Red Bull Makes a Cultural Statement

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Anna Holmstrom, ballet, Berlin, breakdancers, Chicago, Chicago Business Journal, Civic Opera House, dance, demographic, energy drink, Flying Bach, Flying Steps, hip-hop, Lewis Lazare, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Red Bull, Rich Regan

Red Bull Flying Bach

Red Bull is getting artsy. Even though the familiar energy drink has more often marketed itself in association with sports events, the brand is turning its attention to things cultural.

Chicago will get the first and so-far only taste in the United States of a Red Bull project involving music and movement. Called Red Bull Flying Bach (Red Bull is the presenting sponsor), the show is a melding of music by Johann Sebastian Bach with hip-hop music, breakdancing and ballet, and it’s all headed for that most civilized of Chicago performing venues, the Civic Opera House, where the seventy-minute show will play 20-28 June 2014.

Although Chicago will be where the show makes its American debut in 2014, the production has already played successfully in Europe and around the world, including Australia, Iceland, Russia, Chile and Japan.

At the core of the production is the Berlin-based breakdance group Flying Steps. They will be joined for the show’s American debut by Swedish ballerina Anna Holmström – just to add a touch of precision ballet to the prevailing breakdance theme.

A spokesman for the show said it aims to appeal to people in their twenties through their forties, a somewhat younger demographic than typically fills the Civic Opera House for the many Lyric Opera of Chicago productions staged there, and the Civic Opera House couldn’t be happier about the booking during what would otherwise be the slow summer months. “It’s a groundbreaking blend of traditional and contemporary entertainment that will be completely new to Chicago audiences,” predicted Rich Regan, director of facilities at the Civic Opera House.

Perhaps wisely, Red Bull Flying Bach is keeping pricing relatively reasonable – at least compared to grand opera – with tickets ranging from $24 to $88.

Lewis Lazare – Chicago Business Journal

Hagel Stages the St. John Passion at the Berlin Cathedral

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aria, ballet, Berlin, Berlin Cathedral, Berlin Symphony Orchestra, cathedral, choreography, Christoph Hagel, cinema, corps de ballet, dance, Flying Bach, Haydn, Holy Week, Lent, London Symphony Chorus, passion, score, St. John Passion, The Creation, theatre

Following his 2011 production of Haydn’s The Creation, director and conductor Christoph Hagel has returned to the Berlin Cathedral during this year’s Lent and Holy Week to stage Bach’s St. John Passion (BWV 245). In addition to combining theatre with intense spiritual contemplation and contemporary dance with cinematic elements, Hagel is harnessing the spatial effect of the entire cathedral to heighten the depiction of the final days in the life of Jesus.

The St. John Passion is not opera director Hagel’s first attempt to stage Bach’s music. With his world tour of Flying Bach, he has already redefined the boundary between high culture and youth culture. This production is his attempt to make the passion of Jesus of Nazareth accessible to the entire population of twenty-first century Berlin.

Nearly one hundred performers from twelve countries are involved in the production. The large corps de ballet is responsible for the dramatic crowd scenes, while the solo dancers have been given the opportunity to represent the musical and theological content of the contemplative arias. Much of the choreography is by Buczko Martin, a solo dancer at the Berlin State Ballet, and Bach’s score is being performed by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Chorus.

– Berliner Dom und die Staatliche Ballettschule zu Berlin

Bach on a Bösendorfer

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acoustics, András Schiff, Bösendorfer, Busoni, cantabile style, Christoph Hagel, Clavier-Übung I, Flying Bach, Klangideal, organ, organ pipe, partita, Partita in C minor, Passacaglia in C minor, Paul Badura-Skoda, piano, Valentina Lisitsa, Vienna

The enormous Bösendorfer Imperial Grand piano, weighing well over half a ton and measuring 9′-6″ in length and 5′-9″ in width, was first built by the Viennese firm in response to a special request by composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni while he was preparing a transcription of Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor (BWV 582). Busoni found that he required bass notes lower than those available from pianos of the time, so he approached Bösendorfer with the suggestion that they manufacture instruments that could generate the pitch of a thirty-two foot organ pipe. After refining several prototypes, the Bösendorfer Model 290 grand piano entered production in 1900, and it remains one of the few concert grand pianos that features ninety-seven keys capable of generating an eight-octave range of fundamental frequencies as low as 16Hz and as high as 4,186Hz.

