Helena Rasker News
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2024-03-29
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2019-03-06 22:50:00
George Benjamin Ensemble Modern Into the Little Hill
Ensemble Modern George Benjamin and Ensemble Modern at the Wigmore Hall with Anu Komsi and Helena Rasker in Benjamin's Into The Little Hill. There have been many George Benjamin Days at the Wigmore Hall (also featuring this piece) and Ensemble Modern are welcome regulars in London But this was a historic occasion since Benjamin's Into the Little Hill was for Ensemble Modern, who gave the world premiere in Frankfurt in November 2006, conducted by Franck Ollu, with Anu Komsi and Hilary Summers. For me, the highlight was hearing Anu Komsi singing it live. Though other singers, have done the part well, Komsi is much more than just a singer. She's a phenomenom, a true coloratura with an unusually wide range and the agility to use her voice in the service of Benjamin's fiendishly tricky score, where extreme changes of register and technique continuously contort and challenge. That, in esssence, is […]
2019-03-06 16:18:00
Wigmore Hall Cathy Milliken: Bright Ring (UK premiere) Christian Mason: Layers of Love Dallapiccola: Piccola musica notturna Benjamin: Into the Little Hill Anu Komsi (soprano) Helena Rasker (contralto)Ensemble Modern George Benjamin (conductor) This week, the Wigmore Hall presents two concerts from George Benjamin and Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern, the first ‘at home’ on Wigmore Street, the second moving north to Camden’s Roundhouse. For the first, we heard Benjamin’s now classic first opera, Into the Little Hill, prefaced by three ensemble works by Cathy Milliken, Christian Mason, and, for the evening’s spot of ‘early music’, Luigi Dallapiccola. An Ensemble Modern commission, here receiving its United Kingdom premiere, Milliken’s Bright Ring spoke, to quote the composer, of ‘fields of energy that I perceived whilst performing with the Ensemble Modern,’ an energy ‘of collaboration and interaction, whether pulsing or still […]
Royal Opera House (The Guardian)
2015-11-15 16:01:34
Royal Opera House, London Superb performances and expert conducting can’t disguise the dramatic weakness in Georg Friedrich Haas’s new opera “Morgen und Abend is the struggle of Johannes into and out of life.” This is all we are given as a programme synopsis for Georg Friedrich Haas’s new opera, an immensely serious, essentially religious work that deals with birth and dying as the only absolute certainties of the human condition. We watch the beginning and end of a life, but not its course. The fisherman Olai (actor Klaus Maria Brandauer) waits for his son Johannes to be born. Later, Johannes himself (baritone Christoph Pohl), also a fisherman, is conducted to the afterlife by those who preceded him – his wife Erna (Helena Rasker), and his friend Peter (Will Hartmann) – leaving his daughter Signe (Sarah Wegener) to grieve alone. Continue reading...
2015-11-14 07:26:00
Invisible Theatre made visible : Morgen und Abend Haas ROH
[…] Pohl). He sings about Signe, the name of his mother, who long ago gave him birth, and also the name of his youngest daughter, a symmetry that suggests continuty and subtle change, reflected in the understated but complex instrumentation. Johannes notices that his body doesn't ache as it did before. He feels a strange weightlessness, and objects seem to float in light. Things haven't been the same since Erna, his wife (Helena Rasker), died. Yet he sees her, and she sings. His old friend Peter (Will Hartmann) appears. Why is Peter's hair so long? Why is he so grey? "Let me cut your hair for you" sings Johannes, "like we did 50 years ago". "You can't" sings Peter. Johannes wants to sail again as he used to. "When the sea as still and calm as this", he sings, "I could sail out far […]