander Kaisers The guitarist's fingers flit spider-like across the fretboard and through distorted outer-space soundscapes in the second piece.

The Spider as an Artist
Has never been employed -
Though his surpassing Merit
Is freely certified

By every Broom and Bridget
Throughout a Christian Land -
Neglected Son of Genius
I take thee by the hand -

Emily Dickinson (1275)