Series: Opera / Werke

With the aim of heightening attention and perception, Graz city opera reflects on the elementary components that go to make up opera as a form of art. Seven autonomous and independent, while inter-related main sections form up to create an aesthetic medley of topics revolving around ”Opera / Works”. Total re-valuation of all values: resolutely and emphatically, the project turns the whole conglomerate of opera on its head, at the same time making constructive suggestions as to what forms current opera could assume. It is about the concurrence of different forms of art (and the focus on hearing that links them all), above all the authenticity of the individual arts, their intrinsic forms of reception and perception, and the resulting social patterns: with a champagne glass on the gallery, with a reservation ticket in rows of chairs, or alone with a book. And the actor is not a fictitious figure but rather only the listener and perception of the here-and-now. ”Opera/Works” addresses the plurality of forms of works and effects. The composer is no longer restricted to filling manuscript paper. He is equally a sound artist and sound ecologist reflecting on the role of music and art institutions. The singing in esc. has only indirectly to do with the phenomenon of vocal expression, and is rather an extensive acoustic survey of the phenomenon of city – it is the city itself that sings – an encyclopaedic city/sound catalogue, an urban audio library comprising 36 CDs and approx. 400 recordings from various sites in Graz. Some of these ”phonographs” play the leading role in the première of the second act with the recreation orchestra in the Helmut List Hall: The Orchestra – a piece in ten tableaux and eleven intermezzi. The libretto by Yoko Tawada is an autonomous book, conceived as a pure reading act, a text/book, then, that is neither set to music nor sung. The plot is set in Graz opera house (where else can you still find a plot?!), but it revolves around the dialectics of absolute silence and the white noise between time and a suite of rooms. A ten-minute installation performance for a maximum of six visitors. The scenery is planned to take the form of a large intervention in the central public space, a visual corridor through the accustomed optical labyrinth of the city with the aim of undermining conventional forms of consciousness and perception. The seating is a mobile procession of 36 chairs, set up at various places around the city in order to allow possible metamorphoses with regard to the links between the public sphere and auditory experience. The Audience as the final act in the Helmut List Hall, with the Zeitfluß Graz ensemble, is an aesthetic parallel action of music and film under the heading of the ”utopia of art”. A piece for two films, two ensembles and two computer-controlled pianos. For Peter Ablinger and Edgar Honetschläger, The Audience is about a complementary widening of horizons – for the innovative experience of cinema, in alliance with the acoustic speech of authentic modern music. Particularly in this context, the aesthetic topos research of Graz city opera becomes a concentrated enrichment of our ”sensory consciousness”.

Filed under “Opera / Werke”

Der Gesang
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Das Libretto
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Das Orchester
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Die Handlung
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Die Kulisse
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Die Bestuhlung
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Das Publikum
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Retrospective
Retrospective
Retrospective