6 composers, 3 singers, 3 instrumentalists, and 1 conductor: Out at S.E.A. is a joint project supervised by Péter Eötvös, Luca Francesconi and Balázs Horváth and supported by the Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation and the Budapest Music Center. After performances in Budapest and Milan the French premiere takes places at IRCAM in Paris on July 9.

Out at S.E.A came into being as the result of a unique process, a combination of a composition workshop, a competition for composers, and a complex final phase of assembling the parts and creating and rehearsing the final result, a chamber opera. Or, rather, a double chamber opera, as the same libretto is set to music in two independent versions.

A Chamber Opera Workshop is being organized for young composers by the Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation in 2013 to produce a jointly created opera on Sławomir Mrożek’s absurd one-act play entitled ‘Out at Sea’, which unites and addresses the predominant phenomena of the modern age (alienation, abuse of power, conformity and the question of the boundaries of freedom) in one grotesque situation, and in which the problem of part-whole relations is reflected in the possibilities of form and technique.