After its world premiere in April 2024 in València by lead commissioner Orquesta de València and SWR Experimentalstudio Freiburg, Inside Metropolis by Elena Mendoza receives its German premiere at ECLAT Festival Stuttgart. On February 6, SWR Symphonieorchester and SWR Experimentalstudio under the baton of Emilio Pomàrico are presenting the work for large orchestra and electronics.
In Inside Metropolis Mendoza uses field recordings from various European cities, such as Valencia, Berlin, Madrid or Vienna, and lets them interact with the orchestral sounds in a collaged form. She is concerned with the spatialization of these sounds throughout the concert hall and the multifaceted relationships between the city sounds and the orchestra.
The poetic idea of this work is based on a short text from Italo Calvino’s “The Invisible Cities”:
“Sometimes a clearing in an immeasurable landscape, a flash of lights in the fog, the dialog of two passers-by meeting in a crowd, is enough for me to imagine that from here I will assemble, piece by piece, the perfect city, built of fragments mixed with the rest, of moments separated by intervals, of signals sent out by one without knowing who receives them. When I tell you that the city to which my journey is dedicated has no continuity in space and time, is sometimes looser and sometimes denser, you must not think that it is possible to stop searching.”
Mendoza uses this excerpt to imagine a city composed by many fragments, that becomes a personal utopian place that you can’t stop looking for. The idea of utopia becomes essential for her survival in our current time, that is marked by many crises.
For more information see ECLAT Festival