DREAMS: Sciarrino / Venables / Viñao

Kings Place
Kings Cross, London
United Kingdom

Juliet Fraser - soprano
E.Laine mezzo - mezzo-soprano
Benjamin Seifert - baritone
Ian Watson - accordion
Ben Edmonds - oboe
Eamonn O'Dwyer / Andrew Fielding / Maxim Bendall - speakers
Graham Ross & Darren Bloom - conductors
Philip Venables - sound
Royal College of Music Ensemble



DREAMS. Dreams of faith, dreams of fear, dreams of pleasure.

Sciarrino's powerful 'Infinito Nero' is an incredible 30-minute “ecstasy in one act”, combining dreams of the flesh, faith and madness into a tense, surreal meditation, sung psychotically by E.laine with the RCM Ensemble and Graham Ross.

The concert also includes a 15-minute preview of two scenes from Philip Venables' opera, The Schmürz, with librettist Michael PJ Brett. This special preview features the wonderful Benjamin Seifert, a chorus of speakers and Ian Watson on accordion, conducted by Darren Bloom. The preview scenes are towards the end of the opera, where Len, the main character, finds himself alone with the mysterious Schmürz that has followed him all the way up his apartment building, after Len has abandoned his wife and daughter to The Noise. The speechless, abused Schmürz, from whom the opera takes its name, features on live video in this preview.

To begin, acclaimed soprano Juliet Fraser sings about spiritual visions in Alejandro Viñao's Hildegard's Dream, for voice and tape.

Salvatore Sciarrino : Infinito Nero
Philip Venables : The Schmürz
Alejandro Viñao : Hildegard's Dream
Philip Venables : Two Metamorphoses after Britten