Nico and the Navigators: Force and Freedom – With the Kuss Quartett

Video on demand via ARTE Nico and the Navigators have a proven connection to the lighthouses of Western music history. Their specifically music-poetic mixtures of theater, dance and concert have already been the subject of Bach, Schubert and Mahler, among others. It was obvious to continue this tradition in 2020 and to dedicate oneself to the Bonn master of free musical art practice and his 250th birthday - like 99.9% of all culture creators. For this purpose, the brilliant musical abilities of the Kuss Quartet were assured, in order to theatrically circle the infamous late string quartets (and some songs) with them in the Navigators-familiar alliance of sound and movement, seriousness and play. After the canceled stage premiere and corona-induced restructuring, a "Staged Concert" was devised, first realized at Radialsystem on December 21 and available on Arte for another month. Under the (particularly virulent) tension between constraint and freedom, excerpts from the quartets op. 132, op. 135 and, of course, the visionary "Grosse Fuge" were examined for their existential potential under the proven direction of Nicola Hümpel; a cinematic-scenic search for traces that, in the poetry of minimalist abstraction and allusion, repeatedly incorporates signs of the pandemic present. There are ravishing choreographies by dancer Yui Kawaguchi, endearingly melancholic song adaptations by Ted Schmitz, or the incorporation of Beethovenian words and ideas by actor Patrick Schott. All this is not quite as complex and sadly funny as one is used to from the Navigators, but it is an eloquent approach to a music that is overshadowed by almost "holy" seriousness without doing it violence. The real protagonist is the Kuss Quartet, which is astonishingly accurate in all scenic situations. Beethoven's late quartets have not been heard so intensely for a long time...

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