Another night healed by art

Anyone who loves Beethoven, modern dance and modern theatre was in for a treat this evening. The staged concert ‘Force & Freedom’ impressed the audience. Nico and the Navigators and the Kussquartett showed how Beethoven can be rethought from a contemporary perspective. Their faces are captured by two hidden cameras and projected onto a giant screen behind them, each face looking contemporary yet like an oil painting capturing the beautiful moment. The innovative blend of multiple art forms amplifies the composer's inner voice and gives new life to the music. The audience was so enthralled by the imagination, drama and sense of humour that the applause went on for a long time. One audience member left the hall saying: ‘I am very excited to have seen such a show in Shanghai.’ The precision of the Germans makes the performances sophisticated and graceful. Literary critic Sun Mengjin remarked that not only did Yui Kawaguchi's dance conquer the two pieces of musical theatre, but the singers also took over the play. The live images are very carefully set and are sometimes a little reminiscent of the Fassbinder style, the quartet flows through Schubert's soul. 

The music critic Li Changying is convinced by the avant-garde high-end staging and finds that Schubert's music offers a great deal of imagination and scope for subsequent generations: ‘Poetry, wandering, phantoms, death, loneliness, confusion and love’. The evening seems to show Schubert's inner heart, but in reality it also epitomises the mood of modern society.

The impact of the two pieces with live image transmissions quickly spread by word of mouth. On both evenings, the artists demonstrated how technology can skilfully combine with live music in a way that can be expected in the 21st century. ‘This is the best performance I've seen in the last few years,’ commented audience members on social media. The vision and courage of the Shanghai Concert Hall is the pride of Shanghai. The audience is shown a definition of how to break boundaries and what a fusion innovation can look like in this world - what the diverse skills of an artist can be today.