Works
Action concert pieces | 2016

Lascia ch'io pianga

New production:
ZeitGenuss - Festival für Musik unserer Zeit
15.10.2023
Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM) | Kubus
Johanna Vargas, Soprano
Magdalena Cerezo, Piano

PRESENTATION
The project is conceived as a short theatrical piece in concert where the two musicians, the soprano and the pianist, act as characters, creating themselves, with their performative actions, the sound-scene of the theatrical event.
The soprano is inside the open piano, representing the unknown woman, a foreign woman on the move toward a new country, crossing the sea on a tragic black boat (the piano controlled by the pianist).
She performs movements with her body and plays with her hands the internal string system. She sings, prays and reflects, introducing popular songs from her remote country and projecting the voice towards the strings.
The woman is also a water nymph, the dreamlike projection of our fragmentary information concerning the moving of people towards Europe.
The pianist, ex-machina presence, plays through the keyboard the representation of a tempest, of the wide horizon, of the unbearable solitude of the woman. The pianist is the symbol of destiny, the fate dominating her life during the passage.
The societal and cultural legacy of the piano as a symbol of 19th-century feminine refinement and achievement, is recalled and analyzed:  the piano, in its massiveness and solidity, is both an image of the makeshift boat, the tomb of the drowned woman, and a shell from which the siren emerges.
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Action concert piece for female voice and piano (2016)
Text by Katja Petrowskaja
(with fragments from refugee’s witness and collated poem’s fragments)
Commission: Musik der Jahrhunderte
First performance: 3-7-2016, Theaterhaus, Stuttgart
Duo ILLEGAL
Alessia Park (soprano), Marjia Skender (piano)
Publisher: Rai com
Duration: ca 15 m