Niels Rønsholdt · Gaze for Gaze
September 21st-22nd, Niels Rønsholdt’s piece Gaze for Gaze (2016-2017) will be performed for the first time in Poland. Gaze for Gaze is a music drama for stage performance written for 8 musicians and a choir, performing and handling light. The composer has called Gaze for Gaze a performance opera, where the audience is placed in a circle around the stage contributing to the performance.
Rønsholdt is set to decrease the distance between composer, singer, musicians and audience making the audience - usually the passive third - an active contributor to the performance. The audience is equipped with a device using an opera app, where he/she can go through the opera by moving the finger across abstract characters.
Danish Newspaper Politiken wrote in a review on the piece, performed November 2017: “I left the hall feeling both wonder and excitement. ‘Gaze for Gaze’ was really different and successful. Maybe like a slow, meditative mixture of traditional Japanese noh-theatre, Danish circle pedagogy, and curious, minimalistic avant-garde.”
Read the review here
Gaze for Gaze is performed in ATM Studio by singers Ida Urd and Rik Willebrords, actors Weronika Cegielska and Szymon Dobosik, SCENATET directed by Anna Berit Asp Christensen, light direction by Mikkel Jensen, sound projection by Anders Ørbæk, and VRC Choir conducted by Joanna Maluga. See the programme here.
Simon Løffler · b and H
September 23rd, Simon Løffler’s works b and H will be performed in IMKA Theater by Ensemble Kompoplex.
H is written for 4 musicians, 4 step motors and tuning forks. The 4 musicians can active the tuning forks by stepping om the motors. H was originally written for Ensemble WeSpoke in 2014 and revised multiple times since then. You can see a video of the piece on the composer’s webpage.
The piece b was commissioned by Curious Chamber Player in 2012. It is written for 3 musicians, neon lamps, effect pedals and a loose jack stick. The pedals are connected in a circuit. Around neon lamps, there is a static electric field that is passed on when the musicians touch. In a review in Danish newspaper Politiken, Thomas Michelsen wrote about Løffler: “His works have a strong quality by being completely unvarnished.” See the work performed on the composer’s website.
Bára Gísladóttir · ÓS
Saturday, September 28th the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra will be performing Gísladóttir’s Symphony: ÓS, conducted by Ryan Bancroft. ÓS was commissioned by the City of Reykjavík and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra in 2018 on the occasion of Iceland’s centenary of sovereignty. The piece deals with the different significances of the word ós, which can mean “estuary” or “mouth”.
Earlier this year, Bára Gísladóttir received the talent award from The Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Foundation. Honoring the composer as among the most talented and interesting composers of her generation. Danish newspaper Politiken wrote the following about her piece Music to accompany your sweet splatter dreams: “how nightmare-like and transcendent she can write”.
View the score of ÓS here
Warsaw Autumn Festival 2019 · 62nd edition
This year, the theme of the festival is AIR. First, because air is the centre of sound, where the sound is born and through which it moves. Air exists in song, speech, organs, portatives, accordions, other wind instruments and objectophones. But also because air is the “centre of spirit”—the sphere of life that aims at grasping the world as a coherent, sensible whole, fed by a nostalgia for a harmonious fullness, which is experienced as “numinosum”: the extraordinary, touching the transcendence, the Director of the festival, Jerzy Kornowicz, writes.
View the festival programme here