Kraftwerk with spectacular light show at the Semperoper

Dresden- You almost didn't want to call it a “concert”: On Saturday, the electropop pioneers Kraftwerk performed on Theaterplatz, in front of the magnificently illuminated facade of the Semper Opera. The four musicians, positioned on the balcony balustrade above the opera entrance, regularly change in oversized projections. No, not a concert, it was a gigantic multimedia spectacle.

Pop culture was thus married to high culture, with Kraftwerk's electropop itself being considered high culture worldwide. At least in this anniversary year: exactly 50 years ago, the album “Autobahn” was released, with which the band's founders Ralf Hütter (78) and Florian Schneider (†73) for the first time transferred the methods of electronic sound generation from the spirit of Stockhausen and Musique Concrète into a pop format and thus evolved music – the birth of techno pop.

As the only remaining original member, Hütter performs Kraftwerk's musical legacy live with three changing collaborators, for years in museums, most recently in open-air shows in front of historical buildings such as the Acropolis in Athens or Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna.

Now the Semperoper, in front of 18,500 fans on the Theaterplatz (who were certainly happy that the forecast rain did not come).

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The music was loud and presented with a technoid oomph. For the opening, “Numbers” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), the numbers were projected onto the opera house's façade by projectors, creating a neon-green, wafting carpet of numbers. The piece leads directly into the “computer world”, visualized by lines of binary code.

As a result, the baroque façade of the Semperoper became a large-screen projection surface for the audiovisual performance, in which the four quickly immobile musicians in color-variable LED suits and keyboard stands shrank to their own pictograms and merged with the projections.

These were precisely tailored to the architecture of the Semperoper. Animated radio waves, pulsar lines or twitching sequencer bars wafted across the main facade, while the roof of the opera shimmered sometimes violet, sometimes bluish, always complementary.

At times the “motorway” rushed over the facade, at “radioactivity” the atomic symbol flashed yellow, at “neon light” gently curved lettering ran through.

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“Spacelab” offered the view from a spaceship and quickly seemed as if the Semperoper itself was taking off.

The setlist included 19 songs, including “Das Model”, “Mensch-Maschine” and “Computerliebe”, until the finale “Boing Boom Tschak / Musique Non Stop” when the facade disappeared completely behind iconic Kraftwerk images.

As an encore there was “The Robots” and a kind of bow from Hütter. A unique show, truly a total work of art.