When asked about his latest work, Ryszard Osada refused to comment. While waiting for the performance we can only speculate how the composer will use the leotronic machinery. Will he follow his own Autumn music for strings or perhaps the latest purely “synthetic” E-motion-retrospection? Will he keep his typical lyric tone? Whatever happens – we have reasons for positive thinking.

The composition by Wolfgang Suppan is based on a collection of pitch sets – whose material is projected vertically and horizontally as a subject to various transformations. The title Lakunen (lat. Lacunae) is a linguistics term, meaning gaps in the vocabulary of a given language – words that cannot be translated to this language (e.g. the word “shallow” does not have its equivalent in Romanian, so it is a lexical gap in this language). In the composer’s opinion “such gaps can be found between melodic and harmonic states in this composition”.

The MIMEO group is composed of analogue (Thomas Lehn) and digital (Marcus Schmickler) synthesizer virtuosos; amplified objects, digital samplers and special computer software for improvisation are also used (Phil Durrant); there are also the legends of improvised music who contributed to its production in the 1960s (Keith Rowe), electronic music stars (Christian Fennesz), space-jazz followers (Rafael Toral) and the most important figures of the noise scene (Peter Rehberg). What characterize MIMEO’s concerts are the unique electronic orchestral sound, a special sensitivity to the acoustic conditions of concert localisation and ideas prepared separately for each concert (e.g. interpretations of images; a performance may take 24 hours). The experience and sophistication of individual instrumentalists is a guarantee of quality artistic events. Critics have written that one of their concerts (with a piano accompaniment) was the first piano concerto of the 21st century.