A Mesmerizing work
FOR STRING QUARTET IN FULL DOME THEATER
What is ENIGMA?
Performed live by the multi-GRAMMY-nominated Spektral Quartet, ENIGMA is a hypnotic collision of music and film, tempting audiences to investigate the secret alcoves of their own minds. Distinguished on 2021 Best of lists by NPR Music and The New York Times, ENIGMA combines the mysterious sounds of internationally-acclaimed composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir with the cryptic visuals of video artist Sigurdur Gudjonsson (Venice Biennale 2022) – debuting in Chicago this April at the Adler Planetarium’s iconic 360-degree dome theater in partnership with ExpoChicago.
The Story of ENIGMA
It might be said that we enter the planetarium for the same reason we enter the concert hall: to be brought in touch with the sublime and the unknown. In both places we make contact with tangible reality and imagined panoramas, and in both places our sense of perspective expands.
Still image from ENIGMA by Sigurdur Gudjonsson (click to enlarge)
ENIGMA marks a major milestone for the string quartet repertoire, written by one of the most distinctive composers of her generation. Winner of The New York Philharmonic's prestigious Kravis Emerging Composer award, Anna Thorvaldsdottir is heralded for music that “conjures unseen worlds” and creates “shimmering, harmonically ambiguous, thoroughly enveloping texture” (New York Times). Elemental power and an expansive scope are signatures of her music – soundscapes in which the natural world collides with colossal, fantastical forces.
A longtime artistic partner of Ms. Thorvaldsdottir, Sigurdur Gudjonsson has created video art that immerses the audience in a synesthetic experience, linking visual and aural elements to enhance the concertgoer’s perceptual field and produce new sensations in both body and mind.
A piece of profound artistic collaboration, ENIGMA provokes considerations of our relationship to the vast cosmos without – and the infinite universe within.
Purchase/Stream ENIGMA
The Enigma team
Anna Thorvaldsdottír
COMPOSER
Recipient of the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists and the New York Philharmonic Kravis Emerging Composer Award, Anna Thorvaldsdottír is a composer who frequently works with large sonic structures that tend to reveal the presence of a vast variety of sustained sound materials, reflecting her sense of imaginative listening to landscapes and nature. Her music tends to portray a flowing world of sounds with an enigmatic lyrical atmosphere.
Anna’s music is frequently performed internationally, and has been featured at several major venues and music festivals such as Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival in NYC, the Composer Portraits Series at NYC's Miller Theatre, ISCM World Music Days, Nordic Music Days, Ultima Festival, Klangspuren Festival, Beijing Modern Music Festival, Reykjavik Arts Festival, Tectonics, and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Her works have been nominated and awarded on many occasions - most notably, Anna is the recipient of the prestigious Nordic Council Music Prize 2012 for her work Dreaming.
"Ms. Thorvaldsdottir's music has a natural beauty to it in the way it reveals itself patiently, and in its unpredictable but organic-seeming instances of rhythmic quickening." -The New York Times
Sigurður Guðjónnson
VIDEO ARTIST
Sigurður Guðjónsson (b. 1975) studied in Vienna, Reykjavík, and Copenhagen, starting his exhibition career at the turn of the century in the artist-run experimental scene in Reykjavík that has fostered new art in temporary venues all over the old city.
His dark and moody videos immediately set him apart and attracted attention not only in Iceland but also in Berlin, New York, London, Beijing, Seoul, and wherever they were exhibited. He mostly uses video but in many ways his work could as easily be classed as music. He exploits the potential of time-based media to produce pieces that rhythmically engage the viewer in a synesthetic experience, linking vision and hearing in ways that seem to extend one’s perceptual field and produce sensations never felt before. Usually slow and often repetitive, his pieces draw you in and gradually start to expand, creating complex loops and rhythmic schemes that can almost overwhelm the senses.
His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, in such institutions as the National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik Art Museum, Hafnarborg, Iceland, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany, Arario Gallery, Beijing, Liverpool Biennial, Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway, Safn Reykjavík, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Kling & Bang Gallery and Bergen Kunsthall Norway.
