Brian Ferneyhough - Opus Contra Naturam (2000) [Score-Video] скачать в хорошем качестве

Brian Ferneyhough - Opus Contra Naturam (2000) [Score-Video]

Brian Ferneyhough - Opus Contra Naturam (2000) 00:00 - I 02:41 - II. Katabasis 13:27 - III. Kataplexy Ian Pace, piano Preface (By Brian Ferneyhough) This piece forms part of my opera project Shadowtime, built around the death of the influential German-Jewish cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin on the Spanish border in 1940. It plays a key role in that work in that it represents the orphic descent of Benjamin’s avatar into the Underworld, through whose portals he is welcomed – to the strains of a series of sclerotically repetitive fanfares – by a Dante-esque gathering of demons and the feral shades of historical figures (some of whom were, at that point, still living). ‘Opus contra naturam’ is a term taken from renaissance alchemy and signifies one of the essential moments of transition/transformation which typify that arcane discipline. The piece itself is to be played by a Liberace-like figure or Joker and is to be accompanied by a silent film projection encompassing the chaotic intersection of scenes from fin-de-siècle Berlin cabaret, medieval labyrinths and images from the hyper-dissimulatory environment of present-day Las Vegas. Formally, the work is composed of a large central body of disordered and clamorous fragments framed by a lyrical Introit and a concluding Processional, both of which latter, in the opera, are accompanied by distorted and superposed plainchant quotations. In keeping with its hallucinatory imagery, the central segment is a piano transcription, commentary and prolongation of an entirely disorderly and prolix body of materials assembled over the space of several months as a form of musical diary or monstrously autonomous memory trace. Apart from rendering it for piano, little has been done to suggest spurious criteria of coherence: given his fascination with the Surrealistically orderly disorder manifest by Parisian passages, I imagine that Benjamin himself would not have been entirely unappreciative of this aesthetic strategy.