Analogue is piece for camera obscura, amplified string trio and tape written by the British composer Joanna Bailie for the music- and performance ensemble SCENATET, who premiered the piece at SPOR Festival 2011.

Analogue is a music theatre work of sorts and as such it concentrates on the parallels, be they either real, possible, or imaginary, between sound and vision. The basic material for the piece comes from two field recordings that Bailie made and then manipulated electronically. All the music for the trio is derived from the electronic sound. In that sense, Analogue deals with the relationship or parallel between the “real” field recordings and the transcribed music — and the gap that exists between them.

“Eating a Man” [..] was crazy. Spor Festival 2021 did not offer tasty tapas, but went for the main course: The urge to perform spills out of the works being written today, the musicians refuse to be reduced to mediators, and the composers want to be there where it happens”

“Christensen’s music teases the attention rather than demanding it in a big forte fortissimo. Similarly, it was also clear that something important is at stake in Eating a Man. But it was liberatingly unclear whether the gaze is directed at Christensen himself as a form of cathartic self-insight or at a prejudiced and xenophobic outside world.”

“Tonen slogs direkt an i Christian Winther Christensens kammaropera Eating a Man. Denna hade premiär i en första version på Spor 2009 och kretsade då kring en ritual att äta en människa för att på så vis låta denna leva vidare efter sin död. Sedan dess har tonsättaren bildat familj och denna levnadssituation utgjorde i den nya versionen en utvidgad fond där en snabbuppspelning av familjens filmade vardag kring mat- och arbetsbordet ställs mot det sceniska i form av sångerskan Clara Stensgaard, mamman i familjen. Genom denna dubbelexponering skapas en sällsam reflektion kring tid, förgänglighet och kanske uppoffring för den andra eller sin nästa. Allt är tonsatt med Winther Christensens typiska subtila klanger och musikaliska motiv.”

Performers: My Hellgren (vlc), Vicky Wright (cl), Rowland Sutherland (fl), Matias Seibæk (perc), Fei Nie (pno), Kasia Ziminska (vio), Clara Stensgaard (voc)
Composer: Christian Winther Christensen
Staging and direction: Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Video: Christian Winther Christensen and Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Light design: Maria Pi Houmann
Technical Manager: Mette Hornbek Hansen
Performance images: Marc Fluri

The Creative Europe programme of the European Union, Sounds Now, The Danish Arts Foundation, Augustinus Fonden, KODA Cultur and William Demant Fonden.

Chorale was written particularly for SCENATET by one of the ensemble’s recurring collaborators, the Danish composer Christian Winther Christensen – a boundary pushing composer for whom the history of Western classical music is not simply an artifact of the past to be admired from a distance, but rather an ever-evolving tradition that needs to be constantly reckoned with. Chorale, which was premiered at SPOR Festival in 2017, is an example this: In a surreal piece that blurs the lines between real sound and synthetic reproduction and forces the old into conversation with the new, ghostly quotes from Bach are placed in the midst of jagged soundscapes created by percussively played acoustic- and electric guitars.

“There is an element of theatre in the piece, but the experience is a deeply musical one. Amid all the quiet, there is a sudden ecstasy of fumbling, pedaling, and tapping just before the work’s conclusion after which Ensemble Scenatet’s pianist was allowed to suggest the embedded chorale more keenly than before, which he did with a flourish.”

“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.”

Performers: My Hellgren (vlc), Vicky Wright (cl), Rowland Sutherland (fl), Matias Seibæk (perc), Fei Nie (pno), Kasia Ziminska (vio), Clara Stensgaard (voc)
Composer: Christian Winther Christensen
Staging and direction: Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Video: Christian Winther Christensen and Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Light design: Maria Pi Houmann
Technical Manager: Mette Hornbek Hansen
Performance images: Marc Fluri

The Creative Europe programme of the European Union, Sounds Now, The Danish Arts Foundation, Augustinus Fonden, KODA Cultur and William Demant Fonden.

