Olga Neuwirth
KLOING!
for and with Marino Formenti
videos by LILLEVAN
performances @
Lucerne Festival, Weimar Pèlerinages, Wien Modern, Festival d’ Automne, Holland Festival, Aldeburgh Festival, Philharmonie Köln a.o.
A Bösendorfer CEUS computer-controlled grand piano is situated at the center of the stage.
The hyper-machine plays mainly seismic data: audified recordings of the
Geodynamic Pendulum in the Grotta Gigante in Trieste.
The flow of music is interspersed with hectic, funny, weird video sequences: abstract images, cartoon fragments,
Tom and Jerry, old virtuoso’s hands and their romantically inspired faces.
Marino Formenti, the live pianist, comes on stage.
His destiny is to struggle to overcome the “mapped” flow of scientific data on the instrument,
whose keys appear to swell and surge like a tsunami.
An utterly arduos, exhausting battle begins between human and machine.
The CEUS obliges Formenti to play the most famous and infamous common places of the Romantic Literature:
Chopin’s Etudes, Liszt’ Rhapsodies, over and over, faster and faster.
The existential battle unfolds at a furious speed right in front of the audiences’ eyes.
marino formenti 