A Love Song Across Seas
From Berlin to Sri Lanka, a midsummer conjuring: the Chamber Music Society of Colombo announces
two vocal recitals this July, in Colombo and Jaffna, that feel less like performances than acts of return. The
principal figures are themselves the product of small, porous worlds: the Sri Lankan‑German tenor Thaisen
Rusch and the German‑Estonian mezzo‑soprano Ireene Ollino, both members of the esteemed chorus at the
Deutsche Oper Berlin. They arrive not as imported curiosities but as colleagues of a profession whose lines
of travel and longing now thread Europe and the Indian Ocean.
Rusch, whose recent recording of Schubert’s Winterreise testifies to a lyricism that favors inwardness over
show, has held stage with the Munich Philharmonic and the Berlin Radio Choir and serves as
artist‑in‑residence with the Sinfonisches Kammerorchester Berlin.
Ollino, a laureate of the Triomphe de l’Art competition, brings the polish of engagements under Sir Simon
Rattle and Thomas Guggeis at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. Both singers carry that peculiar
combination of European conservatory discipline and the lived, improvisatory grace that travel and hybrid
identity foster.

They will be supported by principal players of the Chamber Music Society of Colombo, led by Artistic
Director Lakshman Joseph‑de Saram, along with pianist Johann Peiris. The program resists tidy
periodization: Händel’s baroque clarity is set against Mahler’s late‑Romantic whisper in “Urlicht,” while
arias by Bizet, Mozart and Verdi remind listeners that theater and confession are two sides of the same
coin. The evening’s logic is not historical survey but intimacy - an economy of means that exposes what
the music is made to do: witness, confess, persuade.

“This concert hopes to strip these pieces back to their bones so the music and the singer can speak plainly,”
Joseph‑de Saram said. “In an intimate setting, you hear every breath and every shift in color. Ireene and
Thaisen bring a rare depth and honesty to the stage; they don’t just sing the notes, they tell the story. We
want listeners to encounter these works anew - not as two‑dimensional museum pieces, but as living,
breathing music.”

Founded in 2007, the CMSC has spent nearly two decades cultivating programming that is at once rigorous
and rooted, pairing high‑concept projects with an active education arm. The society’s international advisory
board - whose names include the virtuoso Midori and Leslie Suganandarajah, music director of the
Salzburg Landestheater - signals a global conversation; its Education Fund, which circulates thousands of
free tickets to students from marginalized communities, insists on a local accountability. The result is a
kind of cultural diplomacy: music as exchange, and as a small, stubborn insistence that art should open
rather than sequester.

Performance & Ticket Information
The series opens in Colombo at the Lionel Wendt Theatre on Thursday, July 25 at 7:00 PM, supported by
the Rukmini Tissanayagam Trust, A. Baur & Co., and the Goethe‑Institut as venue partner. The ensemble
will then travel north for a historic performance in Jaffna at Kälam on Sunday, July 28 at 6:30 PM. The
Jaffna concert is funded through the generosity of the Samuel Gnanam IT Center, with the Goethe‑Institut
continuing as venue partner.

Seating is strictly reserved for both venues.
These midsummer concerts, arriving at a moment when travel and belonging have become complicated
currencies, feel like a parable of belonging itself - of artists who move through the world and bring back, in
their breath and timbre, the places they have been. For audiences in Colombo and Jaffna, the performances
promise the unusual intimacy of hearing familiar scores reanimated by voices that have learned, elsewhere,
to listen.