Introduction

Featuring Redux Orchestra

Space by Tino Sehgal

The musical-spatial composition for 14 musicians SYMPHONY X challenges the concert format, which has remained virtually unchanged over centuries despite music's evolvement. Ari Benjamin Meyers and Tino Sehgal create a "choreographed space", as dynamic as the music itself, which allows the audience to move freely and experience the musicians from different perspectives and positions. In this very physical 75-minute work, compositional procedures influenced by composers such as Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham meet elements from post punk, minimalism and contemporary music. Musical situations at a steady 120bpm are exposed to a permanent web of construction and deconstruction, leading the audience's expectations astray.

The work is in four connected parts. 14 musicians begin seated throughout the space with the conductor, Ari Benjamin Meyers, in the middle. The audience is free to roam amongst the musicians. Of course they are also free to sit, lie down, run around, or dance. In the final part the conductor is no longer in the middle but at the outer end, it is not clear if he is conducting the musicians or the audience, the division between the two groups having been blurred during the performance and now almost completely erased by the darkness in which the piece ends.