Baroque fantasy full of mystery

One should not look for a red thread in "Anaesthesia". Even if the soprano pulls it out of the mouth of one of the performers at the end. It's fun like everything else in Nico and the Navigators. After Schubert, this time the team around director Nicola Hümpel took Handel to task. Together with the Austrian music band Franui, named after the alpine meadow of an East Tyrolean village, they created a playground for baroque theater and its arsenal of characters from today's, by no means seriously meant point of view. In 32 numbers from 24 operas and oratorios, Franui merrily plunders the Handel fundus, plays music in the original, plunders and shreds the noble sound with foreign instruments such as accordion, dulcimer, saxophone, tuba. Franui sits on a podium behind gauze in the depth of the peep-box, as Oliver Proske has simply and effectively built it into the stage-free space of the Radialsystem, becomes visible in the parts without singing, and even sings along with the ensemble. Otherwise, the arias, duets and tercets are the responsibility of singers, among whom Terry Wey impresses with his lightly controlled, coloratura-assured countertenor of radiance and piano culture. The many small actions of the Navigators, consisting of dancers, actors and acrobats, also ensure the insensitivity to pain promised in the title. Right at the beginning, Patric Schott is carried out as a living sculpture and cleaned by Yui Kawaguchi. Again and again she will polish the actors during the 90 minutes of the show, if she is not dancing. Et in Arcadia Ego, it says Schott brushed on her belly. To that baroque Arcadia belongs a saber-armored Turk with a Handelian house cap, who speaks the recitatives, intersperses them with many a topical reference. He talks about material imported from Asia, while Kawaguchi touches silk, then lolls himself erotically on ram skins, as two reclining women wear them in the entrance picture and as they are constantly on the scene. A mistake in the daily routine, Adrian Gillott continues, could have cost social status back then. Image after image is lined up in a constant flow. A headless woman's gesticulating hands sprout from her brain, a man hovers one-legged over the scene, feathers become wings, a woman shrieks prima donna-like in time to the music, Kawaguchi stabs a feather into the flesh of a man on the floor. Where have all the greats gone, the narrator asks, Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, Che Guevara. "Piangerò" from Handel's "Giulio Cesare" is not far away, not "Nel riposo" from "Deidamia", which baritone Clemens Koelbl has to sing upside down from the portal. Quietly, thoughtfully, without any special climaxes and affects, everyone goes to the ground whitened for the death march from "Saul", having previously rolled the pavement of the footbridges into possessable moons under a wall of fog. One enjoys this and many other fantasy ingredients to the Handel ragout, winner on points remains the master from Halle.

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