"I saw Wozzeck  on stage before the war and was so impressed by it that I decided to set it to music immediately." So wrote Alban Berg to his friend and colleague Anton Webern in 1918, a time when his name was known only among the small circle of Schoenberg's students. Fame and international recognition would come a few years later, thanks to Wozzeck , an opera inspired by Georg Büchner's novel of the same name, which soon became a symbolic work of the early twentieth century and an emblem of Expressionist theater. In Büchner's text, Alban Berg had identified themes particularly dear to Expressionist poetics, such as nightmares, mental insanity, and brutal murder. The opera in three acts and fifteen scenes debuted at the Berlin Staatsoper on December 14, 1925, achieving considerable success. Berg conceived the opera as a system of closed forms, where each scene of each act harks back to a formal structure from Western instrumental tradition—the suite, the rhapsody, the march, the passacaglia, to name just a few—reimagined through a livid and anguished orchestral writing. On the vocal side, the almost spoken singing in Wozzeck's Sprechgesang stands out , eschewing all melodic artifice and emphasizing the protagonist's painful humanity.”

Ian will sing the role of the Tambourmajor.sd