Asko|Schönberg, the leading Dutch ensemble for new music, will play acclaimed British-American composer Oscar Bettison’s very first opera. The Light of Lesser Days accompanies the audience in an overwhelming total experience. Two singers, locked in a bare room with only a 19th-century handbook of colours in nature to inspire their imagination, are accompanied by an ensemble that forms a duo with an electronic copy of itself.

Oscar Bettison’s music walks a razor-sharp line between unpredictability and full-blooded grooves. His music is full of imaginative twists, and is wild, boisterous and at times uncomfortable. As Bettison himself puts it: “It’s not that refinement is a bad thing. But there are times when it can get in the way.”