Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie

In recent years, the Holland Festival has staged a series of special concerts on location, featuring groundbreaking compositions by the twentieth century avant-garde (Varèse, Xenakis, Cage, Nono en Boulez). This year, we continue this series with a new work by the award-winning Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth (1968), who used to be regarded as something of an enfant terrible in her home country, but since has become widely known across Europe.

In collaboration with the Ensemble intercontemporain, conductor Matthias Pintscher and the electronic music and audio experts from IRCAM in Paris, Neuwirth will acoustically transform de Gashouder into the Church of San Lorenzo in Venice. In this imaginary cathedral, she will take the audience along on a seventy-minute sonic journey through a mysterious archipelago. At 47, Neuwirth cuts a striking figure among the either ancient or deceased men listed above, but she's certainly not out of place in their company. Just like her predecessors, she likes using electronic techniques and acoustic experiments to open up new sounds worlds. Whereas her work usually has political connotations, Le encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie (The Encantadas, or the adventures on the sea of wonders) focuses entirely on the search for new sounds. 

The title of Neuwirth's score is taken from American writer Herman Melville's novella The Encantadas (1854), a collection of ten short philosophical sketches of the Galapagos Islands – also known as Las Encantadas or The Enchanted Isles. Melville depicts the archipelago as a magical, but desolate world; an uninhabited and cruel land, yet at the same time a place full of memories and stories. Neuwirth transfers the story to Venice and its lagoon, with at its centre the church of San Lorenzo, which in 1984 served as the backdrop to the world premiere of Luigi Nono's premiere of Prometeo. As a 15-year old, Neuwirth witnessed this special event. Whereas at the time Nono had a special acoustic space designed by Renzo Piano placed inside the church, Neuwirth has chosen to recreate the church's exceptional acoustics with the use of electronic means.

Le Encantadas is written for six musical ensembles spread across the space, samples and live electronics. The piece is an imaginary journey across five islands, with two intermezzos, a prologue and an epilogue. At the beginning we hear recorded soundscapes of the lagoon, slowly blending with the sounds played by the instrumental ensembles. The sounds depict an imaginary sea voyage from one island to the next. One by one, the islands slowly come into 'view' before disappearing into the distance again. As we near the city, recorded voices become more prominent. As well as Neuwirth's trademark recorded dialogues we can also hear the voice of Hatsune Miku, the Japanese cyber diva who gave a virtual performance in The End at last year's Holland Festival. Mixing recorded and digital voices, Neuwirth creates a surreal, in her own words 'androgynous sound'. Le Encantadas will treat the audience to a scintillating spectacle.