Jean Rondeau: UNDR

Since he first began working on the Goldberg Variations in 2016, Rondeau has never ceased to explore Bach’s score, seeking to understand both its mysteries and its spontaneity.

With Krummer over the years, he has forged a path that inhabits the form of the variations, while imagining a different narrative for each of its 30 variations, weaving echoes and contrasts, colours and tonalities into a jubilant, many-voiced whole.

Punctuated by the spoken words of choreographer and photographer Valère Novarina, artist Shura Rusanova and poet Ezra Pound, UNDR is a complex but deeply rewarding listening experience which highlights the introspective and improvisatory approach of its creators.

Through their interplay, UNDR reinvents itself in real time, with each performance. What matters to the artists is to remain open to whatever may arise: allowing the form to shift and transform, while accepting that they, too, may be transformed by it.

The Goldberg Variations remain only as a distant memory, an almost imperceptible imprint, gradually dissolved by the form’s successive wanderings.

UNDR is a singular musical encounter in which Rondeau and Kummer become the guides, within the formal framework of the celebrated Aria and its variations, of a music that emerges in the moment and offers itself anew with ever-renewed generosity.

Jean Rondeau is a Southbank Centre Resident Artist for Classical Music: Spring/Summer 2027.

Tickets: from £20