Trinity Laban leads the London premiere of Heiner Goebbels’ Surrogate Cities to launch the Southbank’s Cultural Olympiad
11 January 2012
Saturday 3 March 2012 at 6pm, Royal Festival Hall,
Southbank Centre
Trinity Laban Symphony Orchestra - with
musicians from National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and London
Philharmonic Orchestra Foyle Future Firsts
Jonathan Stockhammer: conductor
David Moss: voice
Jocelyn B Smith: mezzo-soprano
To launch the Southbank Centre's Cultural Olympiad and to
celebrate the acclaimed German composer's 60th birthday,
the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance Symphony
Orchestra will give the London premiere of Heiner Goebbels' edgy,
urban soundscape Surrogate Cities on Saturday 3 March at
the Royal Festival Hall. The performance is part of the BBC's Music
Nation weekend (3-4 March 2012) and includes "Exploded!", a
festival of new work inspired by Goebbel's orchestral tour de force
curated by choreographer Lea Anderson within the Royal Festival
Halls' public spaces, which will put London's urban youth at the
heart of the project - both on stage and in the audience.
Drawing upon an eclectic mix of musical influences, text and
sampled sound, Goebbels has stated that his intention withSurrogate
Cities was "...not to produce a close-up but to try and read the
city as a text and to translate something of its mechanics and
architecture." The work pulsates with the dynamism of the
city - a life-blood which is all-consuming, relentless, hostile,
isolating, mechanical and destructive.
In response to Surrogate Cities, teenagers from the Isle of
Dogs, the wider Tower Hamlets community and South London boroughs
including Lewisham, Greenwich, Lambeth and Southwark, all areas
affected by last summer's youth riots, will create a series of
performances as part of Trinity Laban's community programme.
Performances of the Isle of Dogs and Tower Hamlets community work
will be showcased at the East Wintergarden in Canary Wharf on 10
February and some of these will be performed at the Southbank
Centre on 3 March as part of 'Exploded!', in which dance, film and
music performances will be shown in the public spaces of the Royal
Festival Hall in the afternoon before performance of Goebbels' own
work.
For the London premiere of Surrogate Cities, Trinity
Laban Symphony Orchestra, comprising 80 current students, will be
augmented by young musicians from the National Youth Orchestra of
Great Britain and the London Philharmonic Orchestra's Foyle Future
Firsts scheme. They will be joined by soloists Jocelyn B. Smith and
David Moss, who feature on the original ECM recording of Goebbels'
work and have toured the piece worldwide. This is a unique platform
for Trinity Laban students to perform at such an important London
premiere in one of Europe's leading venues.
Professor Anthony Bowne, Principal of Trinity Laban
Conservatoire of Music and Dance commented:
"Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance is an
international hub for future world leaders in the arts. With
its combined music and dance offering, Trinity Laban is directly
connected to the contemporary pulse. Surrogate Cities presents a
superb opportunity to focus on the future generation of artists in
the lead up to the Olympics."
Surrogate Cities (1993-94) is a major 90-minute work
for mezzo-soprano, speaker and large orchestra, originally
commissioned to mark the 20th anniversary of the Junge
Deutsche Philharmonie and the 1200th anniversary of the
city of Frankfurt. It was subsequently championed by Sir Simon
Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker.
Unlike much of Goebbels'output, which is deeply rooted in
experimental theatre, Surrogate Cities is on a truly
symphonic scale, using a particularly large post-Romantic
orchestra. This performance is a collection of six
of the works: In the Country of Last Things (string
version), Die Faust im Wappen, a Suite for Sampler and
Orchestra, Drei Horatier Songs, Die Städte und
die Toten 4 / Argia, and Surrogate. Central to the work is the
use of text, and literary quotations by authors such as Paul
Auster, Hugo Hamilton and Heiner Müller appear throughout.
