Brussels welcomes spring with Klara Festival

For music life in Brussels, the Klara Festival signals Spring. The festival is produced by Klara, the classical channel of Flemish radio, and its three-week festival (run independently of the radio hierarchy but all broadcast nonetheless) is a highly adventurous mix of all the genres that can be classed as art music, from the very early to the very contemporary European, with a good dose of other zones of the world thrown in.

The concerts mostly take place in the city's fine pair of concert halls, built only a few years apart but very different in atmosphere. BOZAR, an abbreviation of its original name as the Palais des Beaux Arts, was constructed in 1928 as the world's first purpose-built arts centre, a labyrinth of galleries, cinemas and halls built into the side of the hill below the King of the Belgians' palace. In the basement of BOZAR sits its warm, if slightly gloomy, concert venue, where most of the symphonic events take place.

Below another hill, a mile away in Ixelles is Flagey, a wonderful art deco building by a lake that was the home for the National Radio Institute, hosting broadcasts in both French and Flemish until the 1990s. Its halls still bear studio numbers and the main one is Studio 4, a majestic double cube with a gorgeous organ and acoustic that allows every detail to come across clearly without being dry.

Studio 4 is where I started my festival visit. Arriving in the middle of the festival, I began with an evening of French music led by this year's resident artist Barbara Hannigan, who embodies the rare combination of being a conductor while still a soprano in her prime. Before the concert she gave a peptalk on leadership to young interns working in the European Council, the arm of the EU uniting national governments. She then led a programme showcasing young colleagues from a scheme called Equilibrium Young Artists who she has been mentoring in the Netherlands. On the evidence the outcome is impressive, with the mentees in Ravel's septet, the Introduction and Allegro, playing with more vim and accuracy than even their mentors (who formed the string quartet). The harpist, Astrid Haring, was particularly deft.

Then it was Hannigan's turn to sing, conducted by her assistant, Rolf Verbeek. What a stunning performance she turned in for the Four Hindu Poems by Ravel's near contemporary, Maurice Delage. These are songs that are far too rarely heard and were the highlight of the whole trip. Having put down such a bold marker for others to follow, Hannigan became the conductor for two Stravinsky vocal works, the Three Japanese Lyrics and Two Poems of Konstantine Balmont, sung with finesse by soprano Emma Posman. After them, mezzo Ema Nikolovska gave us Ravel's delicious Three Poems by Mallarmé. Both emerging singers were very fine, and will certainly develop impressive careers, but could not quite match Hannigan's musical subtlety or range of colours just yet.

The next day, it was time to migrate north-east to Bruges (or, since this was Flemish Radio, Brugge). Its concert hall is firmly from this century, all modern red brick with a squat interior dyed battleship grey - efficient but with none of the charm of the old city it borders. The afternoon was taken up with a conference on the meaning of 'quality' in classical music. With the title ECHO, it brought together practitioners, academics, venue administrators and musicians from across Flanders and the Netherlands (several venues called Concertgebuow!) as well as a good sprinkling from the UK. Panellists discussed whether the concept of ‘quality’ needs to be rethought in an era of greater ideas of eclecticism and greater access; and whether it needs to encompass elements of theatre in presentation as well as musical proficiency.

The whole afternoon was kicked off with a keynote speech from the Southbank's new curator of classical music, Toks Dada. After we had chewed over the subject for four hours - and nipped out to buy the obligatory packets of Bruges chocolates - the Belgian National Orchestra gave an appealing evening of new works. The programme sandwiched Beethoven's Violin Concerto conducted by Joshua Weilerstein and played by Josef Spacek, a man who fully justifies his reputation as a rising star, giving a virile reading that knew when to be lyrical but kept moving. The evening opened with Human Voices Only by Kris Defoort, a Flemish composer who uses the full panoply of orchestral sounds in a way that feels as Californian as it does European but was highly effective on first hearing. Less satisfactory was the vast and repetitive seascape by John Luther Adams, Become Ocean, a portrait of environmental pollution, accompanied by a specially commissioned video of slowly deteriorating sea water by artist Lillevan. However, the excellence of the first half of the evening more than made up for Luther Adams' longeurs.

This was a small sample of the Klara Festival but it was enough to demonstrate the intelligence and daring of the programme - there were also concerts in BOZAR that weekend of music from Central Asia and mostly 17th century Italian church music. After the ECHO discussion, the groups involved in the period instrument evening of Italian music seemed to illustrate perfectly the danger of clever programming (splitting works up between voices, strings and early brass) being undermined by forgetting that moving around the stage in between, dressed in black, in bad lighting, innervates the whole effect. It was not helped by the decision only to list the music being played online in the interests of paper saving - which left the audience with a choice between ignorance and endless checking of mobile phones during the pauses. Nonetheless, wandering between the Belgian halls is an invigorating way to blow off the Winter cobwebs and the Klara Festival at least takes the trouble to interrogate the complex issues facing classical presentation full on and by example, not just lip service. Not everything worked but, heck, it was an interesting attempt.

Simon Mundy's journey for CM was facilitated by Visit Brussels.