Kunst aus der Zeit & Bregenzer Festspiele have invited Lillevan to collaborate on Morton Subotnick’s reworking of his Opera ‘Jacob’s Room’.
Premiere in 05-AUG-2010 in Bregenz,
Preparation in Berlin & New York 2009/2010
Interesting interview in Berlin’s De-Bug
Jacob’s Room (world premiere)
Chamber opera for four soloists, four cellos, keyboards and electronics by Morton Subotnick
Co-production with soniq performing arts, Berlin, with funding from the Hauptstadtkulturfonds in association with the European Arts Centre in Hellerau
Jacob is a survivor – and yet he cannot live because he is repressing the memories of an awful experience in his childhood. A woman appears and takes Jacob on a journey through his own mind, a journey into Jacob’s Room. Here he must confront the horror of those extreme emotions that accompany his experience of a holocaust. Jacob remembers; he remembers the cries of his mother, who died for her son; he remembers his grandfather’s cries of lament and his anger: anger at an unjust god, anger at all of mankind.
Morton Subotnick’s opera Jacob’s Room is like a prayer, like an appeal for safe conduct, a collective cry for help. The hypnotic loops of Subotnick’s music transport the audience to a musical prayer room, a place between dream and reality, a place of associations in which sounds, memories and images blend together.
Morton Subotnick’s career as a composer has been subject to two major influences: his passion for combining music with other media, and his experimentation with electronic music. His new opera Jacob’s Room has been developed in close collaboration with the production team and is the result of a common artistic conception.
5 and 7 August – 8 pm
Lillevan and Morton Subotnick in Berlin
Musical director: Ari Benjamin Meyers
Production, space and costumes: Mirella Weingarten
Moving imagery: Lillevan
With: Katharina von Bülow, Ruth Rosenfeld, Florian Just and Tom Sol
www.mortonsubotnick.com
Kunst aus der Zeit/Bregenzer Festspiele
Morton Subotnick @ wikipedia