Port Bou by Elliott Sharp Operas

The opera PORT BOU by Elliott Sharp presents the last moments in the life of philosopher Walter Benjamin at Port-Bou in 1940 as he was fleeing Nazi-occupied France. PORT BOU features the astounding bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood with virtuosi Jenny Lin on piano and William Schimmel on accordion as well as electroacoustic backing tracks by Sharp. In his spoken introduction to the Berlin performance of PORT BOU, Volker Schlörndorf, director of The Tin Drum stated: "Anybody's agony, the night before closing the door on the world, is hard to transcribe in musical notes, I thought, even more so a philosopher's Angst. Yet, it can be done, and his voice, this particular voice, roaming a hotel room in exile, is proof of it. A metaphysical achievement.”

Elliott Sharp: composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, author, leads Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics and Terraplane with compositional strategies including fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors. His collaborators have included Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Cecil Taylor; Debbie Harry; Hubert Sumlin; Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt