Sabina Meyer - Project Xanto - Ninfa in lamento

Sabina Meyer is a singer of Swiss and Italian origins who has made cross-cultural references a key issue in her approach to performing music of the most diverse kind. Contemporary classical music, antique arias, and new European free improvisation blend seamlessly in a musical soundscape of her own invention.

The multimedia project XANTO Ninfa in Lamento crystalizes the magic aura of the Lament and explores its internal dynamics, distanced from its manipulative qualities. In the Lament the vital idea of immortality, as human desire and aspiration distilled through internal contrasts and brought back to its timelessness, is absolute.

XANTO Ninfa in Lamento takes its cue form the the terrifying and voluptuous world of sixteenth century music theater, but differs in its interdisciplinary transfiguration, which has, as language and media, the analogue (body, voice and movement) and the digital (light design and electronic music).

Baroque and contemporary music interact. The laments of Monteverdi, Strozzi and Purcell are woven with the alienating compositions of Scelsi and held toghether with electro-acoustic sublimations that give voice to the intimate thoughts imbedded in the texts. To add to the rigor of the interpretation in a traditional style a touch of the contemporary. The relational qualities between the different scenic languages (acoustic music, voice of the soprano, electronics and the interaction with video, light design, costume, text and performance) is condensed in an ecstatic music theater that transfigures a mimetic of the sixteenth century into a mimetic of the contemporary. The electronic sounds are used in constant dialogue with the voice and instruments and takes shape as an active part of the performance: as agent and as context for the lights and video.

The singing is subdued and refined, with few gestures, in osmosis with the rarefied poetic compositions, which are capable of being evocative and remodeled to relive today.