A disaster hovers over the old walls

The Bregenz Festival featured "The Fall of the House of Usher" and a "play about happiness. In Claude Debussy's seldom-performed Gothic opera "The Fall of the House of Usher," opera, dance and image merged into a grandiose unity and a new Bregenz stage aesthetic. What the musicologist Robert Orledge with set designer Richard Hudson, director Phyllida Lloyd, choreographer Kim Brandstrup and lighting designer Adam Silverman created in the Festspielhaus from Debussy's fragment and his ballet compositions "Jeux" and "Après-midi d'un faune" as a feast for the ears and eyes is phenomenal. There, Edgar Allan Poe's famous horror story, from which Debussy took the material for music and libretto, reveals not only incestuous Eros elements and the demoniacity of a doctor figure resembling that of Dr. Mirakel in "Tales of Hoffmann." Huge vitrines, moving around each other, continue to spin the passions and fears of Roderick Usher on the revolving stage (fascinating baritone Scott Hendricks as well as his dance double Steven McRae of the Royal Ballet London). The actual motifs of the ballets gave way to thematic integration into the operatic material. Thus the fragment became a coherent thriller, which the actions and feelings of the singers explain in dance and foresight. And which they help to an exciting conclusion in the final dance and song phase. The respective dance doubles and their singing partners (outstanding soprano Katia Pellegrino as Roderick's sister Madeline with Leanne Benjamin, baritone Cavalier as Roderick's friend with Johannes Stepanek, and tenor John Graham-Hall as the devilish doctor with Cary Avis) were provided by U.S. conductor Lawrence Foster and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra with that fine musical tapestry that inspires peak performance. No wonder that theater managers from all over the world did not miss this world premiere in French with German subtitles and its audience acceptance! Three evenings earlier, a "play about happiness" had its world premiere on the workshop stage - with the Nicola Huempe Group. Their success had begun in 1998 at the Bauhaus in Dessau. From Berlin, "Nico and the Navigators" started their triumphal processions worldwide in 1999 with new, spectacular experiments. Now Hümpel, assisted by the instrumentalists of the East Tyrolean Franui-Musicbanda and sponsored by the Berlin Senate and the Austrian Cultural Foundation, has developed the piece "Wo Du nicht bist". From August 10, it can be experienced in the Sophiensälen in Berlin. Eight actors, convincing in their acting, dancing, pantomiming and singing, accompanied by Schubert songs, some of which are original in sound and some of which have been alienated, create the "question of the where, how and essence of happiness": as a feeling of being alone, being with someone or being together. On, in, in front of and above a bright supermarket facade with an underground parking garage mouth and integrated orchestra tower, Hümpel lets her young crowd of mimes (pastel dressed by Frauke Ritter) philosophize, meditate and communicate in German, French, English, Flemish and Japanese. Lyrically and acrobatically, there are no short excursions into the Grand Guignol, the Kabuki theater or the circus ring, happiness can develop in munching apples as well as in browsing, and the audience's eyes and ears are constantly on the move.

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