On Thursday afternoon, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment became the first of several British ensembles to visit the George Enescu International Festival in the coming days. On the stage of the Athenaeum they presented “Breaking Bach”, a new ballet choreographed by Kim Brandstrup.
To this eye untrained in the language of dance, Brandstrup and his troupe – three professionals, the others drawn from a South London schools project but several already making their way in the dance world – achieve a remarkable meeting of mind and gesture between the German High Baroque and 21st-century street dance. Dissonance would have been a predictable approach, seeking violent contrast rather than sinuous complement between Bach and hip-hop, but Brandstrup has found consonance in every shift of music and movement: each art form respects and translates the other.
The suspensions in the slow movement of the Double Violin Concerto have the dancers grasping and resisting. In the finale, Classical Greek poses came to mind: the discus-thrower, the wine-bearer, Achilles as break-dancer. The Sarabande from the Fifth Cello Suite embodies an awakening, either after a long sleep or a profound shock to the system, with sudden pauses for thought.
In Brandstrup’s choreography, and its often astonishing realisation by the young dancers, physical expression is not squeezed into boxes marked “anger” or “joy” or “sorrow”, but rather left as strong and as oblique as the music itself. Formal and courtly elegance was an entirely apt but unexpected component of quick pieces such as the finale of the F minor Concerto BWV1056, in a version for oboe. The opening movement presented a game of pairs which became personal and tender in the central Adagio. To finish, Brandenburg 3 brought the entire troupe on stage, for a chase on the cusp of danger, marked by flashes of fight and flight.
The OAE musicians moulded their performances to the dancers as well as vice versa, unfolding the counterpoint in more strongly marked episodes than they might when left to their own devices. Any festival or theatre with the resources to take on the project would, I fancy, have a winner on their hands. I would travel to see it again.
A tour of interactive art spaces may likewise be the aim for the pianist Alexandra Silocea, the creator of ‘Ver Sacrum: Klimt meets Bösendorfer’. Taking its name and inspiration from the magazine published by the artists of Vienna’s Secession movement, ‘Sacred Spring’ fuses Lieder, piano pieces, poetry and Gustav Klimt’s paintings into an unbroken, hour-long multimedia hymn to nature. Mirrored pillars and walls at the Museum of Interactive Art (MINA) in Bucharest surround the listeners with reflections from the 3D-imagery projected on floor-to-ceiling screens, but in a space wider than it is deep, they make for an unforgiving acoustic, further compromised by the venue’s rubber flooring and flickering overheads.
Reciting arboreal classics of English poetry from John Clare to James Joyce in a French-accented cantabile, Laëtitia Eïdo used a microphone which exaggerated sibilants and blurred roughly one line in every four: “bough” made for a particular and predictable stumbling block. As one of perhaps a handful of native English speakers in the audience, I wondered what the Romanians made of it: those I spoke to afterwards were bewitched by the son-et-lumière unity of word and sound and image, and entirely open to a programme presented without advance notice of its contents.
For this old stick-in-the-mud, much the most captivating element of the event was the singing of Patricia Nolz. In Der Lindenbaum from Schubert’s Winterreise, she refrained from interrogating every word of the text, and left her control of tone and diction to project a still and noble point of beauty – like the lime tree itself – while both Silocea’s accompaniment and the leafy projections fluttered around her. Housman’s Loveliest of Trees sensitively prefaced Ständchen, although the “fifty springs” of the poet’s fond hope were incongruously illustrated by a maple in late autumn.
Best to concentrate on the music, and the singing in particular, though Nolz left the stage after a scant quartet of Schubert and Schumann and did not return until the encore: her curving legato around Irgendwo auf der Welt, a nostalgic hit in Weimar Germany, underlined the lingering sense of a talent underused. Most adventurous and compelling of the solo piano pieces was Fazil Say’s Black Earth, which required Silocea to reach into the body of her Bösendorfer and stop the strings in imitation of the Saz, a traditional Turkish string instrument. Here, too, the treatment of Klimt fully embraced the potential of the immersive medium, with waves of autumn and brown silk rippling across the screens in geometric droplets. More of that level of imaginative engagement across art forms, and ‘Ver Sacrum’ would surely find a receptive audience at venues such as London’s Lightroom.
Peter's press trip was funded by the George Ensecu International Festival.