It is the singing character of the middle and mid-high ranges of the larger Bösendorfer grands, rather than the extension of the left end of the piano keyboard, that attracts the attention of many interpreters of Bach’s keyboard works. András Schiff and Paul Badura-Skoda have long been proponents of the Bösendorfer Klangideal, and Christoph Hagel now features these instruments in his Flying Bach performances.

Another newcomer to Bach’s works on the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand is Valentina Lisitsa, who offers an online rendition of the Partita in C minor from Clavier-Übung I (BWV 826).

Flying Bach Encores

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b-boy, Bösendorfer, Berlin, breakdancers, breaking, Christoph Hagel, dance, Deutsche Welle, Flying Bach, Flying Steps, German Democratic Republic, Gounod, harpsichord, hip-hop, Konsum Genossenschaft, organ, piano, scenery, subway, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, trafo/Kraftwerk

Breakdancers Flying Steps have returned to trafo/Kraftwerk, a decommissioned power plant in the Mitte section of Berlin, for two additional weeks of performances of Flying Bach, featuring the first six pairs of preludes and fugues from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I (BWV 846-851) and Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565).

The following account, describing the 7 December 2011 opening night performance, originally appeared as a comment to a Boulder Bach Beat post:

As soon as I saw the Deutsche Welle video in September, I knew that I wanted to see Flying Bach when I got to Berlin in December, but it wasn’t until early November that I realized that tickets were sold out and that I would have to wait until I got to Berlin to get one.

Soon after arriving in Berlin and settling into my hosts’ flat in Prenzlauer Berg, I began an online search to find a ticket, but the asking prices for scalped tickets were so high that I decided to show up at the door every night, starting 7 December, until I got lucky.

So that Wednesday I made up a sign in what I imagined was colloquial Denglisch (“suche 1 Ticket”) rather than proper German (“Eine Eintrittskarte wird erwünscht”) and headed out in the rain to the U-Bahn station at Senefelder Platz. Four stops later, after passing below Alexanderplatz, I emerged from the Märkisches Museum station and began walking east, looking all around me for any sign of trafo/Kraftwerk. Well, that certainly proved to be no problem as the former power plant’s huge smokestacks were brightly illuminated, and it crossed my mind if they’d been bathed in red light, rather than blue, they might have inspired the logo for the Konsumgenossenschaft, one of the few outlets for consumer goods in the former German Democratic Republic, that featured a “K” fashioned from a smokestack and a sickle.

Anyway, the crowd was already lining up at 6:30pm because there was no assigned seating and the doors were going to open at 7:00pm for an 8:00pm show. I entered the gate controlling access to the small parking lot, walked to the front of the line, saw that no-one was offering tickets, and realized that my best bet was to return to the gate and stand there emotionlessly with my very powerful sign.

But before I could even get the sign out of my pocket, a man arrived at the gate and asked if I could use an unneeded ticket. I was immediately overcome with a rush of relief as I realized that I was not only going to get to see Flying Bach that very night, but I was also going to be able to pull off my ideal schedule for the remainder of the week.

So, it turns out that this guy’s girlfriend had bought a pair of tickets, but she’d fallen ill and couldn’t go and made him promise that he’d go without her and he’d better “have a good time anyway, dammit.” Well, “Dirk” really had no idea who the Flying Steps were and had, after all, expected his girlfriend to tell him what was going on, so I was happy to step forward and offer to serve as his guide to Bach and whatever else was happening.

Not that I knew anything about hip-hop or breakdancing (Where are my sons when I need them?), but I hoped that I’d watched at least enough YouTube and read enough Wikipedia to not be entirely clueless about the urban arts. However, that really never became an issue it was the scene inside the old industrial building that I, a habitué of formal concerts, was totally unprepared for.

As soon as the doors were opened, the crowd began to surge behind us, and we found ourselves scrambling up fantastic staircases as painted scenes from the Flying Bach tour flashed by. We climbed up and up without stopping, the air warming as we got higher and higher, crazy beams and columns grabbed at us from every side, overhead rolling cranes threatened our scalps, until we finally reached a peaceful cross aisle separating banks of audience seating. We grabbed two seats at the end of the last row at the top of the first seating section and immediately realized that our sightlines to the performance platform were going to be perfect.

A Bösendorfer Imperial Grand stretched across the left side of the stage, a two-manualed harpsichord stood to the right, crystal chandeliers were suspended above both, but other than that, the raw concrete of the found space was to serve as the scenery.

An hour quickly passed in conversation. I learned how Dirk’s family had emigrated from the East to the West, how his mom immediately fled for the US, forcing his dad and him to move back to the East, how it had felt to have had the rug pulled out from under him when the two Germanys were unified, how he was barely eking out a living as an actor in television commercials.

