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Evan Gardner - Gunfighter Nation (DVD)

£12.69

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Label: Wergo

Cat No: WER64232

Barcode: 4010228642322

Format: DVD

Number of Discs: 1

Release Date: 29th September 2017

Works

Gardner, Evan

Gunfighter Nation
No Thanks: 5 Poems by E.E. Cummings
Scandinavian Knitting
Sonic Voyeur II

Artists

Anne Montandon (mezzo-soprano)
Opera Lab Berlin
Zafraan Ensemble
Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra
Ensemble Contrechamps

Conductors

Musashi Baba
Antoine Daurat
Manuel Nawri
Dima Slobodeniouk

Works

Gardner, Evan

Gunfighter Nation
No Thanks: 5 Poems by E.E. Cummings
Scandinavian Knitting
Sonic Voyeur II

Artists

Anne Montandon (mezzo-soprano)
Opera Lab Berlin
Zafraan Ensemble
Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra
Ensemble Contrechamps

Conductors

Musashi Baba
Antoine Daurat
Manuel Nawri
Dima Slobodeniouk

About

After the world premiere of his first music theatre piece Die Unterhändlerin in 2013, Evan Gardner and director Michael Höppner founded Opera Lab Berlin, an independent, free-form ensemble dedicated to creating interdisciplinary music theatre that is tightly bound to its contemporary surroundings. Since then, Gardner has been placing the focus of his compositional work on musical theater and his own particular ensemble.

The new portrait DVD of the American-Norwegian composer presents a video production (commissioned especially for the Edition Zeitgenössische Musik) of Gardner’s most extensive work for Opera Lab Berlin so far, this Western-opera Gunfighter Nation (2016) in a staging by Michael Höppner. The full-length work for six voices and ensemble, which received its premiere at Berlin’s Ballhaus Ost, retells in a playful-musical manner the myths entwined around the history of the United States, from the expulsion of the native Americans by the white settlers to the ongoing political upheavals according to the motto 'America first!'.

As every Opera Lab Berlin production, Gunfighter Nation demands of its singers and musicians to step out of their familiar sphere of activity and to act as performers and actors – committed to the pioneering spirit of the first settlers, conquering all unknown territories before them. In the booklet, Roland Quitt describes Gardner’s compositional approach: 'Tunes from America’s everyday culture are stitched into the cohesive fabric of Gardner’s own musical idiom. They thereby become material for further manipulation, dissection, and transformation as the American Dream is called into question with the resources of music.'

In addition, the DVD contains three works from the period when Gardner was still composing mainly instrumental pieces: recordings of his works Sonic Voyeur II (Zafraan Ensemble), Scandinavian Knitting (Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra) and of the cycle No Thanks, based on poems of E. E. Cummings (Ensemble Contrechamps).