Forms of Silence

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architecture, ballet, Bavarian State Ballet, cello, choreography, dance, death, globalization, LG Arts Cente, Mikhaylovsky Theatre Ballet, Multiplicity Forms of Silence and Emptiness, Munich, National Spanish Dance Company, Norwegian National Ballet, organ, Seoul, Sohn JiAe, The Inside Korea, Universal Ballet

Playing a cello in human form

Europe during the Baroque era, a period and artistic style that prevailed in the seventeenth century, was dominated by a series of great musicians who are beloved to this day. Among them is Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), the great German musician and composer. Dubbed the “Father of Classical Music,” Bach has been much-loved worldwide for more than three centuries.

Many countries around the world have seen both dead and living musicians and artists inspired by the legendary composer’s music. In Korea, too, there is no doubt that the artistic and musical scenes have been much-influenced by his music over the recent globalized decades.

A new piece on the stages of Seoul has now proved that Bach is ever-renewable, this time in the form of a ballet. Multiplicity, Forms of Silence and Emptiness is a ballet featuring the well-known Baroque compositions of Bach. It ran for three days, from 25 to 27 April 2014, at the LG Arts Center in central Seoul. As one can see from the title, the piece aims to deliver the “multiplicity” of artistic elements that exist in Bach’s music, as well as in other forms of art, architecture and dance from the Baroque period during which the composer lived. The choreography also illuminates some important moments of Bach’s life, emphasizing his passion for his music and showing the loneliness and sometimes painful illnesses that were part of his inspiration.

The piece is being presented by Universal Ballet, one of Korea’s major ballet companies. Universal Ballet is now the fifth troupe to perform the work, following the National Spanish Dance Company, the Norwegian National Ballet, the Bavarian State Ballet in Munich and Russia’s Mikhaylovsky Theatre Ballet. “As a long-time fan of this work, I am so happy to be able to bring such great art to Korea,” said general director Moon Hoon-sook of Universal Ballet. This work, she added, has always been both one which she wanted to present as a dancer and one which she always wanted to view from the audience.

The ballet features twenty-three Bach compositions, arranged into two acts. Act One is centered on the signature arts of the Baroque period and on the life of the composer himself. It featured a series of choreographed dance moves, all inspired by Bach’s music, as the dancers wear simple black costumes and dance as if they are each a musical note in Bach’s composition, acting like musical instruments and performing the sounds they make. In one of the more memorable scenes, a male dancer, portraying Bach himself, plays a human cello formed by the arch of his counterpart’s body. The choreography shows the audience the way in which Bach, through his music, became one with his musical instruments.

Act Two focuses on Bach’s final years with their string of hardships, agonies and, finally, in the end, death. The emptiness and loneliness the musician felt in his later years is exquisitely displayed by a group of seven male performers dancing to solemn organ music. Meanwhile, a female dancer, wearing a white mask, symbolizes Bach’s purity and also the conflict he felt between his music and religion, a conflict from which he suffered until his death. In the final scene, Bach is at death’s door and collapses onto the floor as black-clad dancers stand behind him, like a series of musical notes, dancing to the rhythm. The scene gives the audience an important message: even though he dies, the musical legacy he left behind is everlasting.

Choreography for the show comes from Spanish artist Nacho Duato. “At first, I was so afraid of the idea of having to choreograph a piece based on Bach’s music,” Duato said at a press conference on 21 April 2014. “His music is so great and beautiful that I thought, ‘How dare do I have my humble, dirty hands do something with his music?’ I felt so scared at first,” he confessed. “As a choreographer, I wanted to show my sincere respect for the great musician through this work. I had to be careful, out of my deep respect for his music, in choosing some of Bach’s pieces that I thought would be most suitable for dancing.”

