Laure M. Hiendl


  1. back

    the performance of a shift that could turn into a disturbance (2025)
    for voice and orchestra

    Commissioned by WDR / Musik der Zeit


  2. © Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer

    © Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer

    © Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer


  3. the performance of a shift that could turn into a disturbance takes its title from Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. A gesture, Berlant reminds us, “does not mark time, if time is a movement forward, but makes time, holding the present open to attention and unpredicted exchange.” The photographs of Merce Cunningham, suspended mid-air, catch the body in this charged interval — a frozen gesture that stretches the present into something thick, spacious, and uncertain. Beside them, the portrait of John Cage, eyes lifted beyond the frame, seems to register a quiet, queer desire: an opening of time, a gaze that lingers somewhere beyond the script of normative chronopolitics.

    This piece inhabits that suspended space. Its songs are woven from sampled fragments of Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder, music steeped in the teleology of late-Romantic longing. Here, those gestures are stretched, fractured, and held—slipping loose from their narrative arc. In that opening, another desire surfaces: not toward an ending, but toward presence, toward the resonances of what remains unfinished. This piece explores these gestures, hovering at the threshold of disturbance, moments of time dilated and made audible, where the present refuses to move on.


  4. Saturday, 11 October 2025 — 20:00
    Funkhaus Wallrafplatz, Cologne
    Hélène Fauchère — mezzo-soprano
    WDR Symphony Orchestra
    Bassem Akiki — conductor