Prize for opera production from Hamburg
The content on this page was translated automatically.
The composer Catalina Rueda - MA student from Gordon Kampe's composition class - together with her librettist Lisa Pottstock (music theater direction at the HfMT) receives the Reinhold Otto Mayer Prize endowed with 50,000 euros
As the foundation and the Stuttgart State Opera announced on Thursday, the prize, which was awarded for the first time, was awarded to the work "MELUSINE. What are you doing on Saturday?", a "monster opera" for people aged 16 and over.
The first cooperation partner for the prize, which is awarded as a commission, is the Stuttgart State Opera's Junge Oper im Nord/JOiN. The winning work will premiere at JOiN in June 2022 and the award ceremony will take place in Stuttgart on October 15, 2021. The prize was awarded for a new German-language music theater work that has not yet been performed and is aimed at young people aged 16 and over.
In the prize-winning work by Catalina Rueda and Lisa Pottstock, the medieval legend of Melusine is linked to the feminist and queer struggle for self-determination of one's own body. According to the jury, the fact that Melusine has to keep her ambiguous body secret in order to live in human society is the mythological motif for the two prizewinners, the political and social consequences of which reach right up to the present day. "The ambiguous body, which changes and transforms itself, is censored in patriarchal, heteronormative society. Or turned into a monster."
The prize was established at the instigation of entrepreneur Reinhold Otto Mayer. With the foundation, he wanted to promote new musical and theatrical works of stage and poetry created in the German language, and especially young talent.
Vita_
Catalina Rueda was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1989, grew up in Cali and has lived in Hamburg since 2011. She completed her Bachelor's degree in composition and music theory at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama with Manfred Stahnke and is currently studying for her Master's degree with Gordon Kampe. In addition to her compositional work, she also devotes herself to improvisation and performance with piano and voice.
Influenced by folk, dance and electronic music, her musical language unfolds in acoustic space, embedded in a sequential harmony that never tires of creating new contexts for melody and narrative.
Her vocal sextet "Duo Seraphim" was awarded second prize at the Acht-Brücken Festival of WDR Cologne in 2016. In 2016, she also received the Deutschlandstipendium and was awarded a final scholarship by the DAAD in the same year.
2018 she worked with the Asian Art Ensemble and wrote a piece for Daegeum (Koranic flute) and string trio, which was performed at the concert focused XIX - Asian Groove at Konzerthaus Berlin. In June 2018, her music installation "Antipodes" was funded by the Innovative University in collaboration with director Mien Bogaert and dramaturge Pia-Rabea Vornholt and premiered at the CLAB Festival in the Resonanzraum; for this, her own compositions were interwoven with her own arrangements of various medieval and Renaissance pieces.
Between 2017 and 2020, she collaborated with film director Annett Stenzel and recorded the piano music for her film Silence Song. In 2017, the recording of her piece "A-Suite" for guitar and accordion by the Lux Nova Duo was released on the CD Hamburg Dialogues (published by Costa Records Classics). And in 2020, her piece "Hypnosistum" was released on Dedication, performed by the ensemble Mirror Strings (published by Ears Love Music).
In spring 2019, she worked with the ensemble KNM Berlin on her piece "Walking", which was performed as part of the KNM Contemporaries. In 2019, she was commissioned by the Theaterorchester Aachen to write a new orchestral piece, which was premiered at the 2020 New Year's Concert. For the Cologne Early Music Festival 2020 (which was not allowed to take place due to Corona) she wrote the vocal sextet "Staub" on behalf of the Kölner Vokal Solisten. At the end of 2020, she was commissioned by the Duisburg Philharmonic Orchestra to compose a song cycle for baritone and ensemble with poems by Steffen Popp.