Reviews
But the really big festival experience was Current Resonance, with whom I began this article. The five works on the quartet’s programme - with Hope’s À la carte as the last - seemed incredibly well chosen, and rarely have I experienced such perfectly executed new music. It’s a mystery to me how the ensemble could succeed in activating the entire range of emotions with such a mundane theme as food…I managed to be baffled, irritated, moved, nauseous, overwhelmed. But most importantly, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face after the concert. It was a rollercoaster ride that tickled in all the right places. One rarely gets the chance to enjoy a concert experience like this in Denmark.
Jakob Gustav Winckler on MINU_festival_for_expanded_music 2023 for SEISMOGRAF (Original Article in Danish)
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Similarly, the closing performance of Hope’s “Á la carte” saw the ensemble perform in gender-confounding costumes that refused to settle into a binary as they sat down for dinner, caught in the multilayered subjective realities of the moment. Between incidental sounds of culinary consumption, snippets of big band jazz, sound design, dialogue and noise, Hope had staged and composed the ruptures we live with even when we just share a meal with a friend/lover/enemy/parent/partner/associate and the struggle we feel to keep it all together – all the while questioning if we should. By the end, the stage and the performers were covered in cake and there was a remarkable feeling of levity in the room which is rare in contemporary music festivals.
Macon Holt on MINU_festival_for_expanded_music 2023 for PASSIVE/AGGRESSIVE (Original Article in English)
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Four men in dresses and fishnet tights set a long table. The velvet tablecloth is red, candlesticks are placed on the table. The solemn organ and the detective jazz on the sound system portend an ill fate for the variegated dinner party. Is this their Last Supper?
They have the strangest way of communicating with each other; they don't talk at the table, but furiously write letters with quills and take turns gesturing excessively. There's something Chaplinesque about the pantomime comedy, I think in my bewildered attempt to place the mystery of a work Michael Hope has written for his composer ensemble Current Resonance - the very last piece at MINU festival in Copenhagen. Suddenly the lights go out, a scream resounds from the speakers. A crime has taken place.
Now the lights in the dark auditorium flash with a stamping sound that catches the ensemble red-handed in various incriminating photographs. A smile spreads across my lips. What kind of obscure Cluedo aesthetic are we witnessing? Finally, the ensemble is back at the table and the lighting has changed to the red glow of the darkroom. The strobe-laden finale leaves me with a dizzying doubt as to whether the piece was actually a murder scene that unfolded or the evidence from it. Either way, it was hilarious!
À la carte (2023) ended MINU with a bang. There was something refreshingly brash about the work’s propensity for big theatrical effects, Sherlock Holmes and ribald slapstick humour. A fitting end to a festival where comedic strategies played an enormous role.
Jakob Gustav Winckler on MINU_festival_for_expanded_music 2023 for SEISMOGRAF (Original Article in Danish)
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What’s another common thread to many performances at MINU is their surreal storytelling, which is at its height during À la carte performed by Current Resonance (already known in Poland from Elementi). This international collective, established during study time in Århus, programs its concerts usually around certain topics – and this time it was Michael Hope who assembled pieces on dining, including writing his own. In many moments I felt like [I was] entrapped inside a Buñuel or Lynch movie, with all its claustrophobic atmosphere and nowhere to escape.
Jan Topolski on MINU_festival_for_expanded_music 2023 for GLISSANDO (Original Article in English)
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There used to be a website called 'Cute Overload' where one could experience a full overdose of cute animal photos. Composer-performer Michael Hope has probably spent a bit too much time on there over the years. In his performance NICE FACE he comments on an endless stream of cute animal images, whether it’s an ant, a raccoon, a bumblebee or a cat. He shouts the name of the animal, if google translate is right, in Japanese, and then comments 'Cute'. He gesticulates wildly, accompanied by violent electronic sounds; that too is an aspect of cuteness - 'Cute Aggression' - cute creatures can sometimes be pretty mean…Or like when one eats too many sweets; the hangover comes, the stomach rebels, and isn’t nice about it. I have to admit that I personally have little contact with the conventional kawaii aesthetic; I was a bit too old for the Pokémon hype. But I find it all the more exciting when this kawaii encounters its opposite. When this innocent childishness collides with brutality…
Clemens K. Thomas & Friedemann Dupelius for WDR 3 STUDIO NEUE MUSIK (Original Broadcast in German)
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A conductor has taken off his jacket. He's wearing pink knitted gloves and is in the process of smearing popcorn on his face. The man is in fact performer Michael Hope, a composer who works far from old-fashioned sheet music. Hope explores sound, music and roles in the music world in his performances. I loved his piece about classical concert pianists and the way they mimic the extreme emotions of piano concertos like Rachmaninov's and Tchaikovsky's with their body language while playing. The work was performed earlier this year at the Royal Danish Academy of Music's Pulsar festival. In The Black Diamond on Thursday night, Hope embarked on a new performance; 'How Not to Shout' was the rather cool title, this time inspired by the fact that in a place like the Royal Library, you are expected not to make noise. Hope was on the floor with a conductor's baton and microphone, while doing his best to keep his voice down…he again showed his willingness to expose and poke fun by exploring music as broadly as possible. As sound. Or the absence of sound. But also as stage performance and as everything that is outside of sound in the creation of classical music.
Thomas Michelsen on Klang Festival 2023 for POLITIKEN (Original Article in Danish)
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A totally unfounded fear, as Michael Hope in particular proved over the coming days. A charming cross between Simon Steen-Andersen and Victor Borge, he put comic ingenuity at the top of the festival's agenda…with the performance Born/Again, in which a video illustrated the similarity between piano virtuosos' mimicry and Hollywood renderings of Christ on the cross. Behind the grand piano, Hope himself mimed along after painstakingly donning a tuxedo, before finally - based on the maxim ‘laughter and a tear’ - hitting the keys himself as a touching, romantic virtuoso.
Sune Anderberg for SEISMOGRAF (Original Article in Danish)
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The unexpected collaboration between electronic duo Pamela Angela and performance ensemble Current Resonance, for example, was a highlight. The way the gentle textures of Current Resonance's piano and clarinet weaved in and out of Pamela Angela's extremely synthetic universe of glitching electronics and autotuned vocals was powerful in its slightly uncertain, constantly shifting atmosphere, suggesting that this was not a seamlessly fused assimilation of two very different aesthetics, but rather that the two were interested in exploring the differences between them, drawing each other into the deep end.
Rasmus Weirup on MINU_festival_for_expanded_music 2022 for SEISMOGRAF (Original Article in Danish)