The Concert Walks are an interactive series of concerts combining music, movement, and stories tailored to the unique atmosphere of the specific sites of the walks. Premiered at GEIST Glorup in May 2013, the Concert Walks have taken place in several different locations: the grimy industrial architecture surrounding Astrid Noacks Atelier on the outskirts of Nørrebro, Copenhagen; among the streams, bridges, fishponds, and surprisingly vibrant greenery of the park on the roof of the Warsaw University Library; through the beautiful landscape surrounding Konstepidemin in Gothenburg.

The Concert Walk-concept is developed by Scenatet’s founder and curator Anna Berit Asp Christensen and arranged as walks in which small musical surprises pop up on carefully selected spots in an area. The unique combination of a musical program and a walk creates a new kind of encounter between music and audience. The Concert Walk mix music with its surroundings, creating a completely new and interesting situation in the intersection of art, music, nature and urban environments and cultural heritage.

The Concert Walks are supported by New:Aud and the Culture Programme of the European Union.

“Eating a Man” [..] was crazy. Spor Festival 2021 did not offer tasty tapas, but went for the main course: The urge to perform spills out of the works being written today, the musicians refuse to be reduced to mediators, and the composers want to be there where it happens”

“Christensen’s music teases the attention rather than demanding it in a big forte fortissimo. Similarly, it was also clear that something important is at stake in Eating a Man. But it was liberatingly unclear whether the gaze is directed at Christensen himself as a form of cathartic self-insight or at a prejudiced and xenophobic outside world.”

“Tonen slogs direkt an i Christian Winther Christensens kammaropera Eating a Man. Denna hade premiär i en första version på Spor 2009 och kretsade då kring en ritual att äta en människa för att på så vis låta denna leva vidare efter sin död. Sedan dess har tonsättaren bildat familj och denna levnadssituation utgjorde i den nya versionen en utvidgad fond där en snabbuppspelning av familjens filmade vardag kring mat- och arbetsbordet ställs mot det sceniska i form av sångerskan Clara Stensgaard, mamman i familjen. Genom denna dubbelexponering skapas en sällsam reflektion kring tid, förgänglighet och kanske uppoffring för den andra eller sin nästa. Allt är tonsatt med Winther Christensens typiska subtila klanger och musikaliska motiv.”

Performers: My Hellgren (vlc), Vicky Wright (cl), Rowland Sutherland (fl), Matias Seibæk (perc), Fei Nie (pno), Kasia Ziminska (vio), Clara Stensgaard (voc)
Composer: Christian Winther Christensen
Staging and direction: Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Video: Christian Winther Christensen and Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Light design: Maria Pi Houmann
Technical Manager: Mette Hornbek Hansen
Performance images: Marc Fluri

The Creative Europe programme of the European Union, Sounds Now, The Danish Arts Foundation, Augustinus Fonden, KODA Cultur and William Demant Fonden.

Ephémère enchainé was developed by French composer François Sarhan specifically for the Danish ensemble SCENATET. Described as a theater concert, an installation, an opera, a night, a performance, an experience, a story, an Opera Mundi, a story of a life, a life of thousands of people, a combination of music, voice, video, performances, sound design, an overlay, and a mix of everything together, a Teatro del Mondo, an attempt to find a unity through the chaos, the massive, highly ambitious twelve-hour piece demands of its performer’s a nearly superhuman level of endurance. After its world premiere at SPOR Festival 2015, the piece was praised by music magazine Seismograf, who described it as a revelation.

Throughout the lengthy performance, the audience are free to move sit, stand, lie down, leave, come back, and move around and explore not only the diverse soundscapes ranging from romantic opera to intense funk excursions, aggressive growling, and minimalist impressionism, but also the overwhelmingly elaborate, visually impressive staging consisting of giant, seemingly floating, effigies of fantastic and mythical creatures hanging from the ceiling.

