Bählamms Fest
Musiktheater von Olga Neuwirth (Text: Elfriede Jelinek)In her intermedia music theatre "Bählamm's Fest", composer Olga Neuwirth looks into the abysses of the house that the surrealist Leonora Carrington built in 1940 on her escape from Nazi-occupied France. "Bählamm's Fest" is based on Leonora Carrington's drama "The Feast of the Lamb". Olga Neuwirth, who calls "Bählamm's Fest" her own "House of Usher", created unprecedented avenues of escape from this unbearable reality into unreal, visual and musical spaces with her pioneering work in the 1990s. The young Irish directing duo Dead Centre transports "Bählamms Fest" into a time in which the boundaries between reality and virtuality seem to be lost. The flight into fictitious worlds of desire as an expression of despair over inhuman cold and barbarism brings new dimensions to light. The writer Elfriede Jelinek wrote the libretto based on Leonora Carrington's drama. Sylvain Cambreling is the musical director of the Ruhrtriennale production.
At the Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum, Sylvain Cambreling and the formidable Ensemble Modern go to work, placed slightly off to the side under the iron strutting; this work features electronic sounds, noises of animals, nature and civilization as well as surround-sound.nachtkritik.de, Andreas Wilink
A heathland without firm ground underfoot, full of ponds and swamps, in the twilight of eerie shrouds of fog. [...] At the left edge of the stage, dimly lit, the fabulous Ensemble Modern musicians play under Sylvain Cambreling’s baton.Süddeutsche Zeitung, Julia Spinola
The apparently anarchical mix – of children’s songs and brutal discharges of sound, operatic gestures and melodrama, distorted ländler and the glassy jangle of reams of sound – magically merges into a higher entity: this music never appears eclectic.Süddeutsche Zeitung, Julia Spinola