It is an exploration of the 'concrete jungle' in all its
complexity complete with musical-historical 'flashbacks' to times
past. One notable example is the sampled antique recordings of
Jewish cantors, heard in the Suite's 'Chaconne.' The
piece portrays a cityscape which is full of thundering life and
energy, but is also at times an empty, dark and dangerous place.
Such darkness is especially prevalent in In the Country of Last
Things, in which Moss's recitations on the transience of the
city contrast with Smith's wordless vocalisations behind him.
"When you live in the city, you learn to take nothing for
granted. Close your eyes for a moment, turn around to look at
something else and the thing that was before you is suddenly gone.
Nothing lasts, you see. ...Once a thing is gone, that is the end of
it. ...That is what the city does to you. It turns your thoughts
inside out. It makes you want to live and at the same time it tries
to take your life away from you. There is no escape from
this." - Surrogate Cities: In the Country of Last Things
by Paul Auster
"It [Surrogate Cities] turns the symphony orchestra on
its head . . . . It gave one listener a first sense of what it must
have been like to hear a Mahler symphony a century ago, with the
whole notion of sonic possibility expanded at a stroke." - The
New York Times
Creative Cities- 10 February at 6.30pm in the East
Wintergarden
Inspired by Surrogate Cities, Trinity Laban has created
its own community project, Creative Cities, focusing on the Isle of
Dogs community as well as young people from the wider Tower Hamlets
area. Funded by the Canary Wharf Group plc, the project
culminates in a performance in the East Wintergarden in Canary
Wharf on 10 February. Over 500 young people from primary and
secondary schools, youth clubs and the local community have
interpreted what the urban landscape means to them through dance,
music and film. After the February performance, selected acts from
this project, together with additional groups, will perform in the
public spaces of the Festival Hall as part of 'Exploded!' leading
up to the performance of Surrogate Cities.
More than 1,000 free tickets to Surrogate Cities at the
Royal Festival Hall will be made available to the teenagers taking
part in Creative Citiesand to young people in Greenwich, Lewisham,
Southwark and Lambeth.
Heiner Goebbels
Heiner Goebbels was born in 1952 in Neustadt/Weinstrasse,
Germany. He has been based, since 1972, in Frankfurt, writing
chamber music, music theatre, audio plays, and theatre-film-ballet
music. Goebbels also has a reputation as an improviser in free
music and art-rock genres. In 1976 he co-founded the "Sogenanntes
Linksradikales Blasorchester", which he led until 1981, and the duo
Heiner Goebbels/Alfred Harth, which existed until 1988. Between
1978 and 1980 he was musical director at the Frankfurt Schauspiel,
and in 1982 founded the critically-lauded experimental rock group
Cassiber. In the mid-1980s he began composing and directing audio
plays of his own, most of them based on texts by Heiner Müller.
Since then, Goebbels' work has been staged in more than 30
countries, and he is currently Director of the Ruhr Festival.
Goebbels first recorded for ECM in 1980 in an improvisational
project with Paul Lovensand others. His compositional albums for
ECM and ECM New Series are "Der Mann im Fahrstuhl" (recorded 1988),
"Hörstücke" (1984-1990), "Shadow/Landscape with Argonauts" (1990),
"La Jalousie / Red Run / Herakles 2 / Befreiung" (1992) and "Ou
bien le débarquement désastreux" (1994). Goebbels' work has won
numerous national and international awards, including the Prix
Italia, the Prix Futura, the Berliner Hörspielpreis, the
Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden, the Karl-Sczuka-Hörspielpreis des
SWF Baden-Baden, the Goldene Ehrennadel der deutschen
Schallplattenkritik, and the Hessischer Kulturpreis.
"When it comes to the power dynamics of the city, the
individual is always the more vulnerable party. Art rebels against
this overpowering structure by strengthening the subjective
element. Music, too, is composed from a highly subjective
perspective, for composers usually justify what they write by
saying that they "need to get it out of their system". That is only
partly true for me. l try to gain a bit more distance: l construct
something that confronts the audience, and the audience reacts to
it, discovering in the music a space they can enter complete with
their associations and ideas." - Heiner Goebbels
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