RuhrTriennale
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That Awesome Underground of Souls An evening with Tobias Moretti and the chamber orchestra moderntimes

Concept:
moderntimes, TOBIAS MORETTI
Music:
Benjamin Britten, Joseph Haydn, Joseph Martin Kraus, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Dmitri Schostakowitsch, Paul Wranitzky
Text:
Paul Celan, Johann Peter Hebel, Heinrich Heine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl
Scenic rendering:
Maria Kross
Lightdesign:
Alex Paget
Dramaturgy:
Veronika Zimmermann
 
With:
Kammerorchester moderntimes, Tobias Moretti
Opening night:
24. September
Start:
8:00 pm
Duration:
approx. 1 hour and 30 min., no interval
Performances:
25., 27. September
Start:
8:00 pm
Duration:
approx. 1 hour and 30 min., no interval
Introduction:
27. September
The introduction begins 45 minutes prior to the start of the event.
Price:
Category A
40 €
Category B
30 €
Category C
20 €

Twenty musicians and one actor will take the audience on a journey through time, made of speech and music. The journey's leitmotif comes from Unverhofftes Wiedersehen, a short story in Johann Peter Hebel's (1760-1826) almanac, describing a mining accident in Falun, Sweden as an event symbolic of the radical social and intellectual changes of the early 19th century. The fast, hard rhythm of the young industrial society was already so strong that literature could no longer ignore it.

A dramatic collage of poetry, prose, music, sound and light produces a field of tension ranging from romantic to contemporary literature and from musical 'Sturm und Drang' to the 20th century. It describes an up and down movement symbolizing two things: a journey through inner spheres to the locations of fear, danger and longing; and an actual journey underground. Hebel, Heine, Rilke and Trakl all drew images of dreams and language from the experience of unstoppable destruction and dissolution. Their texts go right to the heart of the romantic movement, which is not bound up with any particular age but rather to the experience of living in a time when two ideals are apparently on collision course. Romantic ideals, hopes and passions, themselves partly fuelled by scientific achievements, collide with the social consequences of technical development: The Romanticists' enthusiasm for natural science then vanishes when faced with the reality of early industrial poverty and pauperisation.

This pulse was always reflected by musical developments. Joseph Martin Kraus, Haydn, Paul Wranitzky, Shostakovich and Schoenberg all emphasised historical and factual aspects in their work. This is clearly shown by instrumentation and orchestra's changes in sound, as reflected by the developing changes in the instruments themselves. moderntimes (artistic directors: Ilia Korol & Julia Moretti ) is a young Austrian orchestra with international specialists who are just as proficient in historical performance as in the music of the 20th and 21st century.

A RuhrTriennale production