Ensemble Phœnix Basel

An immanent musical-theatrical firework spectacle for and with Svea Schildknecht.

György Ligeti’s only opera “Le Grand Macabre” is based on a play by the Belgian poet Michel de Ghelderode, one of the most important representatives of absurdist theater alongside Eugène Jonesco, Alfred Jarry and Samuel Beckett. The arrangement of three arias for coloratura soprano and ensemble was written by Elgar Howarth, who was the study director of the premiere of the opera at Stockholm in 1978. The German composer Manfred Stahnke, who studied with Ligeti in Hamburg and now teaches composition there himself, wrote his work “Lumpengalerie” in 1999, based on a recorded improvisation that was reworked into a sextet. The South Korean composer Unsuk Chin wrote the ensemble piece “Gougalōn” in 2009 after a visit to the suburbs of Seoul in memory of the old, impoverished neighborhood of the 1960s where she spent her childhood. She describes the work as “imagined folk music”.