Alemania
Harmony and the Spheres
Jesse Simon
In Germany, the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s Disputatio is being celebrated in numerous and diverse ways, from the introduction of the Playmobil Martin Luther figure (I’m not making this up; it really exists), to countless performances of Mendelssohn’s Fifth Symphony, to a special one-off bank holiday at the end of October. For many choirs, a programme devoted to Bach would seem the most obvious way to mark the occasion, but the Rundfunkchor Berlin have gone several steps further: working in collaboration with Robert Wilson, they created an immersive experience somewhere near the midpoint of choral concert, musical theatre and performance piece. Luther: dancing with the gods, which ran for a week this October at the Pierre Boulez Saal, was an intriguing and often wonderful experiment; if it was not always able to locate an exact balance between theatrical and concert performance, it was a superb example of choral programming at its most adventurous.
There are few directors who do ritual as well as Robert Wilson. His best work uses heavily stylised movement and painstaking slowness – along with stark colour schemes, severe costumes and a way with lighting that borders on magical – to bring the audience into his world. Even when the symbolic significance and specific meaning of his imagery remains opaque, it retains its own intuitive logic. Mr Wilson’s aesthetic is highly distinctive and immediately recognisable: when the choir walked in with white faces and long black robes, and the house lights dimmed to reveal two concentric ovals of concentrated blue light on the ground, one knew exactly who was in charge. In this sense, Luther was perhaps an evening of few surprises.
LUTHER dancing with the gods © Rundfunkchor Berlin
Even the structure was recognisably Wilsonian, a series of scenes – in this case, several motets by Bach, plus one piece each by Knut Nystedt and Steve Reich – connected by ‘knee plays’. But the work was also inseparable from the oval auditorium of the Pierre Boulez Saal. A low black stage at the centre of the space was the primary venue for the action, although the choir moved freely about the room throughout the course of the evening. During the motets, a group of allegorical figures performed a series of pantomimes on the central stage. Their costumes suggested angels and demons, but their actions belied such easy interpretations; their movements, hemmed in by the grand ellipse of the stage, described a distinctly planetary motion, a series of rotations and orbital paths forever striving to achieve some kind of harmony.
The knee plays were driven primarily by spoken texts, although the meaning came more from the delivery than the words themselves. The prologue featured biblical passages in new testament Greek delivered with unnerving conviction by Lydia Koniordou, a severe figure with a cone of bright red hair and a black gown that seemed to conceal wings. Luther, given a dour, adversarial performance by Jürgen Holtz, who looked as if he had just stepped out of a Holbein portrait, declaimed an equally terrifying passage in German from the book of Revelation. In the evening’s most astonishing scene, Luther and the Lady in Black engaged in an explosive war of words, she in Latin, he in German, that filled the auditorium with the overlapping voices of an argument destined never to be resolved.
At the centre of the evening, however, was Bach, the lone voice of balance amidst the linguistic, theological and cosmological disharmony, and his motets were given performances of great clarity by the Rundfunkchor Berlin. The Rundfunkchor already have considerable experience with elaborate semi-stagings – they were, among other things, an integral part of the Berlin Philharmonic’s ritualistic Bach Passions with Peter Sellars – and their performance seemed unfazed by the evening’s theatrical demands (although in addition to principal choir director Gijs Leenaars, an additional conductor on the other side of the hall was used to ensure synchronisation in those scenes where the members of the choir were arranged to face in different directions).
Rundfunkchor Berlin © 2017 by Jonas Holthaus
Indeed, one of the delights of the production was a chance to experience the motets in such an intimate setting. At different points during the evening the choir was arranged in a ring around the outer edge of the auditorium, clustered at the centre of the stage, or grouped onto the staircases that separate the blocks of seats, and the different configurations yielded remarkably different insights into Bach’s part-writing, although there were rarely moments of indistinct phrasing or noticeable imbalance. The choir were perhaps at their most impressive when standing in a large ring, but the other dispositions yielded passages of great immediacy – the urgent ‘Komm komm’ at the end of Komm, Jesu, komm, or the ‘Gute nacht’ section of Jesu, meine Freude – bringing us that much closer to the intricacies of Bach’s polyphony.
In addition to the motets, the evening also featured an opening piece by Knut Nystedt which opened with a quotation from Bach but then began to stretch the individual notes and syllables into ambient fields that shifted and swelled while retaining an ever-distant connection to the tonal centre of their source. Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, a study in phase shifts, rolling rhythms and contrapuntal textures, was a natural fit with the interlocking vocal lines of Bach’s motets and it was given a joyous performance by the hands of the choir. (On the evening it was performed before Luther’s death, but was initially intended to appear at the very end of the concert, where it would, one suspects, have been far more effective).
Although the evening was brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed, the logistics and considerations arising from the format and the venue – it was, after all, a choral concert in a chamber music hall – seemed occasionally at odds with the work’s theatrical ambitions. This tension may have stopped it just short of achieving the organic unity and effortless flow it needed to cross the boundary from concert to ritual. And at a mere ninety minutes – almost no time at all in the methodically paced world of Mr Wilson – it sometimes felt as though we were seeing only the highlights from more cosmically-scaled investigation into the chaos of early Modern theology. Nonetheless, Mr Wilson’s vividly rendered imagery and the Rundfunkchor’s way with Bach made Luther: dancing with the gods an evening of great musical and visual pleasures.
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