Frankenstein!!

Daniel Handler (better known as Lemony Snicket) joins your KWS to share some of his favourite music and narrate H.K. Gruber's pandemonium Frankenstein!! It's a modern classic with a warped view of childhood that is strange, hilarious, and unexpectedly touching.

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Daniel Handler, narrator

Edwin Outwater, conductor

Program
Part I: Funny Music, Scary Words, and Vice Versa

Part II: House of Frankenstein, with autobiographical notes by Daniel Handler

Part III: HK Gruber: Frankenstein!!
A pan-demonium for baritone chansonnier and orchestra after children's rhymes
Poems by H C Artmann (G,E,F), English translation by Harriett Watts

In my more-or-less normal life I am a writer of fiction, not a performer of classical music, so tonight's extravaganza shows that I am either a dynamic, boundary-crossing artist, or a hostage held against his will by the Canadian government. HK Gruber's Frankenstein!! is based on the well known horror story involving a raving lunatic who constructs a ghastly monster out of the discarded corpses that ends up attacking a terrified populace. Tonight, Edwin Outwater is the raving lunatic, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony is the ghastly monster, and the terrified populace is anyone foolhardy enough to have purchased a ticket. Enjoy!
- Daniel Handler

I first worked with Daniel Handler in a Kafkaesque performance of Peter and the Wolf with the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, and soon after in the premiere of The Composer is Dead (a book and narration about dead composers with amazing music by Nathaniel Stookey). In these performances I learned that Daniel had more than just a literary voice ... he is a stage animal, so to speak. Before long, we hatched a plot to perform what I believe is the greatest orchestra/narrator tour de force in recent history, HK Gruber's pandemonium Frankenstein!! Tonight we bring it to Kitchener, along with a literary/musical examination of what is funny, what is scary, and what is both.
- Edwin Outwater