The first time that actor and theatre director Alex Bogdan saw Mischa Blanos perform live, he made a mental note: ‘I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but I’m going to work with this artist.’

Bogdan’s production of ‘The Bald Soprano’ (1950), Eugene Ionesco’s
groundbreaking ‘anti-play’, provides the fertile ground upon which a meeting of creative minds takes place. Returning to InFiné for his debut theatre soundtrack, Blanos mines the intersection of classical music, minimalism and electronic production that his work has pioneered.

An accomplished pianist, composer, producer and innovative live performer, the Romanian-Russian musician combines a wealth of diverse technical experience. An absurdist exploration of the futility of communication, Ionesco’s play posed unique compositional challenges to Blanos. ‘In order to create this soundtrack, I had to read the entire script like an actor.

‘Composing the soundtrack was not about me or my ego’ he recalls. Working closely on several drafts alongside Bogdan, while observing the play’s production and rehearsal, Blanos utilises harmony and disharmony to mirror the emotional state of Ionesco’s characters, as the communication between them slowly dissolves into abstraction. ‘Music comes from the characters themselves,’ Bogdan says of the process. ‘From their inner vortex of feelings.’