ECLAT Konzert 8

Günter Steinke: The Sandman
Scene for speaker and seven musicians after a text by E.T.A. Hoffmann (2021) ^WP

Ensemble Ascolta
Markus Schwind, trumpet/Andrew Digby, trombone/Erik Borgir, cello/Florian Hoelscher, piano/Hubert Steiner, electric guitar/Boris Müller, percussion/Julian Belli, drums

Gerhard Mohr, speaker
Conductor Nicholas Kok

Broadcast on SWR2 JetztMusik on 10.3.2021, 11:03 p.m.

Fascinated by how E.T.A. Hoffmann confronts all the protagonists with the »uncanny« in his black-romantic art fairy tale »The Sandman«, Günter Steinke wrote the scene of the same name, set for narrators and seven musicians. At the centre of Steinke’s musical psychodrama, as in Hoffmann, is the figure of Nathanael, who tells his fiancée Clara in a letter the cruel and uncanny story about the alchemical experiments of his father and the lawyer Coppelius. Clara, in turn, analyses Nathanael’s fears clairvoyantly in a letter. And last but not least, the music automaton Olimpia makes an appearance, with whom Nathaniel is supposed to fall hopelessly in love.–Similarities to Siri and Alexa as well as to other contemporary psychological sensitivities are intentional on Günter Steinke’s part. Ultimately, it is Nathanael’s ambivalent love for »an apparently beautiful and seductive automaton« that has set Steinke’s musical fantasy in motion.