Reviews

Between 6 – 8 June, SCENATET presented Salvatore Sciarrino‘s compelling masterpiece Aspern Suite at four performances at the Copenhagen festival KLANG, and already after the first performance and premiere on 6 June, the Danish newspaper Politiken featured a review full of amazement:

“KLANG Festival ended with an insanely beautiful combination of desperate bel canto in slowmotion and delicate, transparent sounds.” (Politiken, 08.06.18)

The online music magazine Seismograf also took place in the excited audience, and reviewed the staged performance, among others saying:

“SCENATETt’s lighting, video art and misty, watery darkness linked arms with the quietly melodramatic atmosphere on which Aspern’s events gain import and implication, and through which we might begin to imagine what they mean.” (Seismograf, 12.06.18)

Read the whole of Politiken’s review here (in Danish, for subscribers), and Seismograf’s review here.

The performance was documented by KLANG Festival and photographer Alexander Banck-Petersen, and to see a selection of images, visit the FACTS AND PHOTOS page here.

Photo: KLANG / Alexander Banck-Petersen

With a great interest from both the audience of Jutland and a large number of Danish as well as international music journalists and editors, SCENATET took the stage at the SPOR festival in Aarhus with Niels Rønsholdt‘s appraised opera experiment, Gaze for Gaze. Together with a new choir and new performers from Denmark and abroad, SCENATET led the curious and anticipatory audience into Rønsholdt’s love-blown darkness with great conviction and musical integrity.

Among others, the theatre blog ISCENE and the music magazine Seismograf were part of the enthusiastic circle of the audience, really encaptured by the contrasts, the contradictory feelings, and the audience’s role in the plot.

“It was unpleasant and strenuous for the eyes to change from dark to light, and it was nerve-racking with the firecrackers banging right behind us. The senses were at stake and in the utmost preparedness. Just like in the first act, where you constantly waited with much tension for a hand on your shoulder. It was surely not pleasant all the way through, maybe quite as it feels to be in the complicated love relationship the opera was about? (ISCENE, 16.05.18)”

Read the whole of ISCENE’s reportage from Gaze for Gaze here, and Seismograf’s review here.

Photo: Maia Meier Duus

On March 14th SCENATET and the American avantgarde ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse, played a common concert at Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen as part of CPH:DOX‘s audio-visual concert programme – performing both pieces by members of Ensemble Pamplemousse, composer Christian Winther Christensen and sound artist Cathy van Eck. Ahead of the concert, promises of a playfulness and exploration of new musical spheres were made, and according to the magazine Seismograf who were among the audience, SCENATET and Ensemble Pamplemousse fully lived up to this.

In their concert review, among other things, Seismograf writes:

“SCENATET invited the closely related Ensemble Pamplemousse for a concert in Copenhagen, and the result became a close study of stylized fun and rampant playfulness as well as a short introduction to the verbal universe of the American president […] A refreshing and confrontational concert, you would wish there were more of”.

Read the full review (in Danish) right here.

“SCENATET’s dedication to every aspect of performance is what makes them a superlative new music ensemble. Both the interpretation of the music and the overall visual aesthetic of the performance made for an engaging evening that challenged expectations of the everyday and allowed the audience to extrapolate the extraordinary from the ordinary.”

The online new music blog I Care f You Listen visited SCENATET’s concert at SPOR festival in Aarhus and sends big a applause. The concert took place at Godsbanen Aabne Scene 12th May and the program was as follows:

Christian Winther Christensen, Chorale, 2017 (Danish Premiere)
Matthew Rogers, Weep at the Elastic as it Stretches: an adaptation of N.F. Simpson’s Prayer, 2017 (Danish Premiere)
Jagoda Szmytka, sky-me, type-me, 2011

Read the full review here!

Photo: Frederikke Hoeijmans

The Danish newspaper Politiken and the online music journal Seismograf took part of the performance of Blik for Blik at Pakhus11 and the radio program AK 24/7 talked to Niels Rønsholdt about his work.

The critic from Seismograf, Mathias Monrad Møller, describes his experience this way:
“We are pretty excited, actually. It has been an utterly unique, intimate and fascinating experience. Rønsholdt and his team have taken a lot of risks by breaking with common formats and by letting the audience become such a big part of the piece. It is especially the well thought-through and unusually creative experimentations with musical theatre that makes ‘Blik for Blik’ such a special experience.”
Read the full review here: Forskellige virkeligheder (Seimograf 23.03.2017 – in Danish)

Politiken’s Henrik Friis gave Blik for Blik 5 out of 6 hearts with the words:
“I left the performance hall with a mixture of amazement and enthusiasm. ‘Blik for Blik’ was truly different and succesfull. Maybe like a slow meditative mix of traditional Japanese noh-theatre, great Danish circle pedagogy – where everyone has to sing along – and curious minimalistic avant-garde”

In the same article, Friis also reviewed the new opera app Breathless Moment by Rønsholdt & Kleist. It received 4 out of 6 hearts.
Read the review here: Smuk operapatos til gør det selv-folket (Politiken 20.03.2017 – in Danish).

March 18^th Niels Rønsholdt was a guest in the culture program AK 24/7 on Radio 24/7. In the program Rønsholdts earlier piece Me Quitte is the main focus of the conversation. Me Quitte was recorded by SCENATET, Niels Rønsholdt and the singer Anna Katrin Øssursdóttir Egilstrøð and released in May 2016.
Listen to the program here: Ugens Sølvkorn: Bøgers lugt, stilleleg og baglæns opera
(Ak 24/7 18.03.2017 – in Danish).

Photo: Marc Fluri