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Schmopera, Oct 10, 2023 |
John Hohmann
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Schubert: Der Doppelgänger, New York, Park Avenue Armory, ab 22.9.2023
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A clarifying and revelatory evening with Schubert and Jonas Kaufmann |
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Franz Schubert’s Schwanengesang (Swan Song) may have anticipated the
masterful staging of Doppelganger that the adventurous director Claus Guth
brought to the massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall at New York’s Park Avenue
Armory late last month. Art songs generally reside in a lonely, often
isolated place, and this song cycle is no exception. But it traverses such
an expansive emotional range, largely desolate and hallucinatory to be sure,
but with glances of passion and joy, that the overlaid context Guth and his
team have created feels both clarifying and revelatory.
Jonas
Kaufmann, billed simply as voice portrays a wounded solider on a journey to
meet his “Doppelgänger”, his identical self, that will signal the moment of
his death. Kaufman and his long-time accompanist, pianist Helmut Deutsch
shared the 55,000 square foot stage with a team of 22 soldiers and six
nurses under the fluid and extremely energetic guidance of movement director
Sommer Ulrickson. They occupy a somber World War I military hospital
consisting of row after row of white metal beds occupied by restless and
convulsive soldiers. Michael Levine’s set design, elegantly static at the
start, erupted with churning motion in service to the non-linear storyline.
What at the outset might seem a sacrilege, Schubert is supported, indeed
complemented by the original music and sound composition of Mathis Nischke,
whose electronic soundscape possesses its own enigmatic logic. Nischke’s
composition creates a dramatic flow doing its part in erasing any semblance
of the traditional recital as it accompanies the non-stop action of the
staging. Mark Grey’s superb sound design melds the artistic and technical
forces at hand while Urs Schönebaum’s stark and dramatic lighting along with
saturating video projections by Rockfilm further animate the psychological
drama. Constance Hoffman’s costumes for Kaufmann and the other soldiers are
neutral and ragged suggesting the human ravages of war, but they move well
and the starched uniforms worn by the nurses carry an air of inevitability
about them.
Perhaps another seeming sacrilege, the light — and
natural sounding — amplification of Kaufmann was, again, not. Given the
impossibly challenging acoustics of the drill hall, this was a necessary
service to both singer and audience. The subtle sound boost, a better choice
then say a megaphone, helped us keep track of the tenor who, as a result of
effective slight-of-hand stage movement and the artful chaos of the
production, had the ability to disappear from one spot only to reappear in
another.
Remaining constant however was the burnished glow of
Kaufmann’s voice with clarion high notes, a lustrous middle voice and the
heroic strength of his baritonal lower register. The tenor’s wrenching
interpretations of the cycle’s 14 songs while performing strenuous physical
movement left no doubt that he was as wholly committed to the rigors of
Doppelgänger as he was to the rueful Schwanengesang. And it’s worth
mentioning that at moments he sang lying flat and in several otherwise
vocally disadvantageous positions.
“Ständchen”, with lyrics by poet
Ludwig Rellstab, remains the most familiar in the cycle. Kaufmann’s reading
felt newly energized albeit by melancholy and yearning. Of the remaining
songs the nature driven irony of “Herbst”, lyrics also by Rellstab, was
perhaps the most poignant in which Kaufmann probed the simplicity of his
character’s bleak acknowledgment of lost love. Poet Heinrich Heine provided
lyrics for the final song, “Der Doppelgänger”, in which Kaufmann’s
overwhelming anguish and resignation was palpable.
Deutsch,
accustomed to the formality of recitals by the world’s most illustrious
singers, here sat center stage and was often surrounded by waves of
soldiers, nurses and even Kaufmann who never leaned into the piano as
recitalists are wont to do but instead sought refuge by crouching down
beside it. Deutsch receives his own solo moment with the addition of the
Andante sostenuto movement from Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 21in B-flat
major. Placed between “Abschied” and “Ihr Bild”, the movement’s mournful
mystery spoke without words to the inner workings of the solider’s mind and
spurs who knows what associations among the audience. This was a gorgeously
sad sequence that, like the entire performance, was clarifying and
revelatory.
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