MICHAEL GORDON
A Western
HEINER GOEBBELS
Worstward Ho!
Theatre of Voices takes the audience on a journey West in this concert of two dramatic pieces for unaccompanied voices, A Western by Michael Gordon and Worstward Ho! by Heiner Goebbels.
A Western by Michael Gordon, founder member of legendary new music group Bang on A Can, was premiered by Theatre of Voices at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie in January 2019. This playful work is inspired by the classic Western film High Noon and dramatises a showdown on the dusty streets of Somewheresville, USA.
Heiner Goebbels’ Worstward Ho! sets Samuel Beckett’s short novel of the same name to music. Itself a pun on the title of the 19thcentury adventure novel Westward Ho!, Beckett’s text includes his famous line, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Goebbels is known as a director as much as a composer, and his trance-like setting of Beckett’s words is as much a piece of theatre as it is music.
Theatre of Voices
- Else Torp
- Kate Macoboy
- Laura Lamph
- Miles Lallemant
- Paul Bentley-Angell
- Jakob Skjoldborg
- Ben McKee
- William Gaunt
Paul Hillier, artistic director