With their new series “Going slightly mad” the renowned Ensemble PHACE is going on a quest for the passion and fire as the driving force of our endeavours. The memebers of the Vienna-based Ensemble become roamers amongst diverse realities and present numerous new compositions and a world premiere. Under the conductorship of Nacho de Paz, PHACE presents the video-opera “An Index of Metals” at the festival Aspekte in Salzburg, at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, at the L’Auditori in Barceolona and finally at the Ensems Festival in Valencia.
AN INDEX OF METALS
A video-opera by Fausto Romitelli (music) and Paulo Pachini (video) – for soprano, ensemble, multiprojection (3 screens) and electronics
An Index of Metals bears vigorous witness to this determination to go beyond: sizzling orchestration, electric and psychedelic; a voice which plays on effects, murmurs with reverb, cackles into a megaphone, screams like a pop star; and an electric guitar score of a kind that no ‘serious’ composer has ever written, sliding across an infinite range of tones with a lightness of touch and blurring of contours. But that’s not all. Something more funereal, more strongly dissolving is given off: a fierce melancholy, and the echo, as it were, of a long Gnostic lament over the fall of souls.
Shortly before his death, Romitelli together with his friend Paolo Pachini and the poetess Kenka Lèkovich, resurrected the dream of a total scenic art in the manner of the Futurists: rhythms and gleams of light striking metals (for the video part), poems in iron and chrome singing of fusion with matter, acoustic/electric music highly amplified, filtered, spatialised, in as artificial a manner as possible…
An Index of Metals, a paradoxical masterpiece, torn between heroism and exhaustion.
CONCEPTION: Fausto Romitelli & Paolo Pachini – MUSIC: Fausto Romitelli – TEXT: Kenka Lèkovich – VIDEO: Paolo Pachini, Leonardo Romoli – MUSICAL INFORMATICS: Stefano Bonetti, Paolo Pachini – TECHNO INTERMISSIONS BY COURTESY OF PAN SONIC.
CONDUCTOR: Nacho de Paz – VOICE: Daisy Press
Series 2018/2019: GOING SLIGHTLY MAD at WIENER KONZERTHAUS
MON 12.11.2018 KH series #1 – PHACE | MIT ETWAS EXTREMISMUS – ensemble & electronics
WED 30.01.2019 KH series #2 – PHACE | ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND – multimedia
WED 13.03.2019 KH series #3 – PHACE | COMING SOON – ensemble & video
TUE 21.05.2019 KH series #4 – PHACE | AN INDEX OF METALS – video-opera
(Adapted from the original Text by Jean-Luc Plouvier, with kind permission by PHACE and the author )
Links:
http://www.phace.at/