interview

This is the third post in the Play Out series, a collection of profiles on performers, ensembles, and organizations who have chosen non-traditional approaches to classical music performance.

“I just really love classical music!” exclaimed Shasta Ellenbogen, violist and founder of the Classical Music Sunday series at Die Wiesenburg in Berlin. The chamber music series, which takes place every other week in a Wedding-district art space that seems straight out of the ‘90s Berlin squat scene, is her venture to make live classical music a fun and relaxed experience – a nice social evening out – rather than a stressful and judgmental formal occasion.

This is the second post in the Play Out series, a collection of profiles on performers, ensembles, and organizations who have chosen non-traditional approaches to classical music performance.

“The basic motivation in this kind of making theatre is to discover,” David Marton explained to me above the background music and clanging dishes in a Berlin café. David, a Hungarian-born theatre and opera director who trained as a pianist at the UdK and a conductor at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Germany, guides the creation of pieces in which musicians take the stage alongside actors in an attempt to break the actor-musician hierarchy of traditional theatrical genres. He aims to create works of theatre in which music and musicians are central, where “actors also make music and the musicians also play, or they are just characters on the stage like actors.” His pieces have covered a broad range, from reinterpretations of classic operas to a staging of Kerouac’s novel On the Road.

This is the first post in the Play Out series, a collection of profiles on performers, ensembles, and organizations who have chosen non-traditional approaches to classical music performance.

In 2010, Fabricio Mattos cut off his nails – which to a guitarist means ending one’s career. He was living in Italy at the time and had just left a competition where “they did something really bad to me.” (I did not ask him to elaborate.) He was upset, destroyed. Upon returning home, he opened a drawer and found two pieces that had been written for him. Deciding that he could not let the composers down – he couldn’t quit just yet – he instead got to work.