KONTRAKLANG presents the Berlin premiere of Alessandro Bosetti’s music theater Portraits de voix (2021). With this piece, the composer and sound artist draws a polyphonic portrait of a fictional family using decontextualized voices recorded over the course of a summer in Italy. Three female and three male voices represent a total of three generations. The material was dissected and assembled into a palimpsest from which a vocal polyphony emerges. A dense collage of thousands of voice fragments in the midst of an immersive stage set.
The portrayed family of voices lives in a sonic universe somewhere between Renaissance polyphony, microtonal texture and dinner table chatter. The voices have no bodies, each one of them is mother, father, daughter, son, brother and sister of the others. The portraitist and conductor sits in the middle of the audience and is surrounded by the five singers of the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, while the entire space is immersed in a mist of immaterial voices.
Portraits de voix immerses us in seemingly familiar situations that, however, reconfigure themselves again and again. An initially simple intimate situation becomes denser and real dramas play out between the voices: Ties are forged, separations take place, friendships are made, love relationships emerge and pass in fast motion.
Born in Milan in 1973, Alessandro Bosetti is a composer, performer and sound artist who explores the musicality of spoken language, using misunderstandings, translations and interviews as material. His works for voice and electronics blur the boundaries between electroacoustic composition, acoustic writing and performance.
Portraits de voix (2021), music theater
Alessandro Bosetti – composition, musical and artistic direction
Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart
Johanna Vargas – soprano
Truike van der Poel – mezzo
Martin Nagy – tenor
Guillermo Anzorena – baritone
Andreas Fischer – bass
KONTRAKLANG: Alessandro Bosetti – Portraits de voix
5.11.2022 | Doors 19:30 CET | Starts 20:00 CET
Villa Elisabeth | Invalidenstrasse 3in 10115 Berlin
kontraklang.de | Event @ Facebook
