Dear media representatives, dear colleagues,
meanwhile the Reeperbahn Festival is generally known for offering fascinating events. However, it’s not every year that we can announce a world premiere!
Frehn Hawel
Hamburg, 14 July 2016
World premiere at the Reeperbahn Festival, 21 Sept. 2016, Schmidt´s Tivoli:
Matthias Arfmann & Hamburg Symphony Orchestra present "Ballet Jeunesse"
Can such a thing really be done? Can a Hamburg musician and producer get stuck into the crown jewels of high culture with a group of like-minded freethinkers attempting to open them up to a young audience? For seven years, the Hamburg-based music producer has worked with his team, consisting of Onejiru, Peter Imig, Milan Meyer-Kaya and Sebastian Maier, on his new escapade named "Ballet Jeunesse", has deconstructed, fragmented and sampled ballet classics by the world's best orchestras, works well-known for centuries such as Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker", Prokofieff's "Peter and the Wolf" or Stravinsky's "The Firebird" – until they all felt they had laid open the very heart and soul of the work in question, as Walter Benjamin has it "the aura of the work of art". Then Arfmann and his companions re-interpreted these classics, used beats to give them a new heartbeat and gave them a completely new voice and charm by inviting the Hamburg singer Onejiru, and guest singers such as the Hip-Hop legend KRS One, chief styler Jan Delay, the Goldene Zitronen-singer Schorsch Kamerun and Kele Okereke from Bloc Party – and finally had them re-recorded by an orchestra! In this manner Arfmann and his producer team managed to re-shape classics which so far had been regarded as untouchable into songs, unfolding their fascinating strength between old and new, concert hall and dance floor, between sonata and break beat. What better place is there for such premieres, with an orchestra of 60 on top of everything else, than the Reeperbahn Festival?