Petrushka is the fourth concert in the Beyond the Score series, where music enters into dialogue with the wider arts. This time, the starting point is the power of imagination. It’s exactly what Stravinsky plays with in Petrushka: puppets come to life, realities shift, and little by little it becomes harder to tell where the fairy tale ends and the real world begins.
Visual artist Ellen Vrijsen created new paintings inspired by the music. Motion designer Ychaï Gassenbauer then brings these images to life: they move, transform and gradually grow into a parallel universe.
Curious how the project takes shape? Read on for a glimpse into the creative process.
Stravinsky: Petrushka · 24.04.2026 · Flagey
Beyond The Score – This concert series celebrates the power of imagination: our fantasy transforms what we see in the real world into a universe that is entirely our own, coloured by who we are. What is real? What is illusion? What is imagination? What is reality?
The visual dimension enhances this sense of estrangement – and invites the audience to imagine a personal parallel universe. The new works by artist Ellen Vrijsen, inspired by the music, activate the viewer’s imagination.
discover more
Between Imagination and Reality
Since time immemorial, people have created stories and images to understand the world. Only when something is described, discussed, painted or sung does it acquire meaning. Science, art and religion offer points of reference within our chaotic reality. From ancient mythologies to the latest blockbuster, from cave paintings to TikTok: we approach the world through imagination. With the concert Petrushka, we celebrate that imaginative power.
Each of the three musical works explores reality in its own way: Camille Pépin draws on a Chinese fairy tale as a mirror for our own world. Joan Tower invokes the power of whimsically branching sequoias as a metaphor for the musical landscape in which, as a composer, she finds her own voice. And in Petrushka, Stravinsky plays with roles, personas and parallel worlds–until no one can quite tell where the fairy tale begins and the real world ends.
That is precisely why Petrushka feels so relevant today. As AI, deepfakes and technologically generated images flood our daily lives, we find ourselves–like the Charlatan–in a state of doubt: what is real? Petrushka is ultimately killed, yet was he not merely a puppet? What happens if our imagination grows stronger than tangible reality? And what if that imagination, unlike Tower’s deeply rooted sequoias, breaks free from any anchoring in the real world?
The visual framework surrounding this concert engages directly with that tension between imagination and reality. New works by visual artist Ellen Vrijsen, inspired by the music, invite the audience to envision sound in visual form. Motion designer Ychaï Gassenbauer pushes the game even further: images overlap, shift, blur and flow into one another. What do these images–and their movements–represent? Perhaps it no longer matters what they depict, once parallel worlds begin to accumulate and roll over one another. And yet reality will always reassert itself–inescapable and unyielding–a reality through which our imagination must carve its way in search of meaning.
Gerd Van Looy (artistic coordination)
music & image
Music and image enter into dialogue: suspended above the orchestra, two screens hang in space like enlarged canvases. On one screen appear the original paintings by Ellen Vrijsen; on the other, motion designer Ychaï Gassenbauer creates a parallel world–a sequence of transformations, distortions and echoes of the painted images.
--
Ellen Vrijsen
The paintings by Ellen Vrijsen (1979) are the point of departure. Her recent work plays with colour, memory and movement: fluid green and blue backgrounds from which black, red and yellow traces emerge, like fragments of an idea. The images resist a single interpretation; rather, they unfold like a dream or a memory–each time slightly different, fleeting. Together with the music, they invite the audience to look, to listen, and to immerse themselves, if only for a moment, in a landscape of colour and sound.
more info Ellen Vrijsen
YCHAÏ GASSENBAUER
Ychaï Gassenbauer (1981) is an animator, motion designer and video artist based in Brussels. In his work he explores themes such as identity, masculinity and sexuality. He is a member of the Brussels-based artist collectives School of Love and The Aunties Collective, which explore new ways of thinking about love, community and kinship. Alongside this, he works as a videographer and editor with artists including Vincent Meessen, Vermeir & Heiremans and Samson Kambalu. As an animator, he also contributed to Babines by Emilie Praneuf
more info Ychaï Gassenbauer
PROGRAMME
Joan Tower Sequoia (1981)
Camille Pepin Les Eaux célestes (2022)
Igor Stravinsky Petrushka (version 1947)
YOUR CONCERT NIGHT
∙ 19:00 doors open
∙ 19:30 introduction
∙ 20:15 concert (without intermission)
∙ 21:15 end
Beyond the Score
With Beyond The Score, Brussels Philharmonic looks beyond the notes, exploring what symphonic music awakens in other voices in our society. Music touches us all, and always tells a story. But what's that same story through the eyes of a poet? Or through the work of a Brussels-based artist? How do they write new layers over the music of Ravel, Scriabin, or Stravinsky – and does that change not only our perspective, but also yours?
Beyond The Score is creation, encounter, and cross-pollination with the wider arts field. More voices. More impulses. And above all: music. More than music.
