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- Josefine Opsahl
Hjem (2023)
- Edition Wilhelm Hansen Copenhagen (World)
- s.ms.t.b.vc.electronics
- SATB
- s.ms.t.b
- 1 hr 45 min
- Stine Rejnholdt
- Danish
Programme Note
Loneliness has many faces, living next door to each other. The opera HJEM takes the essence of loneliness and leads it slowly and lovingly further into the light towards community. You can look forward to a surprising, genre-bending and deeply humanistic opera experience.
HJEM is a site-specific opera, created with and within Porten, the former Vridsløselille State Prison. Here, the walls and long corridors are full of stories of loss and desperation. The opera occupies the abandoned building with the beautiful, dissonant sounds of a lone cello, in an encounter with both intimately personal and primal singing voices. In a prison walk, the audience will have the opportunity to feel the pain of loneliness and the power of community as a giant Choir of Loneliness leads the audience through the empty corridors.
HJEM creates authentic and intimate encounters between audience and performers as poet Stine Rejnholdt's libretto gives voice to real people's fragmented and hidden stories of loneliness.
In the 160-year-old state prison, this opera invites the audience deep into loneliness, while the encounter in music offers hope for a way out.
Media
Scores
Reviews
★★★★★★ Opsahl's fierce will and belief in that which has not yet been created yet, gives the composer an invaluable head start when boundaries have to be crossed. So when librettist Stine Rejnholdt sets out to describe the taboo of loneliness, it is obvious to let Josefine Opsahl create the universe of tones that must contain the words about loneliness.
★★★★★ The great talent Josefine Opsahl - herself an award-winning cellist - has created a work whose primary musical tones are deep and dark, but full of life and hope from the powerful voices.
★★★★ Josefine Opsahl is an outstanding opera composer. Her dark-sounding minor universe was not only atmospheric, it also commented on the emotional outbursts of the individual characters through the use of complex harmonics mixed with virtuosic passages from the lone cello. The cello was the only live musician who created life and fullness with electronics, and often formed an entire orchestra.
★★★★★ The sadness and the isolation and the loneliness. are eminently portrayed by the singers, the choir and the cello with some electronic layers of sound – all conceived and composed by Josefine Opsahl.
Josefine Opsahl, who played at the Roskilde Festival and Arena Berlin this summer, has created a very strong work – a modern opera that not only seems relevant, but which practically crawls under the skin of the audience, who silently and without continuous applause, follows.
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ It is a huge taboo, which the cello personality and composer Josefine Opsahl tackles with in her opera performance 'Hjem'. The taboo is loneliness. And because of her fearless approach, the project succeeds.
More Info
- Premieres at Copenhagen Opera Festival 2023
- 12th July 2023
- Copenhagen Opera Festival presents the world premiere of Josefine Opsahl's 'Hjem', Birgit Tengberg's documentary about Alenius' opera 'Manualen' and a concert with music by rediscovered composer Leopold van der Pals.