Trickster Orchestra
The Trickster Orchestra unites superb soloists in a collective of trans-traditional contemporary music. Under the direction of Cymin Samawatie and Ketan Bhatti, the orchestra incorporates instruments from diverse global music traditions into a contemporary musical language that gives expression to a post-migrant and diverse society.
With their secret knowledge and legendary revolutionary character, tricksters create chaos and disrupt universal orders to forge new worlds. In the same way, the ensemble works with new line-ups, improvisation, composition and experimental concepts such as comprovisation and mimesis, to not only juxtapose different traditions, but to show a way in which musicians can develop a shared contemporary music. The collective performs in varying sizes and line-ups. It includes outstanding soloists from genres such as real-time and new music, global classical music traditions, jazz, hip hop, electronic music and free improvisation. For the ensemble, being radically contemporary means striving for radical diversity at all levels of development and performance.
The Trickster Orchestra transcends the usual boundaries between genres and cultures, which today are spread across geographical, ethnic, and temporal orders. Instead, it uses traditions as toolboxes through which it opens up completely new sonic experiences and musical innovation. As an internationally renowned ensemble, the Trickster Orchestra is pioneering the acoustic realization of one of the most important socio-political debates: It translates Germany's wealth created by migration into a multiplication of musical perspectives, artistic possibilities, and creative expression. In this way, the orchestra creates a nationally and internationally acclaimed contemporary music that gives musical expression to the completely transformed society of the 21st century. By giving musicians playing once non-European instruments a presence in a chamber ensemble of contemporary music, the Trickster Orchestra expands the orchestral paradigm of the 19th century in order to make it compatible with a post-migrant, open, and diverse society.
The Trickster Orchestra was founded in 2013 by Cymin Samawatie, Ketan Bhatti, and Philip Geisler and has performed in Europe and West Asia, including at the Festival für Modernes Hören and asphalt Festival Düsseldorf, the New Music Series Kontraklang in Berlin, Tonlagen Festival Hellerau, Silk Road Festival Baku, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Berlin Konzerthaus, the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, the Alte Oper Frankfurt a.M., the Junge Norddeutsche Philharmonie, and Bauart Istanbul. In 2021, the debut album »Trickster Orchestra« was released on the ECM Records label. In 2022, the orchestra won the Hamburg Classical Music Prize TONALi in the category »Courage for Utopia« and the German Jazz Prize for Best Large Ensemble. The ensemble's compositions received the GEMA’s Composers’ Award. In 2024, the German Federal Government honored the ensemble by including it in the »Excellent Orchestra Landscape Germany«.
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