All ears

Music by Luciano Berio, own compositions and story by Italo Calvino

within the framework of the KLANGBRÜCKEN 2025 Festival,
as part of the concert series „Musiklabor-ZwischenWelten 2025“

Over the course of 44 years, the Italian composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003) created a cycle of works that expands the boundaries of music: 14 „Sequenzas“ for solo instruments.

We presented four of them - Sequenza IV for piano, Sequenza VII for soprano, saxophone, Sequenza VIII for violin and Sequenza III for soprano - at the Klangbrücken festival in a new musical-literary collage.

Our idea:

The Ensemble Megaphon combined four sequences by Luciano Berio, live electronic intermezzi and their own compositions with the story “Ein König horcht” by Italo Calvino in an acoustic collage. Both works - Berio's sequences and Calvino's story - deal with listening as a central theme. The audience was given eye masks at the beginning of the concert and invited to experience the concert exclusively in the dark.

Listening experience in the dark

In this concert, everything revolved around the perception of the world through hearing alone: In Calvino's story, the king tries to grasp the whole world around him by listening.

Like the king's throne in the story, the piano stood in the centre of the room and the audience sat around it. We expanded and enriched the narrative and emotional dimension of the text with live electronic interludes.

The musicians played distributed around the room, between the audience members. Selected text passages by Calvino were played, recorded by Tayfun Bademsoy and/or spoken live by the singer Sophia Körber.

Cast

Tatjana Prelevic, piano, composition
Lenka Župková, violin, composition
Sophia Körber, vocals, voice
Vlady Bystrov, oboe
Andre Bartetzki, live electronics, composition
Tayfun Bademsoy, voice

Programme

Lenka Zupkova Klangfolgend UA (2025) inspired by Sequenza VIII. for violin
Luciano Berio Sequenza VII for soprano saxophone
Luciano Berio Sequenza III for soprano
Tatjana Prelevic Klangdoskop UA (2025) for Ensemble Megaphon (UA)
Excerpts from the story "A King Listens" by Italo Calvino
Live electronic and literary intermezzi

Copyright

A king listens
From: Italo Calvino, Under the Jaguar Sun. Three stories
Translated from the Italian by Burkhart Kroeber
© of the German translation:
1987 Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Munich