In just over a month, the Vienna State Ballet premieres Goldberg-Variationen, by Swiss choreographer Heinz Spoerli, at the Vienna State Opera.
Set to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, this 1993 work is
a dance drama built out of music-making with the body about human beings, their joys and fears, loneliness and desires, allegiances and quarrels, youth and age.
The Vienna State Ballet presents the 80-minute piece in a newly adapted stage design by Florian Etti and a new costume design created by Spoerli himself. Pianist William Youn will accompany the dancers playing one of Bach’s most challenging compositions.
Vienna State Ballet Premieres Goldberg-Variationen & Tabula Rasa
The double-bill is made complete by another company first: Ohad Naharin’s Tabula Rasa, originally created for Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre in 1986.
Arvo Pärt’s music of the same name provides the inspiration for Naharin’s ballet,
a work of the highest concentration and reduction to the essential, an exploration of the self and the body as a touching kinetic-meditative experience.
The two solo violinists, concert master Yamen Saadi and Raimund Lissy, and the rest of the orchestra will be directed by Christoph Koncz, principal violinist of the Vienna Philharmonic. This will be Koncz’s first engagement as conductor for the Vienna State Opera Orchestra.
Heinz Spoerli’s Goldberg-Variationen will be available to livestream free of charge for 72 hours at play.wiener-staatsoper.at.
Featured Photo for Vienna State Ballet Premieres Goldberg Variationen by ©Florian Moshammer.
