Ming Tsao: Die Geisterinsel, Serenade & If Ears Were All That Were Needed

Featuring

Stefan Schreiber
Tajana Raj
Daniel Kluge
Claudio Otelli
Hans Kremer
Stefan Merki

Rei Munakata
Cecilia Vallinder
Seth Josel
Württembergisches Staatsorchester Stuttgart
Orpheus Vokalensemble
Gageego!
Ming Tsao

Did you know?

1/7

Performer Biography

Ensemble Gageego!, a Swedish ensemble, was founded in 1995 to explore new musical forms and perform music in a technically polished, highly artistic manner.

Compositional Technique

Ming Tsao's Serenade incorporates 'Spätklang' – 'the ashes of burned out meanings' – by blending fossilized musical clichés and noise into a 'Strukturklang' to build music from 'toxic stuff' of inherited musical culture.

Performer Biography

The Orpheus Vokalensemble, a professional and international chamber choir, was founded in 2005 and has collaborated with renowned choir masters and orchestras.

Compositional Technique

Ming Tsao's Die Geisterinsel uses speech-like musical lines for singers, echoing Arnold Schönberg's Sprechgesang, but with a different aesthetic that avoids Schönberg's earnest pathos.

Composer's Artistic Vision

Ming Tsao's musical language in Die Geisterinsel is influenced by the filmic aesthetic of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, particularly in contrasting expressive musical gestures and breaking sonic surfaces.

Composition History

Ming Tsao's chamber opera, Die Geisterinsel, was commissioned by the Staatsoper Stuttgart in 2011 and is based on an earlier singspiel of the same title by Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg.

Composer Biography

Ming Tsao, born in 1966, is a Professor of Composition at Göteborg University in Sweden and holds multiple degrees, including a PhD in Music Composition and an MA in Mathematics.