Christian Muthspiel and Orjazztra Vienna

Christoph Ransmayr: La Melodia della Strada

An enthusiastic cinema audience that sways to the rhythm of a light show in the dark - and then jumps up from the rows of folding chairs and storms into the street to celebrate the first snow...

A good-natured, bony fool who escapes from the prison guards into the crown of a plane tree and screams desperately from on high into the summer afternoon: I want a woman! Again and again: I want a woman!, and who, shortly before sunset, is relentlessly led back to his loneliness via a wooden ladder by a dwarf in a nun's habit...

And finally the village beauty, Gradisca, admiring her from the alleys and windows! is sighed after, Gradisca!, who dominates men's dreams in her tight costumes and finally leaves all her suitors to transform herself into the wife of a police officer from the city...

Did we actually see the swirling snow in the alley in front of the cinema, the lonely one in the treetop or the unattainable beauty and dream of snow - or were alleys and fields, an entire village and its inhabitants blown into existence once again - on clarinets, tenor, and alto saxophones, trumpets, trombones and a flugelhorn, struck, bowed, plucked on the strings of a double bass, a piano, the heads and cymbals of a drum kit or by another of the many voices of Orjazztra Vienna?

Anyone who allows themselves to be cocooned by this orchestra in a dense cocoon of melodies, in a Melodia della Strada, will encounter such and other never-seen images and dream figures on a road that leads from close proximity into the vastness, from the straw of midsummer Fields into the first snow or into the clear light of memory, but in any case in a straight line and without barriers or barriers into your own heart.

Program and cast

Stephanie Schoiswohl, Patrick Dunst, Yvonne Moriel,
 Robert Unterköfler, Ilse Riedler, Florian Bauer: saxophones, clarinets, flutes

Gerhard Ornig, Simon Plötzeneder, Dominik Fuss: trumpets, fluegelhorn
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Daniel Holzleitner, Karel Eriksson, Matthias Bernsteiner: trombones

Viola Hammer: piano
Judith Ferstl, Marc Mezgolits: bass

Marton Juhasz, Sebastian Simsa: drums

Christian Muthspiel: compositions, leader