Long Beach Opera Presents STIMMUNG at a Former Long Beach Fresh N'Easy Market in March

Long Beach Opera's season begins March 19-27, 2022, with an operatic staging of Karlheinz Stockhausen's acapella choral work STIMMUNG. This transcendental meditation through music will become a literal feast for the senses in a new production at LBO, directed by Alexander Gedeon with music direction by Fahad Siadat and David Harris. Stockhausen, one of the most important and controversial figures in the sphere of contemporary music in the 20th and 21st century, created STIMMUNG for 6 acapella voices to intone a stream of poly-linguistics: the names of gods from dozens of religions; the days of the week in myriad languages; pure vowel tones; absurd non-sequiturs.

Stockhausen's eerie, static, microtonal vocal score is delivered just above a whisper. LBO's STIMMUNG takes place in a "magical kitchen" in which the audience encircles the six performers at a central table, as the singers prepare and share a meal with the audience over the hour-long duration of the piece. At the culmination of the performance, singers and the audience alike break bread together.

STIMMUNG offers a chance to reflect on the precariousness and vulnerability of human contact - both the joy and newfound awkwardness of coming together. In STIMMUNG, the identities of audience and performer are reassembled through the prism of communion. It becomes a testament to the intrinsic value of live performance, in the shadow of a collective health crisis and cultural upheaval. STIMMUNG becomes a meditational voyage through multiple cultures: a utopian, albeit imperfect, vision of collective consciousness.

STIMMUNG will be performed at a former "Fresh n Easy" grocery store, 450 The Promenade North, Long Beach CA 90802. Season tickets and information is available at longbeachopera.org.

The creative team includes fashion designer Kenneth Nicholson designing costumes, Yuki Izumihara as Production Designer, Pablo Santiago as Lighting Designer and Carlos Mosquera as Sound Designer. The six vocal performers are Kelci Hahn, Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, Kasper, Charlie Kim, David Castillo and Paul An.

Alexander Gedeon describes his interest in creating this production of STIMMUNG:

"As we were thinking about the season for 2022, we were actually in the middle of 2020. And during that time, during the most intense moments of the second wave of the pandemic, we were trying to figure out: what are we going to do if we have the luxury of being able to have people be in person together again? I had been thinking a lot about things that you can theatrically do that you have to do with people in the room. The idea of a connection between the performers and the audience with the sharing of food struck me as inherently dramatic considering we had just learned that the air we breathe had the potential to hurt each other.

And so, as I was thinking about that, I reflected back to this piece STIMMUNG written in 1968, which I first heard when I was a freshman in college in New York. It was winter, and I was seeing my first snow fall. A friend of mine gave me this piece, which is people humming one dominant 7th chord - just this feeling of suspense for 70 minutes. And then they're intoning the names of all of these gods and goddesses and the days of the week in all these different languages, and then random non-sequiturs. It'll be the German word for Wednesday, "Mittwoch", and then suddenly, "Barbershop." There's camp in it. There's ceremony in it. But there's also just this really warm, enveloping, vibrational feeling.

The word 'Stimmung' actually means 'mood', 'atmosphere', 'tuning'. To me, all those words say: vibe; vibration. What is the word for a vibration that also speaks of the atmosphere that you're in? And then it starts to feel like; well, now this is a reason to have people in a room together."

Information about STIMMUNG and season tickets at longbeachopera.org

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