Close Orbit
for mezzo soprano, guitar and electronics
2005

Close Orbit intertwines the past, the present and the future in a wealth of musical and visual impressions. The performance focuses on music by Wayne Siegel, who for some 30 years has been active on the Danish music scene as a composer and dynamo of electronic music: since 1986 as director of DIEM and since 2003 as professor of electronic music at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus. Siegel’s music is characterized by its immediate beauty, rhythmic drive and sensuality. He has often worked with the Orfeus Duo, founded in 1999 by mezzo-soprano Christina Dahl and guitarist Anne-Mette Skovbjerg and driven by their interest in developing the classical concert form by utilizing effects from world of theater.
 
Close Orbit is the title of a song cycle consisting of eight songs commissioned by Orfeus Duo in 2005. The songs are based on texts by the Ancient Greek poet Soppho of Lesbos (ca. 620 – 570 BC). Reliable sources (including Plato) have described Sappho as one of the greatest poets of her era. Most of her poems have been lost; only a few fragments have survived. Siegel has used some of these fragments, freely interpreted, as lyrics for the eight songs. The songs are sensual in character, at times erotic. They are bound together by electronic interludes that merge the past and the future, mixing what has already been heard with what is soon to be heard.

Program from performance in 2008