Winterreise – Songs & Places
(2010)is a collaboration between Victor Morales (visuals), Ulrike Sowodniok (voice and performance) and Hannes Strobl (Music). It is an exploration of Franz Schubert’s iconic song cycle.
Winterreise – Songs & Places is an exploration of Franz Schubert’s iconic song cycle where different spaces intersect in order to create a new and interesting performance. Real-time visuals generated with video games and surround music based on urban field recordings and Schubert’s Winterreise lyrical part were combined.
The originality of this piece comes not only from the mixture of these different mediums but also from the interpretation of the original Winterreise. Rather than focus on “a subtle journey to death” we decided to explore the ideas of intoxication, psychedelia and “the broken heart” situated on a landscape that is a “desert” generated from a picture of Schubert’s face. Sonically, our intention was to create spaces rather than reproducing the original piano score, so we can immerse the audience on a variety of psychological states. As a performance, there is only soprano on stage, who provides a voice and a body that tells a story without acting it.
Winterreise – Songs and Places is a collaboration between Victor Morales (visuals), Ulrike Sowodniok (voice and performance) and Hannes Strobl (Music). This piece premiered at the Festspielhaus St. Pölten in Austria on October 15, 2010.
Source: Winterreise – Songs & Places (blog)
Winterreise - Songs & Places is an acoustic-visual performance in which Schubert's classic is understood as a dialectical landscape. A virtual landscape is the antithesis of a surrounding landscape; a political landscape is the thesis that counteracts a romantic one. Electronic ice is attacked by the warmth of the human voice: a cold avatar discovers his circumstances and finds himself in a world that is constructed like a city, like a wood. A mountain that could consist of data, a memory that feels like fate, a red sun, a black tie, a runny nose, a violet ocean, a broken chair, the silence of snow, the smell of perfume/sweat. The singer, the actor, the musician, all can disappear on the horizon, observing the landscape and merging into it. Using video-game technology and music a virtual landscape is travelled through on stage, always in search of political/restless, surreal/mental and electronic/mechanical spaces.
Source: Hannes Strobl