Music has always moved between bodies before it settled on paper, and nowhere more so than in seventeenth-century Italy, where a flourishing, at times decadent culture of ornamentation let musical thoughts travel as simple outlines, completed in performance through local pratica and domesticated as chamber art. In 1607 Monteverdi's Orfeo gave the singing voice the power to bend the underworld, and his Arianna's lament survived the loss of its opera because singers carried it from city to city, re-texting and re-singing it.

A century later, Benedetto Marcello wrote down the synagogue chants of the Venetian ghetto as the seeds of his Estro poetico-armonico. Yotam Haber picks up that thread three hundred years on: Sabbath and Passover melodies pass through recorded voices and contemporary Hebrew poetry, and the mezzo becomes the latest link in a chain of remembered song. Around this core, the program follows how such inheritances seep across borders and centuries. Samy Moussa moves Orpheus into an Arctic stillness of unmeasured time. Yiran Zhao wanders through the broken echoes of Arianna's "O Teseo."

Margareta Ferek-Petrić sets a dream of omnipotence against the spoken fantasies of our own day. Samu Gryllus's new piece for glissotar slides freely between the fixed pitches. Dániel Dobri's ENS reduces the ensemble to breath, phoneme and pulse, the bodily ground from which every oral tradition grows. Ajtony Csaba's paraphrase of the Orfeo Sinfonia opens the door both ways. What passes between these works is less quotation than osmosis: a slow exchange through the semipermeable walls of centuries, in which the oldest songs reach us still warm from the voices that carried them.

The MIKAMO Central European Chamber Orchestra was founded by critically acclaimed graduates of the Viennese University of Music and Performing Arts in 2007. The ensemble considers concerts as Gesamtkunstwerk and regards historic music repertory as the extrapolation of new works from our time. While dedicated to living composers and the repertory of current music, MIKAMO also promotes artistic continuity in definition of a Central European musical heritage by regularly performing in defining concert halls of Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Central Europe in general.

The concert is organized by the Sonus Foundation for the Support of New Music and Contemporary Performing Arts, with the support of the Ministry of Social Relations and Culture, National Cultural Fund, Azrieli Music Foundation, Bundesministerium für Wohnen, Kunst, Kultur, Medien und Sport, and SKE.