André de Ridder is Principal Conductor of sinfonia ViVA. Projects in the 2008/9 season include Beethoven in New York and the start of Mendelssohn 2009.
Monkey: Journey to the West
Arguably the most successfull new creation in the field of music-theatre in 2007, Monkey: Journey to the West opened the first Manchester International Festival in June 2007.
Fausto Romitelli An Index of Metals
André de Ridder conducted five performances of the late Romitelli’s last composition with MusikFabrik and Barbara Hannigan as soloist at the World New Music Festival 2006 in Stuttgart, in collaboration with the Forum Neues Musiktheater.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film, after his own original stage play "Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant", was given the operatic treatment by the Irish composer Gerald Barry
sinfonia ViVA
André de Ridder was appointed Principal Conductor of sinfonia ViVA in September 2007 and conducted his first concert in this capacity in October. This relatively young orchestra - it was founded in 1982 - is based in the East Midlands and holds residencies at Derby’s Assembly Rooms and Nottingham’s Royal Concert Hall. It has established a reputation for outstanding, stylish performances of the classical repertoire as well as commissioning new work. Its thriving education department is regarded as one of the UK’s most enterprising and successful.
Beethoven in New York
André de Ridder and sinfonia ViVA have devised a concert series for autumn 2008 juxtaposing the music of Beethoven with contemporary composers from or based in New York and exploring those elements of Beethoven’s music which have informed and inspired them. At the heart of this will be a national tour with jazz pianist Uri Caine presenting the UK première of his adaptation of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, for piano and orchestra, and the first performance of an orchestral commission by Caine. Other featured composers include Nico Muhly, Julia Wolfe and Steve Mackey.
Mendelssohn 2009
Over the course of the calendar year 2009, the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s birth, sinfonia ViVA will be looking at this composer’s most popular and some less familiar masterworks, alongside other German composers affected by religious conflicts, social marginalisation and emigration: Bach, Schoenberg, Weill and Wagner. This will be a comprehensive musical as well as socio-political journey to the heart of German Romanticism including talks, education projects, study days and even a Halloween event, with a film to portray Mendelssohn’s own 19th century version of The Blair Witch Project.
For updates on ViVA’s projects with André de Ridder, go to www.vivaorch.co.uk for more information on the orchestra, or contact sinfonia ViVA on
01332 207570 / info@vivorch.co.uk
Monkey: Journey to the West
Arguably the most successfull new creation in the field of music-theatre in 2007, Monkey: Journey to the West opened the first edition of the Manchester International Festival in June 2007. Billed as an opera involving Chines actors , singers, acrobats of the Dalian Circus Company and martial arts choreography, it is based on one of the most popular novels of Chinese literature, dating back to the 16th century. It was adapted for the stage and directed by Chen Shi-zheng with music composed by Damon Albarn and designs and animation by Jamie Hewlett, the creators of the virtual band Gorillaz. André de Ridder conducted the orchestra which was specially devised by Albarn’s close collaborator on this project, David Coulter, consisting of strings, Chinese plucked instruments, brass, keyboards, percussion, Ondes Martenot, a chorus and a number of instruments played by Coulter himself. The show was co-produced and commissioned by the Théâtre du Chatelet in Paris, where it played to sell-out audiences for three weeks in autumn 2007. It will travel to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in July 2008.
Fausto Romitelli An Index of Metals
André de Ridder conducted five performances of the late Romitelli’s last composition with MusikFabrik and Barbara Hannagan as soloist at the World New Music Festival 2006 in Stuttgart, in collaboration with the Forum Neues Musiktheater.
The Italian composer Fausto Romitelli (1963-2004) wrote An Index of Metals, a video opera, in 2003. A former student of Gerard Grisey he became compositeur en recherche at the Ircam in Paris from 1993-1995 adapting spectralists’ methods in his exploration of sounds, including sources from techno and rock music.
For An Index of Metals Romitelli collaborated with audio-visual artsits Paolo Pacchini and Léonardo Romoli, using three video screens in a tryptich-like formation, to create an abstract drama of light and sound. It is scored for amplified ensemble (including electric guitar and electric bass), electronics and soprano, using texts by Kenka Lekovich.
“…The aim of An Index of Metals is to turn the secular form of opera into an experience of total perception, plunging the spectator into an incandescent matter that is both luminous and sonorous, a magma of flowing sounds, shapes and colours, with no narrative but that of hypnosis, possession and trance. It is a lay ritual, rather like the light shows of 1960s or today’s rave parties in which space, having assumed a solid form through the volume of sound and visual saturation appears to twist into a thousand anamorphoses. Rather than calling on our analytical ability, like most contemporary music, An Index of Metals aims to take possession of the body with its over exposition of senses and pleasure.
An Index of Metals is thus not simply another attempt to the new operatic genre by adding a visual element to the production, nor is it a strictly multi-media approach in which each artist contributes to a common narrative. It is, rather, a completely new concept in which sound and light become part of a single through process, like music and video, where timbre and images are used as elements of a single continuum subjected to the same computer transformations. The story is that of the fusion of perception, the absence of landmarks, the henceforth limitless body in the furnace of a ritual mass of sound.
Even the original libretto by Kenka Lekovich is transformed by being translated from one language to another. The music for sopranoand eleven amplified instruments develops an impure timbre through counterpoint with the colourful interference in the video by Paolo Pachini and Leonardo Romoli. Three autonomous films, projected on three screens, take up all the visual space, while the sound is projected as patches of light. Both music and image use the same physical characteristics, including the irisation, corrosion, plastic deformation, rupture, incandescence and solarisation of metallic surfaces, thus revealing their inner violence and even murderous tendencies…” Fausto Romitelli
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film, after his own original stage play "Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant", was given the operatic treatment by the Irish composer Gerald Barry and received its first staging at English National Opera in autumn 2005, conducted by André de Ridder. It was one of the most controversial opera premieres of the year, but there was no doubt amongst public and critics alike that the production was superbly realised, directed by Richard Jones and designed by Ultz, with a cast including Barbara Hannagan, Stephanie
Friede and Susan Bickley. Barry actually sets to music the original screen play word for word but interestingly reverses the films slowness and languid athmosphere of long, muted and eerie silences into the opposite, as if presenting the emotional negative (or positive, depending on one's viewpoint) of the drama: music and diction are almost relentlessly driven, loud and brass heavy eruptions alternate with obsessive, repettitive orchestral patterns mirroring the inescapable mechanics of the inner going ons. The Theater Basel/Switzerland are presenting the original production of the opera but sung in German, for the first time, in May and June 2008, again under the direction of André de Ridder