+Muntendorf
Melencolia
In immersive soundscapes, musicians from Ensemble Modern and the Apollo Choir of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden invite the audience to explore the creative and transformative power of melancholic worlds.
Starting with Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I, numerous figures and themes are presented on the stage of Melencolia and set in relation to one another: visiting football stadiums and digital cemeteries from the video game “Second Life”, Austrian folk songs, virtuoso instrumental music and Japanese karaoke, AI voice clones and digital guests including the Iranian ney-anbān virtuoso Saeid Shanbehzadeh, Brigitta Muntendorf and Moritz Lobeck go in search of the liberating melancholic mood in a series of seven tableaux.
Tailored for 14 musicians of the Ensemble Modern and accompanied by singers from the Apollo Choir, this work addresses the historical complexities of melancholy – perceived variously as an illness, as a way of overcoming earthly suffering or as the sister of genius. The puzzling polyhedron in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving has become a symbol for these contradictions amid the human desire for salvation. Melencolia combines classical performance with cutting-edge approaches at the intersection of art and technology and transcends the superficially spectacular.
The work has already been recognised for its innovation by becoming the first music theatre piece to receive an Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica. The commission work of Bregenzer Festspiele and Ensemble Modern will celebrate its German premiere at MaerzMusik 2025 in cooperation with Staatsoper Unter den Linden.
Ensemble Modern
21st march 2025
20.00 | Haus der Berliner Festspiele
22nd march 2025
17.00 | Haus der Berliner Festspiele
A work commissioned by the Bregenz Festival and Ensemble Modern
Cooperation with MaerzMusik 2025
Orbit – A War Series
The title Orbit: A War Series is a reference to the New York artist Nancy Spero: deeply moved by the photographs of the Vietnam War that were circulating in the media, Spero investigated the links between sexuality, violence, and power in The War Series (1966–70). The subject of oppressive power structures revealed in her art is horrifyingly relevant today. Orbit: A War Series appeals to the images in our minds: Brigitta Muntendorf’s immersive 3D audio space oratorio is like an electroacoustic series of narratives in which sounds, texts, voices, and space become transmitters of power structures. The texts are based on interviews and reports from Afghanistan, Iran, DR Congo, Poland, the U.S., and Asia during the Second World War. The musical spaces of violence, protection, escape, or exhibition form the acoustic habitat of the voices that their bodies left behind to form vocal clones and immortal warriors of a posthuman and techno-futuristic chorus that proclaims an opera of the future that is as sensorial as it is political.
2nd april – 6th april 2025
19.00
Humboldt Forum, Saal 2, EG
A production of La Biennale di Venezia and ECHO Factory
Cooperation with the Humboldt Forum.
With the kind support of the Kunststiftung NRW, the Goethe-Institut and the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation