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Hop Co-Commission

HEINER GOEBBELS/HILLIARD ENSEMBLE

I went to the house but did not enter

A Staged Concert in Three Tableaux

David James, counter tenor
Roger Covey-Crump, tenor
Steven Harrold, tenor
Gordon Jones, baritone

Thursday, April 2 • 7 pm
Friday, April 3 • 8 pm
The Moore Theater
$30 • Dartmouth students $5


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In this Hop co-commissioned work, German visionary contemporary composer and theater director Heiner Goebbels has created musical and visual settings of texts by four 20th-century literary icons: American poet TS Eliot, French writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot, Czech writer Franz Kafka and Irish poet and playwright Samuel Beckett.

Goebbels joins forces with the Hilliard Ensemble, the preeminent British male a cappella vocal ensemble distinguished for its unornamented, exacting blend. Renowned interpreters of early music and new works, the Hilliards masterfully deliver the close harmony and chant-like lines of Goebbels' music while moving meditatively about designer Klaus Grunberg's three distinct, dream-like sets: a stylized urban parlor for Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock; a two-story suburban home for Blanchot's The Madness of the Day and Kafka's Excursion into the Mountains; and a cavernous hotel room for Beckett's Worstward Ho.

The resulting show is "beautifully presented, exquisitely performed and going far beyond the usual limits of comprehension," says the Edinburgh Scotsman. Writes The Guardian (UK), "Over the course of 90 minutes an immensely powerful atmosphere is created. ... The Hilliards bring it off immaculately; as with the whole show, there's not a detail misplaced."

After premiering to enthralled audiences at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival, I went to the house but did not enter moved on to performances in major European venues. On this side of the Atlantic, however, the Hop is one of only two places to show this work that "lingers in the mind, casting its spell long after its close" (The Telegraph, UK).

Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Production by Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne; Co-produced by Edinburgh International Festival, Schauspielfrankfurt, Teatro Communale di Bolzano, Stadttheater Bozen, Grand Théâtre de La Ville de Luxembourg and Musica, Festival international des musiques d'aujourd'hui de Strasbourg. Co-commissioned by Hopkins Center for the Arts and Carolina Performing Arts/The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.