Haselböck, Nakayama & Orchester Wiener Akademie: More light!

International Brucknerfest Linz 2025. The Japanese artist Akiko Nakayama creates a multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk between music and painting to works by Franz Liszt and a commissioned composition by Judit Varga.

"More light!" - these were supposedly the last words of the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, on whose two-part tragedy Faust Franz Liszt's Faust Symphony premiered in 1857 on the occasion of the erection of the Goethe-Schiller monument in Weimar. The three character portraits in the composition for orchestra, tenor and male choir are each dedicated to one of the three main characters in the drama: Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles.

The 'prologue' to this work is the world premiere of a commissioned composition by Judit Varga. The evening's high-calibre cast includes not only the Wiener Akademie Orchestra, the Chorus Viennensis and tenor Sebastian Kohlhepp under the direction of Liszt expert Martin Haselböck: a very special soloist is the Japanese painter and performance artist Akiko Nakayama, who uses her technique of live painting to 'translate' the orchestral sound into pictures live on the large screen, creating a multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk between music and painting.