MEDIATHEK

Spacial Chamber Music Theatre: "A Summer's Day", based on Jon Fosse's play by the same title and adapted by the composer, set out to establish a new form of music theatre, where language, music, and imagery unite to reveal the unspoken. Working in close dialogue with one another, the team surrounding the composer Nikolaus Brass, Waltraud Lehner (dramaturge), Christian Marten-Molnár (director) and Katherina Kopp (set design) collaborated with selected instrumentalists from Munich's music scene and Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart to transport Fosse's universe of words to the musical and visual realm, creating a spatial music theatre that would make the invisible audible and the inaudible visible. 

// Composition Technique: In order to achieve an authentic musical contextualization of the characters' internal reality and agency, the composition process needed to integrate the inner spaces of ist performers. Consequently, most of the composition is based on the principle of "selforganising music", a concept further refined by the composer. In it the soloists work with a written template, which they then interpret and perform in a predefined time frame, but always spontaneously influenced by every moment's interaction. Large parts of the piece have no fully written score, instead the vocal and instrumental parts are noted in individual parts, predominantly in proportional notation. This means there is no exact common tempo and every performer acts in their own "inherent" tempo. The interplay, the musical and textual "spine", is not fixed in an absolute way, but is being created subjectively and relatively to one another. There is therefore no need for a conductor, a fact that fundamentally influenced the rehearsal process and led to a very special performance character. 

// Synopsis: "A Summer's Day" tells the story of a young woman waiting in vain for her husband, who has gone to sea by himself on an autum day – he never returns. The story is told as a flashback when the woman, now older, receives a visit by a friend – on a summer's day – and remembers the day her husband disappeared. The past suddenly comes to life and the woman comes face to face with her younger self. She relives the pain of the speechlessness between her and her husband Asle, she witnesses her own helplessness and fear, and she understands the nature of her relationship with her friend and her friend's husband, who appears to be like a puppet master, playing a sinister game…