2023-05-31 12:49:38
ZTwo musical transcriptions of existing, mostly well-known pieces of music: one takes place in a theatre, the other in an opera house.
At the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Russian artist-in-residence Kirill Serebrennikov, who now lives in Berlin, is showing his darkly pensive visual pleasure “Barocco”, which he took over and developed further from the Moscow Gorki Center, as a “musical manifesto”.
At the Berlin State Opera, the multiple (puppet) artist Nikolaus Habjan and his regular collaborators, the Osttiroler Musicbanda Franui from Innervillgraten and the baritone Florian Boesch, take a scenic, comprehensive look at Franz Schubert’s song cycle “Die Schöne Müllerin”.
“Bar Occo”. That’s what the poster above Hamburg’s front door says. But there is no hip cocktail source serving a drink that has never been enjoyed. There is also only a modest amount of culinary pasticcio, most of it made up of baroque hits by Rameau, Bach, Lully, Zelenka, Vivaldi and Handel, re-orchestrated in a refreshingly innovative way by Daniil Orlov and all of them listen.
Of course, there is just as little to be seen here of a sensually exuberant party mood, a lavishly oblivious, over-decorated celebration of life. Rather, one has to think of the grotesquely deformed, “deviant” natural pearl that gave its name to that design epoch and was called “barocco” in Portuguese.
Because a Serebrennikov who has become bitter but, as always, operates with boldly effective images, of course still marked by his prison, trial and arrest experiences of the past few years, now finds the “Barocco” manifesto, which he has continued to think about since Moscow, more of melancholy , the Memento Mori, the black side of an age shaken by wars, pestilence and superstition, always lurking behind the gold foil.
Starting point is ’68
And so now rather sparingly golden diva costumes and weird hat creations mix between environmental activists, anti-Ukraine war demos and Tarkovsky film reminiscences. It rains at the beginning, an electrician on a broken whip lamp is struck by lightning, the video fire keeps burning people. Because Serbrennikov’s starting point is the 1968s, the mother of today’s protests, except that back then, from Vietnam to Prague, people also attracted attention as living torches, where today people stick to the streets for the climate.
The ten pictures are contested by singing actors (the famous Odin Biron, who can even counter, the bustling, weary Felix Knopp, Tilo Werner as an aggressive music clown, Svetlana Mamresheva, Yang Ge, Victoria Trautmannsdorff) the superbe, already put on a soprano silver platter by Teodor Currentzis Nadezhda Pavlova, the lovable Brazilian street troubadour Jovey, who was cast off the streets in Berlin, a skeleton doll, five dancers, ten musicians, a small choir and extras.
The music – Handel arias, Monteverdi’s enchanting “Poppea” final duet, Rameau choirs, a Telemann trio, Purcell’s “Cold Song”, Lamenti, Bach’s D minor Chaconne in the one-armed Brahms arrangement (because – very bitter and evil – the other hand of the pianist is in a handcuff along with the security guards) – is the foundation, the glamor and the consolation of the evening in its fluid, much only touching round dance. Dance arrangements are pushed between dance tableaux and game scenes, and virtual sparks, grains of dust, snowflakes are always flying.
This music gave him light and hope in prison, says Krill Serebrennikov about this director’s production, which was once only possible from a USB stick and was muted by the doctrinaire state and finally expelled. The baroque affect, the excess, the defiant beauty, is what the dissident offers to him as a politically overpainted art product. And that experiences an amazing new stage reality, intense dismay from its vulnerable being endangered.
The longer the evening hashtagged as “#einspielmitfeuer” lasts, the more modern this baroque foaming pearl pasticcio appears, which is as laconically simple as it is powerful, arranged between electric guitar, walking bass and melodica (you can even call up the playlist on Spotify ), art in kitsch, truth in beautiful lies, sense in sensuality. That is passionate and desperate, ultimately remains helpless – and therefore insists on beauty as a weapon, even if there is only a plastic door whirling in the fan wind: “Proletarians of all countries – have fun.”
Puppets, singers, brass band: Schubert with Nikolaus Habjan in Berlin
Source: Bernd Uhlig
“Barocco” unfolds in Hamburg in 135 minutes, the more modest “Müllerin” needs 75 minutes in Berlin. Schubert’s piano song cycle, based on the enigmatically romantic songs of Wilhelm Müller, should not end in a deadly sad mood with the wet finale of the scorned boy in the brook. That was the common glimmer of hope shared by Nikolaus Habjan and Florian Boesch. They both get on with “Wander ist des Müllers Lust”, singing and whistling. And in the end they sit on a folded locker that has almost become a coffin and reflect on what they have experienced: “And the sky up there, how big is it!”
Harp and dulcimer and a distant trumpet fade away gently behind them, just as the fine Franui-Ten can switch their warm, but sometimes shrill Alpine alienation sound so wonderfully between dance music and funeral march, love song and world embrace, and yet always sound Schubert-soulful, right and homely.
It is always amazing to see how the expressive Habjan dolls come to life and seem to be singing themselves. The miller, however, is just a blonde brat who curls her blond hair and is episodic a stepmother of the extras, who is quickly disposed of as a widow. On the other hand, the white torso of the bright-eyed miller’s boy is bare and undecorated, and is initially stuck on a staff.
Habjan holding his hands, which were previously lying on a green armchair (“the dear colour”), and Boesch leading his head, who later also wears a white shirt, that is a perfect symbiosis. That hugs each other, keeps the skull very close or at a distance, while the hands shimmer somewhere else, remains a dead artefact and a throbbing third player, sometimes with, sometimes without abdomen.
Who is leading here? This is the collective of the musicians, the not even perfect, sometimes difficult to understand singer, the unobtrusively correcting puppet creator. They all have rhythm and dynamics, blend in with Schubert. Until the music falls silent, the enthusiastic, desperate youth becomes rigid, the two actors hold their fingers between the thing: a sacred Schubert trinity floating along on the so special Franui sound wave.
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