‘Songs and Fragments’ at Aix is gripping, concentrated theatre – Seen and Heard Worldwide

United Kingdom Pageant d’Aix-en-Provence [3] – ‘Songs and Fragments’: Davies, Eight Songs for a Mad King; Kurtág, Kafka-Fragmente: Soloists, Ensemble Intercontemporain / Pierre Bleuse (conductor). Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, Aix-en-Provence, 10.7.2024. (MB)

Manufacturing:
Director – Barrie Kosky
Design and Lighting – Urs Schönebaum

Solid:
Man – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Girl – Anna Prohaska
Violinist – Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Virtuosity of the very best diploma, completely on the service of musical drama, characterised this Aix manufacturing beneath Barrie Kosky’s route. Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King and György Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente fashioned a staged double invoice, given with no break, at that eighteenth-century jewel amongst theatres, the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume. The ghost of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire haunted proceedings, audibly within the Davies’s music theatre monodrama, written for the composer’s personal, Schoenberg-inspired Fires of London (right here, Schoenberg’s ensemble plus percussion), and extra scenically within the Kurtág fragments, not in fact supposed to be staged, however right here given an intriguing new slant by the mediation of expressionist cabaret.

Johannes Martin Kränzle’s assumption of the mad king – referred to within the forged checklist merely as ‘Un homme’, although it’s in fact George III – was one thing by no means to be forgotten. Fairly how a lot was his, how a lot was Kosky’s, we will by no means know — and why ought to we explicit care? Theatre is collaborative, even in what may appear to be a one-man-show. With a single highlight, a single unsparing highlight, this poor (wealthy) man, clad solely in sagging underpants, bared his soul to the birds, the viewers, and certainly the musicians of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, incisively performed by Pierre Bleuse, who in flip supplied us their very own, associated musical tour of caprice, parody, and brutal violence. From an early promenade, by the haunting of an imaginary but ever-so-real queen ‘Esther’, through the king’s beloved Handel – with biting irony, ‘Consolation ye…’, to the ultimate, surprising smashing of the violin, this was a psychological research, which in a way revealed nothing apart from itself, and thus in one other sense proved all of the extra revealing. By the numerous methods he marshalled his voice and his total physique, Kränzle touched, amused, and horrified us. It was gripping, concentrated theatre, which one may effectively have wished to expertise once more, however knew one couldn’t, even when the try had instantly been made.

Anna Prohaska and Patricia Kopatchinskaja, minus the EIC, had been our guides for Kurtág’s extraordinary set of miniatures. The violin offered, because it had been the bridge: destroyed and now resurrected by a one-woman orchestra who was additionally a protagonist — and by her double-companion. Equality right here, between two extra consummate musicians and communicators appeared, by advantage of staging and efficiency, the previous nonetheless astutely easy but minutely noticed, to be each instantly, immanently manifest and but additionally maintained by ever-shifting dramatic energy relationships: one conducting the opposite, one pulling the opposite’s strings, one inciting and consoling, and so forth. The place Davies’s expressionist nightmare had shocked us into submission, right here a unique ghost of Pierrot – maybe surprisingly given the extra ‘summary’ nature of the work – proved extra based in re-gendered harlequin character. We turned inwards, Kurtág’s Webern-like miniatures commanding and receiving absolute focus, in multiple sense. Prohaska’s spellbinding efficiency – think about having to sing that by coronary heart and interact in minutely deliberate bodily efficiency too – was unattainable to dissociate from Kopatchinskaja’s. The 2 musicians appeared nearly to emerge as two emanations of the identical soul. A response to their male counterpart within the first half, or one thing subtly but, in that subtlety, defiantly completely different? Why select? Once more, there was a lot one couldn’t presumably have taken in, which cried out for one more likelihood to take action, but which was tantalisingly misplaced within the passage of concentrated time. Above all, although, and this can be the final word ‘lesson’, we discovered a little bit higher to pay attention to 1 one other.

Mark Berry