Antoine Gindt: I had no academic music background – a few years studying classical guitar only. I have memories of listening to classical music at home (Mozart, Moussorgsky, Wagner, Sibelius…) or in the frame of the college where a music teacher had a fruitful influence on me, making me discovering ancient music and classical basics, before I started music by myself.

Antoine Gindt: Hellebore was typically a band founded by teenagers who shared the same interest in music. We had similar mainstream influences and we wished spontaneously to involve ourselves in a very free and responsible activity, free of any adult control, with no teachers, sharing both serious involvement and friendship. Part of our imagination came from what we knew about avant garde or from what we believed the avant garde should be. We liked to get information about musics, cinema, art and literature. Today, what appears incredible to me is that we were confident enough to start to make small concerts very early, after two or three months of rehearsals.

Antoine Gindt: In a way, Il y a des jours is a final point of all what we did with Hellebore. After five years rehearsing and performing concerts, the album was an achievement. We recorded it in 1983 at the Centre Culturel André Malraux in Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, a fantastic and generous place where we regularly rehearsed and performed during the three years before the recording. We did it by ourselves, on a four tracks TEAC recorder. As far as I remember, we spent lots of time recording it, we had the privilege to use the studio whenever we wanted.

Antoine Gindt: For more than 30 years now I am mostly involved in producing and staging new operas and music theater pieces. It is for me a very imaginative position in which I can aggregate what I like and what I know in new music, new theater and visual arts. I make it with very strong partnerships and I feel free to develop my projects in a various and large range of music, at the moment it makes sense for me to give to some audience original and engaged shows – both aesthetically and politically. My last two productions in fall 2018 are probably a good illustration of what I do now, even if I would prefer to create new works, as I did with Aliados by Sebastian Rivas in 2013 or Giordano Bruno by Francesco Filidei in 2015. In 2018, Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels, a huge production I wished to do for more than 20 years, and Mauricio Kagel La Trahison orale, a reference in the field of music theater, are two productions that I staged with very unsimilar situations and two different artistic teams. They both expressed what I am expecting to do with modern music, at the highest and free artistic level.

Antoine Gindt: 200 Motels by Frank Zappa is at first an album which was very influencing for me in the late 70’s, beginning of the 80’s. I was amazed by the fact that such an eccentric rock musician can be at the same time a composer with so many references in terms of modern classical music. At this time, and probably without having any ideas of how one can deal with so many different possibilities, I was totally seduced by this album. It represented all what was attracted to me in music: sophisticated writing, large orchestra possibilities, various and eccentric vocal expressions, rock powerful energy, and above all, total freedom to speak about the society and about clashing situation between academic world and unrespectful attitudes. At that time, I maybe had the intuition that this piece (fortunately, I did not see the movie before the year 2000) could tell something of its time with a very bizarre and surrealistic narration.

200 Motels © Philippe Stirnweiss

Of course to make such a production, you need to put in it your own experience and do something by yourselves. Years ago, when I shared the idea with Jean-Dominique Marco, in Strasbourg, and Emmanuel Hondré at the Philharmonie de Paris, it was only the starting point to aggregate all the necessary energies, and of course to find the budget of such a costly production. This kind of production required years to make it possible.

After we finally did it, I can say that it was one of the most complex but exciting production that I ever did. A kind of resolution of what Frank Zappa maybe dreamed with it, mixing Philharmonic Orchestra, Choir, brilliant soloists, rock band… including sound and video technologies at their best. And of course fantasy!

Together with conductor Léo Warynski and movie maker Philippe Béziat with whom we have previously done a lot of productions (including Aliados, with live video), it was a challenge to make at the same time the music, the staging and the video parts of the show.

With my team, we use to think about works as very sophisticated objects, involving numerous and long reflections on dramaturgy, casting and characters, set, light, video and costume designs, and so on. We have prepared 200 Motels as we used to prepare an opera by Wagner or Stravinsky, with the same serious and rigorous approach. From the beginning of the job, I was considering 200 Motels as a piece of repertoire, for sure different and highly energetic and fun!

Our production of 200 Motels is certainly a new version of the piece, more respectful of the music than any other versions and for the first time taking care about its theatrical investment. I wanted to show how rich is this piece, not only as a testimony of the early 70’s and Mothers of Invention creation, but really as a complex and inventive music piece of the XXth century. Frank Zappa, even if he strongly wished to be recognized as a composer, does not really belong to the classical music field (just a bit part of the avant-garde area), and his music is far from the opera codes. Nevertheless I do believe that 200 Motels could be part of the repertoire as a very specific work including all possibilities of music, theater and cinema – what lyrical art is pretending to make for more than four centuries. I hope that we could perform this production again. For now we are editing the movie we shot at Philharmonie de Paris. It will be my modest contribution to the work of Frank Zappa that I definitely consider as one of the most exciting musicians of the last century, all styles of music included!

Antoine Gindt: La traición oral (we have translated the title because it was the premiere of the work in Argentina, in a Spanish version) is a very fantastic piece for three actors and a small instrumental ensemble (3 percussion, piano, violin/viola, double bass and tuba). Mauricio Kagel has written it in 1982-83. The text is based on fascinating stories about the devil and sorcerers collected in the 50’s by the writer Claude Seignolle in the french provinces. It is typically what the art of Mauricio Kagel expects to express: theatrical situations always mixed with music or deduced from music. It is highly original, giving the audience lots of paths to think about how things are modified with the speeches (oral treason). Music is always expressive, jerking with various situations, allowing high feelings of strangeness, deep fears or social unexpected happenings. As I did this staging in a very specific venue (the basement of Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires), I decided to set the action in a kind of museum, a museum of the devil, with lots of engravures (from the middle age to our time). The audience had to move one hour and half long, and to follow the actors (or not) in the location. It was a very unusual experience, in which the audience had to be very active and not only seating to attend or to listen to the action.

– Klemen Breznikar

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