Kon-text
Programming William Walton’s and Edith Sitwell’s once provocative work with Graham Valentine as narrator is a pleasure for us in different ways! The English poet Edith Sitwell became an icon of lesbian-gay movement not only through her poems, but also through her eccentric lifestyle and her uncompromisingly non-conformist views, provoking many a scandal with her appearance already in the early 1920s. At the premiere of “Façade,” she spoke her surrealist verses invisibly behind a painted screen with a hole cut out for a giant megaphone.
In combination with the commissions to the two young composers Asia Ahmetjanova from Latvia and Charlotte Torres from France, both living in Switzerland, current artistic dynamite is guaranteed.
Program
- Graham Valentine
- speaker
- Jürg Henneberger
- conductor
- Christoph Bösch
- flute, piccolo
- Toshiko Sakakibara
- clarinets, bass clarinet
- Raphael Camenisch
- alto saxophone
- Nenad Marković
- trumpet
- Michael Büttler
- trombone
- João Pacheco
- percussion
- Kirill Zvegintsov
- piano
- Friedemann Treiber
- violin
- Martin Jaggi
- cello
- Aleksander Gabryś
- double bass