“Wow, a scoop it is for Spor to premiere Ephémère Enchaîné. Wagner must have had a party in the beyond. […] Here was the genius, the one. The uncompromising visionary who spent three weeks to be able to realize what must have been an insane project description. With a musical and scenic excess that could make most others look like … well, whatever you look like when you set the bar lower than extremely high. Je suis un believer, and kudos to the organizers for taking a chance on a French diva.”

Performers: My Hellgren (vlc), Vicky Wright (cl), Rowland Sutherland (fl), Matias Seibæk (perc), Fei Nie (pno), Kasia Ziminska (vio), Clara Stensgaard (voc)
Composer: Christian Winther Christensen
Staging and direction: Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Video: Christian Winther Christensen and Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Light design: Maria Pi Houmann
Technical Manager: Mette Hornbek Hansen
Performance images: Marc Fluri

The Creative Europe programme of the European Union, Sounds Now, The Danish Arts Foundation, Augustinus Fonden, KODA Cultur and William Demant Fonden.

Angel View is a performance piece created by British composer Juliana Hodkinson in collaboration with the music- and performance ensemble Scenatet, who commissioned the work along with SPOR Festival and MaerzMusik/Berliner Festspiele, where the work was premiered in 2014. Described by The Journal of Music as “boundless”, Angel View is an assemblage of urban and musical debris, somewhere between a wordless live radio play, enacted film soundtrack, and instrumental theatre. Made up of over twenty parts, each designed to overlap, the work’s architecture is full of non-sequiturs and arbitrary cross-relations between imagined streets intersecting and running parallel, reflecting the surrealism at the core of everyday life.

In 2018, after having performed the work several times, Scenatet and Hodkinson decided to transform the underlying score and live concert of Angel View into a cinematic work. The resulting film, directed by danish filmmaker Michael Madsen, explores and expands the cinematic and theatrical components that were already at work in the original performance to create a boundary pushing work that manages to be at once humorous and strikingly poetic. The film was premiered in installation format at SPOR Festival 2018.

“Eating a Man” [..] was crazy. Spor Festival 2021 did not offer tasty tapas, but went for the main course: The urge to perform spills out of the works being written today, the musicians refuse to be reduced to mediators, and the composers want to be there where it happens”

“Christensen’s music teases the attention rather than demanding it in a big forte fortissimo. Similarly, it was also clear that something important is at stake in Eating a Man. But it was liberatingly unclear whether the gaze is directed at Christensen himself as a form of cathartic self-insight or at a prejudiced and xenophobic outside world.”

“Tonen slogs direkt an i Christian Winther Christensens kammaropera Eating a Man. Denna hade premiär i en första version på Spor 2009 och kretsade då kring en ritual att äta en människa för att på så vis låta denna leva vidare efter sin död. Sedan dess har tonsättaren bildat familj och denna levnadssituation utgjorde i den nya versionen en utvidgad fond där en snabbuppspelning av familjens filmade vardag kring mat- och arbetsbordet ställs mot det sceniska i form av sångerskan Clara Stensgaard, mamman i familjen. Genom denna dubbelexponering skapas en sällsam reflektion kring tid, förgänglighet och kanske uppoffring för den andra eller sin nästa. Allt är tonsatt med Winther Christensens typiska subtila klanger och musikaliska motiv.”

Performers: My Hellgren (vlc), Vicky Wright (cl), Rowland Sutherland (fl), Matias Seibæk (perc), Fei Nie (pno), Kasia Ziminska (vio), Clara Stensgaard (voc)
Composer: Christian Winther Christensen
Staging and direction: Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Video: Christian Winther Christensen and Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Light design: Maria Pi Houmann
Technical Manager: Mette Hornbek Hansen
Performance images: Marc Fluri

The Creative Europe programme of the European Union, Sounds Now, The Danish Arts Foundation, Augustinus Fonden, KODA Cultur and William Demant Fonden.