In 1733, Voltaire and Rameau collaborated to create the opera "Samson", which was censored and whose music was lost. Claus Guth and Raphaël Pichon revive the spirit of this project, commissioned by the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Samson, isolated by his power, becomes a destructive force through disappointing love affairs. I have contributed sound compositions.
Schubert's "swan song" as music-theatre at the Armory Hall in NYC, conceived and directed by Claus Guth, with tenor Jonas Kaufmann and pianist Helmut Deutsch. I have contributed musical interludes and sound compositions that link the songs into one long experience.
Lure is an artistic research project I lead that explores machine learning in theater and music. We have explored a variety of machine learning techniques in combination with musical instruments, voice and narration. The artistic research transfers questions on the topics of human–machine interaction and artificial intelligence to the fields of theatre and music.
The pedestrian zone in front of the Kunsthalle Munich: There, a homeless person appears in the midst of lustfully shopping, well dressed people. In the hopelessness of her existence, she transfigures everything ordinary into art. Sounds from her memory fit into an orchestration of the urban sound space. Everything she hears becomes a global song in which, like Wagner's Isolde, she finds redemption through death and resurrection in love.
Documentary film maker Felix Hentschel accompanied the production of the Mixed-Reality-Techno-Opera MAYA and held talks with the artists involved. The resulting film (ca. 40 min) illuminates the development of the Maya character and provides insights into the conception of the music and the design of the MAYA augmented reality app.
As the worlds first Augmented Reality opera, MAYA staged the former heating plant Munich-Aubing as a historic site. Through the AR-app on the own smartphone, the spectator betook himself in the perspective of a new civilization in the distant future, and looked back in amazement on the demise of our current civilization in the near future.
VERGEHEN is an opera that you walk. Simply download the VERGEHEN app to your smartphone, take your headphones and walk at the Munich river Isar. You can walk VERGEHEN on any day at any time and in any weather.
Worthless. Placeless. Katharina has lost everything: the lover, the job, the apartment. In her fight against oblivion she develops extreme, hateful energies. The bustle on Münchner Freiheit serves as a stage for a fictional character who is about to exceed the normative limits of social behavior once and for all.
The audience sits in the pharmacy and looks through the shop windows onto Pasing Station Square. Viola, an apparently sad and disoriented woman, appears on the scene. She seems to be in shock, having lost touch with time and space: "Is that inside or outside now? Is it still yesterday today?"
A plea for opera being practised as political expression: a lecture on the creation of HAPPY HAPPY, an operatic song-cycle with party by Mathis Nitschke