The Alpha Experience: the timeline of Uli Jon Roth's symphonic project

What The Alpha Experience was

The Alpha Experience was, in the words of Uli Jon Roth’s official site, the world premiere of his new symphonic and multimedia project. Copies saved by the Internet Archive show it on the home page of ulijonroth.com between January 2022 and March 2023. The site described an evening of more than three hours conducted by Roth himself, with a symphony orchestra from Cologne, his rock band, a classical choir, and rock and opera singers.

The program was billed as a journey through three centuries of music. It included excerpts from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons played on the Sky Guitar, but most of the program was Roth’s own work: new orchestral arrangements of “Hiroshima” and “Eleison” and the premiere of several pieces from his Requiem for an Angel, written for Monika Dannemann. The common thread, according to the official text, was “mankind’s search for identity,” along with the age-old conflict between good and evil.

The local press filled in what the announcement left out. Honnef heute described a program mixing Bach, Beethoven, Puccini and Vivaldi with moments from rock history, and said the show would be filmed for worldwide broadcast. The Bonn blog 3songsbonn mentioned lasers, dancers and video installations.

The Sky Guitar, the instrument on which Roth was to play Vivaldi at the premiere. Photo by Ed Spinelli.

The project at a glance

Field	Detail	Source
Type	World premiere of a symphonic and multimedia show	Official site (2022 and 2023 copies)
Announced length	More than three hours	Official site
Musical direction	Uli Jon Roth	Official site
Line-up	Symphony orchestra from Cologne, rock band, classical choir, rock and opera singers	Official site
Guests announced in 2022	Violinist Nigel Kennedy, flamenco guitarist El Amir, violinist Esmeralda and percussionist Luis Ribeiro	Official site (January-November 2022)
Promoter in Bad Honnef	Ernst-Ludwig Hartz	Honnef heute
VIP package sales	Sky Arts International	Official VIP page (November 2022 copy)
Planned rehearsals	Dierks Studios, near Cologne, and two warm-up concerts at the Medio Theater in Bergheim	Official VIP page
Status	No record that it premiered	See below

Three dates and two venues

The timeline can only be reconstructed by comparing successive versions of the official site with the local press. This is the result:

Announced date	Venue	What is on record	Source
June 4, 2022, 8 p.m.	Grafenwerth island, in the Rhine (Bad Honnef)	Initial announcement, with Nigel Kennedy as star guest. Tickets from €46.20 to €110	Official site (copy of January 18, 2022) and Honnef heute
June 8, 2023	Grafenwerth island	Postponement: the Omicron variant made rehearsing with the orchestra impossible. Tickets remained valid	3songsbonn (April 8, 2022), official site (copy of July 7, 2022) and Edenwaith (September 10, 2022)
June 6, 2023	Lichtburg, Essen	Change of venue. The official text no longer mentions Kennedy or the other guests	Official site (copy of March 6, 2023). This site, in its earlier Spanish-language version, reported it on January 27, 2023
November 2023	—	The official home page no longer mentions the project	Official site (copy of November 21, 2023)

The 2022 concert was part of Grafenwerth’s open-air summer season, which also featured Patti Smith, Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets and ZAZ, according to Honnef heute. With Kennedy on the bill, the announcement promised that the violinist would play part of his “Für Ludwig Van” program, an extended orchestral version of “The Sails of Charon” as a duet with Roth, and a midnight jam to close the night.

The rehearsal plan and the VIP packages

The archived copy of the VIP packages page, from November 2022, shows how the premiere was to be prepared. Sky Arts International offered six packages, from £300 to £3,900. The most expensive one gave access to five days of stage and orchestra rehearsals at Dierks Studios and to two warm-up concerts with an audience at the Medio Theater in Bergheim. For every package sold, trees would be planted in a grove called Sky Forest, in the Scottish Highlands.

The same page gives the rescheduling away: the general text still spoke of Saturday, June 4, and the cheapest package kept the 2022 date, while the others already said June 8, 2023.

