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...in case someone's interested, I just returned home from Berlin last night, having had another workshop with the baritone Thomas Florio, who's written the libretto to Farmer George , a new monodrama to be paired with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's avantgarde cult classic Eight Songs for a Mad King , the latter having always been very difficult to pair with anything because of its extreme extremity as vocal theatre.

You know, old George wasn't always mad, and we started wondering what happened before he lost his sanity (and a major colony across the pond). Over the gone winter, we did a lot of research and forged the idea, had a workshop in Helsinki, and Thomas wrote the libretto. From there on it were professionally the most hectic three months of my life, as I had to squeeze out the music. The line-up is the same as in Mad King (a singer who doesn't sing but screams, gargles, snorts, grunts, yodels, cries etc., and a sextet of players). Oh boy how many 12-14 hour days I sat in my study... I finished the work one and half hours before the midnight deadline a fortnight ago. 😓

Now everything is ready, except that there's the minor matter of the world premiere... and of all possible, it'll take place at the Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria on 19th of July. The Bregenz festival is one of the absolutely major opera festivals in the world, and this is a totally new level to me. Starting in Bregenz sets the standard for possible later performances. Oh what a luxury problem... 😏

Farmer George and the Mad King

If you happen to plan a holiday near the Alps, and want to get a ticket, be quick, there are not many left.