Grab your chance to hear enchanting music that brings a lost world into focus on Sunday, November 16, 2025, at Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, Amsterdam. Get your tickets now!

Emine Bostancı and the Dareyn Ensemble at Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ

Ever wondered how music once sounded in a 15th-century mosque in Istanbul, a cathedral in Vienna, or a palace in Isfahan? With Echoing Travelogues: The Beyond and Us, composer and performer Emine Bostancı invites you to experience exactly that.

Through a fusion of traditional Eastern and Western instruments and immersive 4D sound technology, this groundbreaking concert brings the lost soundscapes of history vividly back to life.

Led by Bostancı and the Dareyn Ensemble, the performance blends centuries of cultural encounters with a contemporary reflection on identity and belonging. At Muziekgebouw’s main hall, audiences will embark on a multisensory journey where history, migration and imagination converge.

Tracing the footsteps of travellers

Echoing Travelogues draws inspiration from centuries of journeys across Ottoman, Persian, and European worlds. In these encounters between diplomats, musicians, and travellers, music became both a language of discovery and a mirror of identity. As the ensemble follows these historical paths, the concert poses a timeless question: Though we travel to explore the other, do we not often find reflections of ourselves?

The programme features works by figures such as Dimitrie Cantemir, the Moldavian prince and Ottoman musician, and Wojciech Bobowski, a Polish-born composer and interpreter in the Ottoman court. Their music, shaped by life between cultures, still resonates today as testimony to shared human experiences of movement and adaptation.

East meets west, past meets present

What makes this concert unique is its bold blending of instruments, traditions, and technologies. The Dareyn Ensemble and members of Holland Baroque play on instruments such as the oud, tanbour, tar, setar, theorbo, baroque violin, harpsichord, and more, led by Emine Bostancı on the Ottoman kemenche. Their artistry bridges Eastern and Western early music, weaving together rich textures that echo across time.

Adding another dimension is 4D Sound, a groundbreaking technology that creates a spatial and immersive soundscape. This allows the audience to experience how music would have sounded in 15th-century spaces such as mosques, palaces, and city squares in Vienna, Istanbul, and Isfahan. The result is a vivid reconstruction of “lost worlds”, where music becomes both a journey and an environment.

A contemporary reflection on belonging

More than a performance, Echoing Travelogues is also a reflection on today’s world. Migration, travel and cultural exchange continue to shape our identities and the societies in which we live. By revisiting the layered histories of the past, Bostancı and her ensemble invite the audience to think about identity, belonging and the traveller's imagination in new ways.

The result is a performance that resonates on many levels: intellectually, emotionally and sensorially. Whether you come for the haunting sound of the kemenche, the fusion of East and West, or the innovative use of technology, this concert promises a truly transformative evening.

Event details

Here are the event details for Echoing Travelogues:

• Date: Sunday 16 November 2025
• Time: Introduction at 7.15pm (Foyerdeck 1), concert at 8.15-10pm (Grote Zaal)
• Venue: Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, Piet Heinkade 1, 1019 BR Amsterdam

Get your tickets

Get your tickets on the Muziekgebouw website. Standard adult tickets cost 28 euros and concession tickets cost 22,50 euros. Youth early bird tickets are available for 12,50 euros.