Pretty much overwhelmed by all of this, all I remember lamely offering to Dirk in return was, “Look, that piano is Viennese and has extra keys at the bass end!” and “Did you learn to play a musical instrument as a youth?”

Suddenly the architectural lighting dimmed, a spotlight gripped the grand piano, Christoph Hagel began to play the C Major Prelude, and I began to strangely sense that, somehow, the entire audience was being called together into some kind of communal consciousness. Some of us were being transported back into our childhood, either hating those hours of piano practice or fondly remembering how we would wallow in the bass line, grooving on the sequence of dissonances resolving into consonances. Others of us were reliving personal hells as we could not force from our heads past images of untalented church sopranos singing Gounod’s “Ave Maria.” But I think that, for most of us, we were being transfigured by something fundamental that we knew to be, deep in our hearts, whoever we were, wherever we’d come from,

German culture: The music of J. S. Bach.

And then the spell was broken, and we were plunged headlong into a fugue.

Motion. Lights. Performers. Patterns. Another prelude. (What’s this, a plot?) Competitions. Freezes. (How do they do that?) Another fugue, this time on the harpsichord. A roll of cloth becomes a projection surface. Distinct characters emerge. (Wow, that guy is STRONG!) Alternating preludes and fugues. Some portions of the music are now electronic beats. Micro-rhythms. Tiny gestures. (Oh my God, I think I am actually “seeing” a fugue!) Boy-girl conflicts. (She is so cute!) Hurt feelings. Promises. (Resolutions?) No, more projected images. Lights are flashing. Now all of the music is electronic. (I think my head is inside the world’s largest, loudest pipe organ.) It’s the Toccata and Fugue in D minor. (This is way better than Fantasia!)

And then it was over.

On to our feet. Applause. The crowd crushes towards the stairways. I say “so long” to Dirk, but there’s no time to hear what he thought of it. Back down the stairs. (No, I don’t want to buy a 50 Euro hoodie.) Through the gate. Back into the quiet side streets.

Head swirling. Heart pounding.

Flying Bach was one of the most exciting performances I’ve ever been to in my entire life.

St. Petersburg by Day and Night

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Andrew Efimov, b-boy, Berlin, breakdancers, breaking, Flying Bach, Flying Steps, hip-hop, Igor Zalivalov, Nuage, Sofia Bridge, St. Petersburg, The Well-Tempered Clavier

Click here for dramatic images of St. Petersburg, Russia accompanied by the C minor Prelude from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 847), the same work that inspired Berlin breakdancers Flying Steps to create their sensational Flying Bach.

The time-lapse photography was compiled by Andrew Efimov, with Igor Zalivalov and Sofia Bridge appearing together as the violin duo “Nuage.”

Flying Bach Sold Out in Berlin

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b-boy, Bachfest Leipzig, Berlin, breakdancers, breaking, Christoph Hagel, dance, Eurovision Song Contest, Flying Bach, Flying Steps, hip-hop, piano, The Well-Tempered Clavier, trafo/Kraftwerk, Yui Kawaguchi

Watch Flying Bach video

All tickets to the December performances of Flying Bach were sold out within minutes after going on sale in October.

Returning home after the first half of a European tour, the b-boy crew Flying Steps, holders of Battle of the Year and Red Bull Beat Battle trophies, are busting their moves to the first six pairs of preludes and fugues from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-851) and Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565) at trafo/Kraftwerk, a decommissioned power plant in the Mitte section of Berlin.

Noting that breaking need not be restricted to hip-hop music as long as basic musical conditions, including tempo and rhythmic patterns, are met, Christoph Hagel, the group’s artistic director and pianist, said, “We chose Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier over the works of other classical composers for three reasons. First, the fresh­ness of the music, which corresponds to the freshness of breakdancing. Second, the ability of breakdancers to dance short note-values, little motifs and clear structures. Third, the ability to give every dancer one voice of a fugue and to make the structure of a fugue visible.”

Hagel says there was no need to fundamentally alter the music to suit the urban dance form. “For the most part, we play Bach’s music on piano and harpsichord. Only a small portion of the music was transformed into electronic beats, mostly without changing the notes.” He stressed, though, that it was critical to add Yui Kawaguchi in the mix. “It was very important for us to include a contemporary dancer, in order to show the contrast between urban and contemporary dance.”

Flying Bach, which was featured earlier this year at the Eurovision Song Contest and the Bachfest Leipzig, continues its Berlin run through 30 December 2011.