Emmanuel Thomas with reports from DPA
SALSBURG – The German DJ and producer WestBam is set to perform at the annual Salzburg Easter Festival of opera, due to start on Saturday.
The German DJ and producer WestBam is set to perform at the annual Salzburg Easter Festival of opera, due to start on Saturday.
His mix, entitled “Night of Love,” combines techno beats with elements of music by Austrian composer Richard Wagner.
The Salzburg Easter Festival is an annual opera and classical music festival in Austria, running throughout the Easter week. By inviting WestBam, the traditional festival is crossing into new territory.
WestBam is a German techno legend who shot to fame in the 1980s. He was heavily involved in Germany’s iconic techno festival, the Love Parade, which was discontinued after a crowd crush in 2010 killed 21 people.
Wagner, the composer of world-renowned operas such as “Tannhäuser” and “Tristan und Isolde” was also a “user of music,” WestBam said ahead of the festival’s kick-off on Saturday.
“My aim was not to put Wagner into disco,” said the musician, who by his own admission has never been to an opera. The aim, he said, was to “bring together the hypnotic and the voodoo-esque [nature] of an endless Wagner melody with an intense WestBam, a hypnotic beat,” WestBam, whose legal name is Maximilian Lenz, told dpa.
He collaborated on the mix with Depeche Mode singer Richard Butler and soul musician Robert Owens.
“Night of Love” is being performed with the Mendelssohn Orchestra Academy of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra on Thursday. There will be another performance in the German city of Leipzig on April 15.
In addition to Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” featuring German-Austrian star tenor Jonas Kaufmann, the programme also includes a modern dance production of Wagner’s “Wesendonck Lieder.”
