Michael Maierhof (De)
Cold Sweat
Friday 14/4/23, 6pm & 8pm
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC CENTRE, FISHAMBLE ST
Duration: 30 mins
PROGRAMME:
Michael Maierhof: Cold Sweat / Kalter Schweiss (2019)*
* Irish Premiere
PERFORMERS:
Daniel Gloger, voice
Steffen Pohl, installation, director
Isabel Osthues, make up action, director
Michael Maierhof, composition, sound, video
The first in Michael Maierhof's series of "home operas" is a 30-minute "micro opera". Each of the works is intended to be performed in domestic spaces, living rooms or public places – at Music Current Festival Cold Sweat will be performed at the Library of the Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin. Currently there are four completed works in the series, each based on a movie of a different genre.
Cold Sweat (Kalter Schweis) is based on the 1970 gangster movie Cold Sweat directed by Terrance Young and starring Charles Bronson, James Mason and Liv Ullmann. The opera focuses on a single scene showing James Mason being shot, threatening the villain with a gun, and protecting Bronson's wife. The action, in keeping with that most enduring of operatic traditions, spotlights Mason's long, slow demise.
Please note the venue for this event is the Contemporary Music Centre, 19 Fishamble Street, and there are two shows: 6pm and 8pm.
"[Maierhof's music] challenges your conception of what music is." [Andrew Johnstone, The Irish Times]
Michael Maierhof is a German composer based in Hamburg. He studied mathematics and music at Kassel, and Art History and Philosophy at Hamburg. Since the early 90s he has written music structured using techniques other than pitch-based organisation.
His composition method involves an extraordinarily wide range of techniques and practices, including: working with instruments, objects, preparations, applications, oscillating systems and motors, and exploring longitudinal wave phenomena on nylon strings, undertones on string instruments, friction on different structured surfaces, activation of instruments and objects by mechanical and sonic motors, plastic materials for constructing new resonance spaces and developing analogue vocoder for wind instruments and the voice.
He has been a guest lecturer at Trinity College in Dublin, Stuttgarter Musikhochschule, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, Mozarteum Salzburg and the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijng, China, the Musikhochschule Freiburg, Germany and in 2015 at the University of Cordoba, Argentina.
Since 2004 he has been the cellist with the improv-trio NORDZUCKER (Hamburg/Berlin) and with the quartet "Stark Bewölkt". He founded of the Association for Contemporary Music, Hamburg (vamh.de), and is co-founder of the stock11 artist network (www.stock11.de ).
