ensemble unitedberlin

Alexandra Filonenko's new musical theater work “LES AUTRES” is aesthetically inspired by 1930s Berlin cabaret and combines historical elements with contemporary music. The work offers a mix of vocal and instrumental numbers as well as spoken and performed texts by Brecht, Müller, Shakespeare, Hendrik Jackson, and others. The content focuses on life in times of upheaval, with references to that period and current social and political crises. Berlin itself, especially its music and singing culture of the 1930s, forms the central setting. Musicians also take on acting roles, creating a multifaceted, grotesquely humorous, and increasingly serious narrative style. Denisov's “Das Blaue Heft” (The Blue Notebook) is a surrealistic musical theater cycle for soprano, ensemble, and narrator. The work describes in an incredibly contemporary way the reality of a system – Soviet at the time – in which people are powerless if they want to survive the machinery of destruction. Vvedensky and Charms founded OBERIU (“Association of Real Art”) in 1927, which was declared subversive and banned by the political leadership in 1930. Both poets suffered repression and imprisonment and, through these specific conditions of survival, were driven to find their own free expression. Edison Denisov's grandson Fedor Rudin will conduct ensembleunited.