Ensemble Phœnix Basel

Daniel Glaus (*1957): “STEINhimmel” (2016/17, WP)

– STEINhimmel I – 42’
– STEINhimmel II “in memoriam” – 37’

1517 and 2017

The Reformation thoughts, taking up the old heretical voices of the mystics and developing them further, led to a political and inner-church upheaval of unimagined dimensions and later influenced the Enlightenment and secularization.

Today, global economic interests are confronted with tendencies of national isolation and radicalizing religious fundamentalism. In between are people. They are lynched, tortured, incapacitated, expelled or, misled by false hopes for a better life, seduced and forced to flee.

Imagine: an overcrowded boat on the stormy Mediterranean Sea at night. Hundreds of people cry out desperately and perhaps silently for help.

Or listen in on the flames of the burning Grenfell Tower in London.

Woe betide if the voices were to become loud and reach our ears unhindered!

Statements of the reformers Oekolampad Basel | Zwingli Zurich | Haller Bern | Farel Lausanne and Luther | the threat of banishment from Rome | Mallarmé “Un Coup de dés” | Freud “Why War” | victims of genocide from Myanmar, 2016 | the holy figures of the “Heavenly Court” in the choir vault of the Bern Cathedral | names of Jewish, Christian and Islamic mystics and the first names of a Swiss school were brought together in the composition process and mixed to form the libretto of the space symphony “STEINhimmel” (STONE heaven).

The church space as an instrument becomes a resonating space, an echoing space, which all those listening, singing, playing make resound through their presence and their devotion and steer, as it were, like Noah’s Ark through the times of the present.

Daniel Glaus