More at www.sigurdurgudjonsson.net
Spektral Quartet
PERFORMERS, PRODUCER
“…they have everything: a supreme technical command that seems to come easily, a capacity to make complicated music clear, and, most notably...an ability to cast a magic spell.” - The New York Times
Multi-Grammy nominees, the Spektral Quartet actively pursues a vivid conversation between exhilarating works of the traditional repertoire and those written this decade, this year, or this week. Since its inception in 2010, Spektral is known for creating seamless connections across centuries, drawing in the listener with charismatic deliveries, interactive concert formats, an up-close atmosphere, and bold, inquisitive programming.
With a tour schedule including some of the country’s most notable concert venues such as the Kennedy Center, Miller Theater, Library of Congress, and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, the quartet also takes great pride in its home city of Chicago: championing the work of local composers, bridging social and aesthetic partitions, and cultivating its ongoing collaborations and residencies in the Chicago region. The 21/22 Season will see the launch ENIGMA: a hypnotic collision of music and film for full-dome planetarium theaters featuring an original score by Anna Thorvaldsdottir and new video art by Sigurdur Gudjonsson – all performed live by Spektral.
Named “Chicagoans of the Year” by the Chicago Tribune in 2017, Spektral Quartet is most highly regarded for its creative and stylistic versatility: presenting seasons in which, for instance, a thematic program circling Beethoven seamlessly coexists with an improvised sonic meditation at sunrise, a talent show featuring Spektral fans, and the co-release of a jazz album traversing the folk traditions of Puerto Rico.
Daniel Dehaan
SOUND DESIGN
Dr. Daniel R. Dehaan is a composer, performer, and educator currently based in Chicago who regularly creates and performs music that is designed to be site or system-specific. The experiences of each performance are crafted by Dr. Dehaan to emphasize the physical or virtual presence of the audience. Each performance relies upon specially designed systems to fully immerse his audiences in the sonic experience.
Remaining engaged with Chicago's music communities for more than a decade has afforded Dr. Dehaan numerous opportunities to work with some truly inspiring people and organizations from around the world on a range of musical and artistic projects. Some of his more recent collaborations have included an hour-long electronic improvisation to the sights and sounds of 30 cellos being submerged in a swimming pool, collaborating with astrophysicist to bring sound to the formation of distant galaxies, programming custom electronics for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's MusicNow series, live streaming an audio/visual performance from Chicago to the Audio Art Festival in Kraków, Poland, and developing original musical works for virtual realities.
From the KROME Gallery in Berlin, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to the Centro Cultural de España in Costa Rica, Dr. Dehaan's music has been performed at a variety of venues all over of the world. He has had the privilege of collaborating with many talented musicians, ensembles, and artists such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, Dal Niente, GPS-Trans, Fonema Consort, and The Industry of the Ordinary. His work has been discussed in many publications including TIME Magazine, New Music Box, the Chicago Reader, BuzzFeed, and Business Insider.
Dehaan holds a doctorate in Music Composition and Technology from Northwestern University and is currently Practitioner-in-Residence of Digital Music Technology at Columbia College Chicago where he teaches graduate and undergraduate classes and private lessons in digital music composition, production, and performance. More at www.danielrdehaan.com
Adler Planetarium
Co-Producers
The Adler Planetarium connects people to the Universe and each other. Whether it is introducing a guest to the Ring Nebula, a neighborhood school to a community partner, a research team to a network of citizen scientists, or one staff member to another, the Adler’s focus on meaningful connections dates back nearly a century.
Consisting of a ‘renaissance team’ of astronomers, visualization specialists, artists, and science communication researchers, the Adler's Space Visualization Group (SVG) and Digital Experience teams specialize in data visualization driven storytelling. They produce the Adler's planetarium shows, and the Kavli Fulldome Lecture Series, as well as digital exhibit and programmatic content for the Adler. The Adler's dome theater experiences and digital visualization work have been recognized with some of the highest awards in the field.
Dr. Mark SubbaRao, DIrector of Space Visualization Laboratory, and Mike Smail, Director of Theaters and Digital Experience, are key technical consultants for the Enigma project.
More at www.adlerplanetarium.org
support
ENIGMA is generously supported by:
