The Silk Road Symphony Orchestra & Callias Ensemble

The Silk Road Symphony Orchestra

The Silk Road Symphony Orchestra was founded in June 2016 in Berlin. It exists in conjunction with The Conference of the Birds which is an online interactive forum, a unique community that expresses different types of world views on classical music.

The notion of “Silk” is central: it speaks of music made of threads both delicate and strong woven together from North, South, East and West.
As artists we take our inspiration from the notion of “silk” as a miraculous product of nature that combines resilience, strength, subtlety and beauty. Silk that binds together, that clothes, that embellishes, that gladdens the heart. And thus, we build our narrative of a Europe of shared values, of strength in unity and diversity, delicacy and beauty.
As musicians, we seek to translate this narrative into music, and to give it the fullest possible expression: combining new and old, high and low, East and West, North and South.

We are professional musicians from different parts of the world: from New York, Tokyo, Cape Town, Athens, Rio, Moscow or Berlin.
What makes us unique as an orchestra is that we invite our international audiences to become actively involved in our unique approach to concert programming, active contributors to our concerts in Vienna, Berlin, and other cities along our imaginary European Silk Road.
Thanks to the European Silk Road App, we integrate into our programming the multiple unique personal ideas on what makes the quality of classical music, on the right conditions for classical music, into new concert forms, ranging from solo recitals to symphonic repertoire.

The Silk Road Symphony Orchestra is the musical arm of The Conference of the Birds. It contributes to building the Silk Road Cultural Belt. Our mission is to give voice to the enormous diversity and different sources of inspiration, putting our knowledge at the heart of things and providing strong, real and clear support to the community.

Visit the SRSO internet site

Responsible Listening

One of the core notions that we champion here at Callias Foundation is the notion of “responsible listening”. Responsible listening is a form of active listening, but that goes beyond what is usually known as active listening. Responsible listening means listening attentively not only to the other, and to what is left unsaid, but also to the noise of the world. At a time when we are assailed from all sides by information, and increasingly by fake news and distortion (including the produce of artificial intelligence), it is music that teaches us to listen intently, and to tune into our innermost response to what we see and hear.

To help nurture this ability in our listeners, we organize frequent conferences, symposiums and poetry evenings.