leit-motiv

Please, don't listen - go on talking

Szenisches Konzert beschreitet neue Wege der Musik

Thomas Witzmann from Cologne, the evening's producer, created with his video-installation Leit-Motiv not only a transition to the Nineties, but also connections between the places of performance.

Distributed on the ground floor as well as on the stairs and as far as the banqueting-hall, the musicians, all of them in front of his or her own monitor, were sitting with instructions instead of sheets of music before them.

Peter Eötvös conducted this scattered orchestra by monitor. The instrumentalists supplied a brilliant performance, the audience went fully amazed from one monitor to the next.

The on two nights proffered spectrum of works, unobtrusively produced by Malcolm Goldstein, ranged from ritual text composition (Pauline Oliveiro's The new sound meditation), for which Stockhausen's Aus den sieben Tagen set a precedent, to an extrovert video-exercise (Leit-Motiv by Thomas Witzmann).

By previous arrangement the musicians react simultaneously to eight monitors where the conducting Peter Eötvös is to be seen. A game which by means of improvisation affectionately, but nonetheless respectlessly makes fun of the traditional hierarchy of conductor and orchestra.

Thomas Witzmann's contribution to this theme was a very cheerful and exciting one. For his Leit-Motiv, a work with variable parts, four musicians were stationed in front of four monitors, the screens of which showed a conductor rehearsing an arbitrarily choosen work.

As in the era of silent movies the musicians, following a rough pattern, set the "leitmotiv" of the conductor's movements to music in an entertaining brass-quartet, entirely dedicated to the unlimited imagination.

Instruments rattling like a sewing-machine

Szenisches Konzert im Festspielhaus birgt zahlreiche Überraschungen Experimente mit Klang und Bild

Some were perplexed. Some looked confused. A few were enraged. And many witnessed an amusing evening. In this way one might concisely describe the audience's sensations in view of one of the strangest concerts which was ever to be heard (and seen) in Recklinghausen.

A "scenic experience" the program's manager had promised those who found the courage to participate, for a certain measure of courage was necessary, no doubt, considering that works by Satie, Milhaud, Witzmann and Walton were announced.

Well, the assembly of those with sympathies for an experimental rather than traditional performance was not disappointed. One must own that even if not everything was intelligible at once and even if many a thing remained hidden in the hazy atmosphere of a now obsolete avantgarde, the performance was of considerable entertaining value.

With a customary concert the performance had indeed nothing much in common. Of course, there were musicians. And there was a conductor, too. But nobody wore a dress-coat, nobody sat on the stage to sound the music into the audience's faces, as it were.

Instead of which there was a video-installation so that the musicians sat widely distributed in the room, thus performing as soloists whom a conductor on monitor united to an imaginary orchestra.