Did it take place? What the sources say

There is no evidence that The Alpha Experience premiered, and there are several signs that it did not:

• No reviews, no setlist. setlist.fm lists 18 Roth concerts in 2023 and none in Essen. After the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise in January, the next entry is the Der Detze Rockt festival on June 16.
• The official site dropped it. The November 2023 copy of the home page no longer mentions it, and the current site has no page dedicated to the project.
• No recording. The official discography, checked on October 24, 2026, includes no release of The Alpha Experience.
• Ticket sales. Eventim’s listing for the Lichtburg appeared as canceled in search engine indexes. That page no longer exists and could not be checked directly.

There is a coincidence of dates worth pointing out without turning it into an explanation. In May 2023, weeks before the Essen date, Roth had a kidney removed, according to Dave Ling’s interview for Classic Rock, published on Louder on November 16, 2023. The official statement issued in July postponed his North American tour for health reasons. No source consulted links the operation to the premiere being called off, and this page does not either. The context of that year is on the page about his Rock Hard interview.

What became of the program’s music (2023-2026)

The show vanished, but much of its material carried on by other routes.

• The name. In July 2023 Roth launched his own label, Alpha Experium, with Cargo Records Germany. Its first releases were gatefold vinyl reissues of Electric Sun’s Earthquake (1979) and Fire Wind (1981). In December 2024 came the book In Search of the Alpha Law.
• The long format. The postponed North American tour became the Interstellar Sky Guitar tour of April and May 2024: some 30 dates with a three-hour multimedia show in two parts, featuring Vivaldi excerpts and a 15-minute talk about the book.
• The Requiem. On December 18, 2024, his 70th birthday, Rock Hard reported that Roth was finishing a large-scale work titled “Requiem,” recorded at Dierks Studios among other places.
• The pieces, in Japan. The Pictures of Destiny tour, announced in April 2025, promised the premiere of pieces from Requiem for an Angel and a performance with full orchestra in Tokyo. According to setlist.fm, on August 28, 2025, at the EX Theater Roppongi, the set included “Requiem for an Angel” and “Enola Gay (Hiroshima Today?)”. The listing does not say whether there was an orchestra.

Roth live with the Sky Super Strat. Photo by Mark Varney.

For that fall’s North American tour, the official press kit announced a full band plus a string quartet, ten musicians on stage, and an orchestral version of “The Sails of Charon.” In October 2026, the official home page presents Pictures of Destiny in two formats: an intimate evening of music, images and stories, or an orchestral experience with band and a ten-piece chamber orchestra.

In September 2026, Roth told MariskalRock: “Right now I’m re-recording some orchestrated songs with my band and an orchestra, although I don’t know when I’ll be able to finish it” (our translation; the interview was published in Spanish). He did not say which songs, or whether they are connected to the 2022 program.

The pieces: Vivaldi, “Hiroshima,” “Eleison” and the Requiem

Vivaldi on the Sky Guitar. Roth had already released Metamorphosis of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in 2003 (it is in the discography), and the Sky Guitar was born precisely to reach the range of a violin. Today it is made by UJR Sky Guitars. Including The Four Seasons meant returning to a repertoire he knew inside out.

“Hiroshima.” The announcement does not say which piece it means, and there are two documented candidates. One is “Enola Gay (Hiroshima Today?)”, nearly eleven minutes long and in four parts, from Electric Sun’s Fire Wind (1981), according to English Wikipedia. The other is the symphony Hiroshima de Profundis, which the official biography lists among his large-scale works. Which one was to be played with orchestra is not on record.

“Eleison.” No source consulted identifies this piece in Roth’s published work.

Requiem for an Angel. According to the official biography, Roth began writing it after Monika Dannemann’s death in 1996, in her memory. Dannemann, a painter born in Düsseldorf in 1945, was his partner for years and painted the covers of all three Electric Sun albums, according to English Wikipedia. The Alpha Experience was to be the first showcase for that work with an orchestra. The first documented performance came three years later, on a band tour.

The rest of Roth’s career, including his 2026 tour, is in his biography.