A pleasure: Schubert at the Elbphilharmonie

The ensemble Nico and the Navigators delights with song and dance in the Small Hall Hamburg. The Schubert song "Der Leiermann" has rarely been heard so sweetly - delicately interpreted by tenor Ted Schmitz. From Mahler as a tableau vivant to Shakespeare's sonnets, the Berlin-based ensemble Nico and the Navigators has brought various fruitful fusions of text classics, opera, song and classical music to the stage. Now, on the occasion of the thematic focus "Winter Journeys" in the Elbphilharmonie, it invited to "Silent Songs Into The Wild" in the Small Hall. And indeed, one has seldom experienced Schubert's classical songs as fresh and then again as cheerful and ironic as with this fearlessly boundary-breaking ensemble. Schubert's song art encompasses stories of wandering, love, parting. They evoke associations with home, strangeness and loneliness. For a contemporary interpretation today, the ensemble of four singers and three dancers as well as a pianist and a guitarist, augmented by the Apollon Musagète Quartet, finds unassuming but effective images. The excerpts from Schubert's well-known cycles, who wrote close to 600 songs, become little scenes, ravishing miniatures observed by two unobtrusive camera eyes left and right of the stage. The mulled wine stand warms you during the intermission The actors, all in everyday costumes, know exactly where to place themselves on the floor markings to land in close-up on the large, separable screen. The images expand the - mostly melancholic - emotional worlds as well as the movements of the dancers, most notably Yui Kawaguchi, who pulls off several artful solos and proves her versatility. Anna-Luise Recke, on the other hand, literally plays with the singers' bodies, merging with them or sometimes thundering her fist against a ribcage. Soprano Julia von Landsberg shines with humor. Sarah Laulan lends her contra alto to stories of escape. Most of the songs are rather melancholic, the ensemble concedes, only to dance across the stage in a particularly joyful manner during "Farewell". At the end, after three hours, when the D minor string quartet "Death and the Maiden" is heard, the enthusiasm of the audience is released. Some warmed themselves during the intermission, freezing due to renovations, at the mulled wine stand on the staircase. Its drink made the timeless songs sound even a little more comforting.

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