Bählamms Fest, The Guardien Andrew Clements Friday November 21, 2003 The Guardian (excerpt) It is only in the past five years that British audiences have heard anything of the music of Olga Neuwirth, who was born in Graz, Austria in 1968, and studied in San Francisco and in Paris with Tristan Murail. The first prominent showcase for her music in London was her commission for the series of concerts the London Symphony Orchestra mounted in 2000 to mark Pierre Boulez's 75th birthday. Her piece, Clinamen/Nodus, introduced us to a distinctively coloured, tangled and often aggressive sound world, which paraded its modernist affiliations proudly and came as a welcome culture shock after so much unnecessary and soft-centred new music. Since then Neuwirth's work has appeared sporadically here, most notably when Almeida Opera put on The Long Rain, her elaborate live soundtrack to a film based on a Ray Bradbury story. In Europe, however, she is already a major figure among the younger generation of composers, with a list of prestigious commissions to her credit. Only last month the Styrian Autumn festival premiered her opera based on David Lynch's film Lost Highway, but Neuwirth's first substantial stagework was the "music theatre in 13 pictures", Bählamms Fest, premiered at the Vienna festival in 1999, when these discs were recorded. An audio disc can provide only a flavour of a piece like this, whose computer-generated sounds and images cry out for DVD. But there is more than enough in this performance to suggest that Neuwirth is already a highly distinctive and, in many ways, disconcerting dramatic composer. It is a typically surrealist dream world, whose sheer strangeness and compelling dramatic pacing are vividly evoked in Neuwirth's music. Her aural imagination has always seemed exceptional, and here the webs of sound with which she surrounds the voices (which speak as much as they sing conventionally, and are frequently subjected to various electronic enhancements) are compelling. The ensemble writing for 21 players also includes a prominent part for the Theremin, the early electronic instrument, now almost extinct, which was given immortality by the Beach Boys on Good Vibrations. Here its unearthly timbres lend yet more sense of dislocation to many of the textures in the opera. up