Thomas Azier presents PANORAMA, a live performance combining music and images. The music is interpreted together with synthesist Annelotte Coster, saxophonist Maarten Hogenhuis, and string players Stefan Wellens and Sam Faes.
PANORAMA is a humanist portrait of life on the brink, where illness, desire, fear and hope coexist and quietly shape one another. Created in a time of turmoil, this new work plays with relentless shifts of scale, from the intimate and mundane to the overwhelming landscapes of the mind. The performance forms a polyphonic narrative: a mosaic of different points of view and observations. Poems, field recordings, video projections and performers disrupt the traditional concert structure, giving it a fractured, collage-like character, until a quiet logic emerges. PANORAMA is a collection of perspectives. The voice of a beluga whale, lost and disoriented, swimming upriver through the Seine. An opera singer lamenting from the audience. A man’s silent fall filmed in slow motion. An audio speaker onstage emitting field recordings as if they were relics retrieved from a past world.
A poem about a lonely Parisian boy in a deserted overheated summer city. Often described as poignant, Azier ’s music carries his strong melodic and melancholic sensibility further in PANORAMA, merging string arrangements and experimental practices into a series of intriguing pieces. His voice becomes an interpretative tool, shifting between male and female, human and animal, mythical and real. Songs are juxtaposed with intermissions and character changes that shift rhythm and mood, like switching channels or scrolling through an endless feed.
The performance unfolds seamlessly, music and images rarely overlap but instead relay one another in an ever-shifting dialogue. Across these disparate fragments, Azier and his musicians slowly craft a cohesive final picture, at times monumental, at times very intimate.
