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Event
MUSIC MEMORY METAMORPHOSIS
Villa Aurora will present the Los Angeles premiere of MUSIC MEMORY METAMORPHOSIS on April 20, 2013 at 7:30 PM. A reception will follow.
Produced and directed by Gwyneth Bravo with the support of REZN8's founder Paul Sidlo and featuring live performances by Neal Stulberg and pianist Steven Vanhauwaert, this multi-media program presents composer Viktor Ullmann's final, 1944 works,the Piano Sonata No.7 and his melodrama The Lay of Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke, against a cinematic backdrop. In the spirit of early film and Erwin Piscator's experimental Berlin theater of the 1920s, the production re-imagines the theater and concert hall as a cinematic space where the live performance of these works takes place inside a cinematic framework, where a kaleidoscope of projected and slowly shifting montage images serves as a visual counterpoint to the poetry and music. Employing a postmodern compositional aesthetic, her film, which Robert Elias, President of the OREL Foundation, describes as "a moving and beautifully wrought immersive work of art," unfolds in thirteen, short movements and is comprised of a series of densely-textured images constructed from the superimposition and animation of a multi-layered and harmonically-conceived series of visual elements.
These treated images are drawn from black and white photographs of the period, as well as blurred and treated film stills and moving frames, to suggest the ghost-like presence and profound absences of early photography and cinema, where the Bohemian landscape that serves as both the historical and poetic context of these works is refracted through the sepia-hued lens of the camera. These images narrate the unfolding of the dreamscape evoked by Rainer Maria Rilke's 1899, Jugendstil poem The Lay of Love and Death of the Cornet Christopher Rilke on which Ullmann's melodrama is based. The work features the life, love, and death of a young soldier during the Austro-Turkish wars of the early 1660s and was written when Rilke was twenty-three. Becoming a huge success in Germany after its second printing in 1912, the work was carried like a Bible by soldiers fighting at the front lines during the First World War.
A pre-recorded soundtrack provides a sonic intervention at key structural moments in the program and includes the drumming hooves of horses to evoke the Austrian cavalry, the sound of wind, a muted reminiscence to the "Rachel" theme from the piano sonata, as well as the Kaiser's "Farewell Aria" from Ullmann's 1943 opera The Kaiser from Atlantis. Exploring the counterpoint between texts and images,landscapes and dreamscapes, as well as the self and nation, this production seeks to convey the poetic imagination of these works as a meditation on the nature of history and memory and, through music, a vision of their metamorphosis.
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LocationVilla Aurora (View)
520 Paseo Miramar/ Shuttle from Los Liones Drive, two blks off Sunset Boulevard
Pacific Palisades, CA 90272
United States
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