David Ogborn's Transatlantic Transient Tour

One of the highlights of the 2006 running of the Tapestry New Opera Works Composer/Librettist Laboratory was David Ogborn's unconventional Laszer vs. Stryker, in which a metal/electronica-flavored soundtrack highlighted the work's opening fight scene. Ogborn will be composing two operas for next February's Opera To Go: Peace of my Heart (with librettist David Carley) and The Translator (with Leanna Brodie), both of which begin their musical workshop process a week from now.

You can catch David in performance this November in case you happen to live in one of the cities of his Transatlantic Transient tour, which opened in Belfast last night at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, continues in Amsterdam's Karnatic Lab on November 13, theaterkapell in Berlin on November 14, Hamilton's James Street North on November 30, and wraps up in Toronto on December 2 at Tapestry New Opera Works' Ernest Balmer Studio.

From davidogborn.net:

On the programme are new remixes and diffusions of 3 soundscape pieces composed by Ogborn in 2005, the year of his last trans-Atlantic sojourn: via Sammartini (based on recordings from Milan), Rio della croce (based on recordings from the island of Giudecca in Venice) and Second Nature (with recordings from Toronto's Tommy Thompson Park). On the menu at every stop of the Transatlantic Transient tour are selections from the Street Songs, flexible improvisatory works for live instrumentalists and electronics, each one a sonic reflection of the international protests against the invasion of Iraq.

In Hamilton and Toronto, Mueller-Heaslip will perform the fifth Street Song as well as In Memoriam STS-107, memorializing the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in early 2003. Mueller-Heaslip will also inject Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag's stunning Josef-Attila Fragments for solo voice and selections from R. Murray Schafer's Princess of the Stars...Rounding out the programme is a series of live electronic improvisations on a physically distorted (missing the D string and the high E string) but electronically-augmented (via microphones and a laptop) classical guitar – a preview of some of the material Ogborn will be performing in the Opera On The Rocks project, a full-length ambient opera premiering January 6-7 2008 in Toronto.

If you want to catch the Toronto show, you should probably grab your tickets ahead of time through David's PayPal link, as the event may sell out (which has been the case with all Tapestry events so far this season).