Sohn JiAe – The Inside Korea

Reading with Bach

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architecture, Chaconne in D minor, choreography, ciacona, composition, dance, death, Frankenstein, Lizzi Kew Ross, Lizzi Kew Ross and Co., London, Mary Shelley, Reading with Bach, rhythm, Ruth Elder, violin, Walking and Talking Books

Lizzi Kew Ross and Co.’s Reading with Bach brings us dancers and musicians into the territory of books. Reading with Bach is a kind of excavation, where the real and imagined worlds collide. Through movement and music, we watch, see, listen, engage and speculate on that strange, solitary act that is reading.

For what is it to hold and handle the physical reality of a book? What is it to read – to turn the page and be led into minds, bodies, objects, space, architecture, netherworlds, underworlds and other worlds? What is to be charmed, seduced or even bludgeoned by language, images and actions? All this happens in our imaginations, and we construct these worlds within ourselves.

As in the act of dying, we read alone. Each person’s experience is solitary, individual, and unique: the list of books we read, re-read, wish for and avoid is as personal as a fingerprint.

Reading with Bach, with three dancers and two live violinists, was developed from choreographer Lizzi Kew Ross’s Walking and Talking Books events, where participants discussed one of a series of books while walking a number of interconnected routes through the City of London. It gave Lizzi the chance to observe people as they walked among crowds, closing themselves off from the exterior world by reading, in an interior world of their own. What is it to read – to turn the page and be led into other worlds? Not only do we construct these worlds within ourselves, but what we imagine can become so vivid that the real and the imagined collide.

Lizzi Kew Ross asks, “can I, as a choreographer, through dance and music, explore the notion of public and private with the world of books and Bach as a starting point? As soon as the dancer opens the book on stage, we go into her head, we hear the music she hears and as she is lifted up reading, she is taken by them on a journey. But who is leading whom? Are they figments of her imagination, characters in the book she is reading, or are they, as in Shelley’s Frankenstein, manipulating her vision and writing the page before she reads it? We will play with the rhythm of this dynamic, asking the audience to ‘read’ the work in a variety of ways.”

Composer Ruth Elder notes, “When choosing the particular extracts from Bach’s music to incorporate into my score, I looked to his solo violin works and found the Chaconne in D minor [BWV 1004] is a piece that really speaks to me. I often find it playing in my head even if I haven’t physically played it for a long time. After choosing the pieces, I then had to create my own extended sound worlds inspired by Bach’s piece. I thought of those composers in 1720 deciding against attempting a ciacona for the violin and realized what a task it would be to create these links that would transcend from Bach’s music to my own material and for them to sound integrated and organic without disrupting the mastery of Bach’s compositions.”

– Lizzi Kew Ross and Co.

Gardiner Conducts High-Stakes Motets

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a cappella, bassoon, cantata, Cantata Pilgrimage, chorale, chorus, Collegium Vocale Gent, concerto, continuo, counterpoint, death, Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf, dragon, emotions, Erato, Fürchte dich nicht, fugue, gesture, Gramophone, high-wire artist, Ich lasse dich nicht, Jesu meine Freude, Johann Christoph Bach, Johann Heinrich Ernesti, John Eliot Gardiner, Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, Komm Jesu komm!, Lobet den Herrn alle Heiden, Monteverdi Choir, motet, opera, Philippe Herreweghe, Philippe Petit, René Jacobs, RIAS Kammerchor, Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, soprano, St. Thomas School

Underpinning so much of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s approach to Bach is identifying the provenance and essence of dramatic character, “mutant opera” (as Gardiner calls it) found in genres – like the motet – which are not enacted but depend on perceptive rhetorical judgement within a fabric of rolling continuity. Bach’s motets may pay homage to forebears in scale, tone and technique but each one, especially revealed in this vibrant and questing new set, presses for fresh meaning with all the virtuoso means Bach could muster.

The motets have appeared as pillars of the Monteverdi Choir’s existence over five decades, punctuated by a notable recording for Erato in the early 1980s and most recently within selected programs during the millennial Cantata Pilgrimage. For Gardiner, these works represent an endlessly fascinating tapestry of discovery which will doubtless continue to evolve, a body enhanced by the addition of Ich lasse dich nicht (BWV Anh. 159) – a short motet once thought to have been by Bach’s great elder cousin, Johann Christoph, but now considered the work of the Young Turk.

