Heiner Goebbels, born in Frankfurt in 1952, is a mainstay of contemporary music theater and is renowned for his creative compositions, in which text, music and theatrical action merge into a grand whole. He has been a close and valued collaborator with Ensemble Modern for over 35 years. The composer celebrated his 70th birthday in mid-August. Ensemble Modern will perform three works by Heiner Goebbels over the coming months in various European cities.
On 14 September, the Ensemble Modern Orchestra will perform the highly praised full-evening cycle "A House of Call. My Imaginary Notebook" (2020) as part of the FRATOPIA festival in the main hall of the Alte Oper Frankfurt. This large-scale work has been developed from the beginning in collaboration with Ensemble Modern. "I have done many projects with them that I could not have done with any other ensemble. There was great trust from the beginning: they never resisted the risk of doing something new. Because I am not a virtuoso in handling large scores, I prefer to respond to what I hear, so that I can develop a sound that emerges during rehearsals, while I work with individual musicians or the ensemble. This possibility is incomparable and I have made much use of it" (Heiner Goebbels). "A House of Call" is a cycle for large orchestra with calls, appeals, invocations, speeches and poems. On 19 November, "A House of Call" will be performed as part of Wien Modern at the Volkstheater in Vienna. This acoustic "life diary" with sounds from all genres and voices from around the world has recently also been released on CD by ECM Records (ECM New Series 2728/29). Goebbels' earlier recordings with Ensemble Modern in the ECM New Series include "Red Run/Befreiung/La Jalousie", "Eislermaterial" and "Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten".
On 23 and 24 September, a performance of "Schwarz auf Weiß" (1995/96) will follow at the Festival Musica at the Théâtre du Maillon in Strasbourg. And on 4, 5 and 6 November, the music theater work returns to the place of its world premiere, the Bockenheimer Depot in Frankfurt. In 1995/96, Goebbels wrote his first music theater piece, which he essentially tailored to the strengths of Ensemble Modern. Here, the collective of the ensemble itself is the protagonist. The musicians are also the actors and take over the full width of the stage. Tennis balls land on a bass drum, tender sounds of a koto ring out, a kettle whistle whistles along with a complex flute melody. The scenes and events continuously flow into each other, and the ingeniously designed light spaces conceived by Jean Kalman contribute their own dramaturgy.
Freedom of action - "Liberté d'action" (2021) - on stage and in life is the subject of Heiner Goebbels' newest work of the same name, a staged concert, a competition between the performer David Bennent and the pianists of Ensemble Modern. The work focuses on the oeuvre of a nonconformist outsider: Henri Michaux, an outstanding painter and also a very modern poet of powerful eloquence. The work was first performed at the Kunstfestspiele Herrenhausen in 2021 and will be revived on 25 September at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, on 28 September at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris and on 27 November in Cluj, Romania.