After the world premiere of his first music theatre piece Die Unterhändlerin in 2013, Evan Gardner and director Michael Höppner founded Opera Lab Berlin, an independent, free-form ensemble dedicated to creating interdisciplinary music theatre that is tightly bound to its contemporary surroundings. Since then, Gardner has been placing the focus of his compositional work on musical theater and his own particular ensemble.
The new portrait DVD of the American-Norwegian composer presents a video production (commissioned especially for the Edition Zeitgenössische Musik) of Gardner’s most extensive work for Opera Lab Berlin so far, this Western-opera Gunfighter Nation (2016) in a staging by Michael Höppner. The full-length work for six voices and ensemble, which received its premiere at Berlin’s Ballhaus Ost, retells in a playful-musical manner the myths entwined around the history of the United States, from the expulsion of the native Americans by the white settlers to the ongoing political upheavals according to the motto 'America first!'.
As every Opera Lab Berlin production, Gunfighter Nation demands of its singers and musicians to step out of their familiar sphere of activity and to act as performers and actors – committed to the pioneering spirit of the first settlers, conquering all unknown territories before them. In the booklet, Roland Quitt describes Gardner’s compositional approach: 'Tunes from America’s everyday culture are stitched into the cohesive fabric of Gardner’s own musical idiom. They thereby become material for further manipulation, dissection, and transformation as the American Dream is called into question with the resources of music.'
In addition, the DVD contains three works from the period when Gardner was still composing mainly instrumental pieces: recordings of his works Sonic Voyeur II (Zafraan Ensemble), Scandinavian Knitting (Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra) and of the cycle No Thanks, based on poems of E. E. Cummings (Ensemble Contrechamps).
