References

Queen of the night

Constance Hauman - Queen of the night

Release 2024/01/12
New York-based, Isotopia Records has released on January 12th, 2024 "The Queen of the Night", a new digital 4 track EP featuring the multi-talented Constance Hauman whose protean career began as an opera star performing at the world's leading houses and extends to her current activities as the leader of the funk rock band, Blu Eye Extinction.

"The Queen of the Night" was originally conceived and recorded in 1993 in a collaboration between Ms. Hauman and Golden Globe Award Winning producer, songwriter, Jimmy Harry (Madonna, Pink, Britney Spears, Kylie Minogue, Santanta, RuPaul, etc.). Influenced by Berlin's burgeoning techno scene in the early 1990s and classical/opera crossover experiments with club music, Hauman and Harry crafted contemporary dance tracks based on highly virtuosic arias that showcased Hauman's emotionally poignant and thrilling dramatic coloratura style of singing.

Ms. Hauman relates, "I was in love with RuPaul's, Free Your Mind" and contacted his producer Jimmy Harry to create a dance/club version of Mozart's Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute, in a style somewhat inspired by Malcom McClaren's Madame Butterfly and Parliament Funkadelic's work with Ruth Copeland in the 1970s."

Hauman's opera career flourished in the 1990s and 2000s after which she began writing and performing with a diversity of funk and rock acts. While touring with George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic with Blu Eye Extinction in 2022-2023, Clinton encouraged her to include her "opera voice" in the music she was performing with her funk band.

Hauman decided to work with her long standing producing partner, the percussionist and multi-instrumentalist, Ross Pederson, to revisit the tracks she created with Jimmy Harry in the 1990s. Hauman and Pederson remixed the earlier tracks and wrote a new song based on the lyrics from the famous aria L'Amour est un Oiseau Rebelle from Bizet's opera, Carmen. The result is a four track EP that that brings together diverse musical styles to create an original, thrilling, soulful and moving interchange between opera, European dance music and contemporary jazz.

ABOUT CONSTANCE HAUMAN:

Singer, songwriter, pianist and producer, Constance Hauman is renowned in the worlds of funk, indie rock, jazz, new age and classical music. Her solo albums as well as her opera recordings have received critical acclaim particularly Lulu (1997) Lost Highway (2004), her debut solo album Falling Into Now was chosen by The Guardian as the best of 2015, High Tides (2019) Quarantine Trilogy 1, 2 & 3 (2020) and Tropical Thunderstorm (2021) was featured multiple times on NPR's 'Play It Forward'.

Hauman was the producer, songwriter and music director for the indie Rock Band, Miss Velvet and The Blue Wolf. Presently she is the producer and founder of Blu Eye Extincton whose eponymous debut album, Blu Eye Extinction was released in May 2023. The album has taken the Funk scene by storm, and the band has toured in the UK and across the US with George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic. Hauman has performed over 175 times as an opening act for Parliament Funkadelic and continues to do so into the 2023 - 2024 seasons.

In 2019 Hauman returned to the operatic stage for Olga Neuwirth's historic new opera, ORLANDO at the renowned Vienna State Opera. The production featured, costumes by fashion icon Comme Des Garcons' Rei Kawakubo.

A protege of Leonard Bernstein, Hauman has sung over 70 roles and 2,500 performances on the stages of the world's leading opera houses and concert venues.

Tracklist

01Queen of the Night (Forever Yours)
02Stetit Puella (There was a Girl)
03Queen of the Night Berlin Mix
04L'Amour