Common to the Monteverdi Choir’s performances over the years are their inimitable textual projection, clarity of line, rhythmic rigor and an overriding sense of expectancy and flair, just occasionally slipping a little too eagerly into exaggerated gesture. Gardiner asks for more pinpoint delicacy, quicksilver contrast and lightness than ever and illuminatingly inward da camera dialoguing between voices. For all the pages of sprung bravura and purpose, especially in Lobet den Herrn (BWV 230) and Singet dem Herrn (BWV 225), there are as many periods of elongated and poignant restraint.

There is no more compelling example than the soft, controlled climate of the final contemplative strains of Fürchte dich nicht (BWV 228), where we have an extraordinary representation of the precious mystery of belonging to Christ. The soprano motif on “und dein Blut, mir zugut” (‘”thy life and thy blood”) is uttered with such sustained and ritualized other-worldliness (track 15, 5’38”) that the risk of disembodiment is only allayed by the Monteverdi Choir’s captivating certainty of line as the devoted soul drifts heavenwards.

One of the most striking features in this new collection, as I mentioned previously, is how attentive Gardiner is to the individuality of each of the motets. This might seem a time-honored ambition and yet, for all the admirable qualities of, say, the RIAS Kammerchor under René Jacobs or the more recent reading from Philippe Herreweghe and Collegium Vocale Gent, neither of these brings as ambitious a kaleidoscopic challenge to the listener in identifying renewed character and meaning as Gardiner aspires to. Indeed, Herreweghe recently went as far as to say that “a groundbreaking reading is not necessary.”

Gardiner would disagree. How lucidly Der Geist hilft (BWV 226), that short but compact work written for the funeral of Ernesti, the old Rector of St Thomas’s, in 1729, sets out to reflect the infirmities of man gradually imbued with the intercessions of the Holy Spirit. Here we have something more perspicacious than merely good pacing: the Monteverdi singers narrate this play of uncertainty and the growing anticipation of understanding God’s will with such corporate and dynamic purpose that, even when the two choirs converge in an affirming four-part double fugue, we never feel quite out of the woods. The tantalizing prospect of salvation is only truly satisfied at the final cadence of a luminously directed chorale.

Some of these interpretative risks may not suit those who prefer a less articulated, more abstract, soft-edged and generally expansive landscape. Singet dem Herrn is typically exuberant in its outer “concerti,” but the unique double-choir juxtaposition of chorale and free contrapuntal “rhapsody” could perhaps have yielded more genuine contemplative warmth. Indeed, Gardiner rarely delivers a comfortable ride and yet what brilliant visions emerge, most strikingly in the central work, the five-part Jesu meine Freude (BWV 227), riding – literally – the storm of the love of the flesh, Satan, the old dragon and death.

Throughout this masterpiece, terrifying, quasi-“turba” (crowd) scenes are viscerally offset against an ethereal quest for redemption. “Es ist nun nichts Verdammliches” (“There is now no condemnation”) has surely never enjoyed such a mesmerizing volley of declamation and rich illusion over a short space as Gardiner summons, while “Trotz dem alten Drachen” (“Despite the old dragon”) spits out its irascible consonances only to be disarmingly defied by the elevated purity of “in gar sichrer Ruh” (“in confident tranquility”) – all this in contrasting tableaux of ever-surprising emotional impact. If the listener is often left gasping, this is caused not only by vocal singularity of purpose but by the discreet and graphic responsiveness of the instrumental continuo players, among whom the bassoon here and in Komm, Jesu, komm! (BWV 229) contributes with knowing effect.

As you would imagine, surprises abound – some of which take a little getting used to. Gardiner challenges orthodoxy in how these a cappella holy grails are fundamentally signposted and he does so, almost always, with persuasive passion and genuine zeal. High-wire artist Philippe Petit is a fitting cover image to this important landmark in highly recommended, high-stakes performances.

Jonathan Freeman-Attwood – Gramophone