In this piece, which lasts a good 40 minutes, the orchestra moves from daytime consciousness into the night and emerges again transformed. In the first part, conducted by Hug, the pictorial and sculptural Son-Icons and their musical transformations are expressed in sound. Then the musicians of the orchestra and the audience are plunged into darkness. The conductor steps away, the central perspective dissolves and the musicians interact individually with the Son-Icons in their nocturnal colours. These appear modified and animated in the form of a video score which stretches above the orchestra and the audience like a canopy. In the last part, the conductor reappears and takes up the nocturnal, partly improvised fragments of the middle section. In this last part, with the Son-Icons changed spatially, temporally and in the lighting, a live remix of the video recording intervenes interactively in the visual and musical events. The musicians now have two stimuli giving rise to forms: the video score and the conductor. In this charged arena, the individual creative possibilities of the musicians come together in a collective, transformed, orchestral organism.

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Live video animation and remix: Götz Rogge, music direction Wolfgang Siuda, light rhythms Christa Wenger Blendwerk, dramaturgy and production Mark Sattler.
Thanks to Pro Helvetia and the Lucerne Festival for the commissioning of Nachtplasmen.