Sven Helbig

Biography

Sven Helbig is one of the most distinguished and versatile contemporary German composers. Stylistically, his roots are in electronic and minimalist music – meant to be performed by traditionally scored orchestras and ensembles. This makes Helbig’s works equally compatible with the classical music scene and with pop. On the one hand, the co-founder of the Dresdner Sinfoniker thus collaborates with the BBC Singers, the Fauré Quartet and the cellist Jan Vogler, and on the other with the likes of the Pet Shop Boys, Rammstein and Snoop Dogg. Helbig’s original music for HOLO HARMONIES consists of a prologue and three interludes that will be played inbetween Schubert’s movements. For the encounter between man and infinity, he has chosen a very special register, drone music. It works with drone tones and long-drawn-out tone clusters to generate a great, in this case extreme, deceleration. Specifically, Helbig electronically slowed down passages from Schubert’s original by 800 per cent in order to create a perception outside our sense of time. Helbig explains: “In my interpretation, death is not a fairy-tale figure, not the Grim Reaper, but something fluid that emerges from and dives back into the infinite. Our life, which is limited in time, takes place, so to speak, against an eternal background – just as silence does not cease to exist when someone speaks.“ More information: www.svenhelbig.com