Beethoven at his best in dance

This summer's very summery music days in Hitzacker place an unusual focus on the German composer It all began when John Neumeier felt called to choreograph Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" more than three decades ago: an act of creative appropriation of time-barred intellectual property that was later to affect Handel's "Messiah" and even Mahler's symphonies. In contrast, the light-playing "B Minor Mass" by Bach, with which Jeffrey Tate opened his penultimate symphonic season, faded into an overdue reverence to the optical zeitgeist. Which, after all, thrives to the extent that listening patience diminishes. In the absence of experience with more complex forms of sound, which are not effortlessly given, confidence in the ability of well-composed music to make itself understood without visual assistance and to speak for itself is dwindling everywhere. Accustomed to having everything complicated simplified, everything ambiguous made into words, a generation of musical illiterates has been growing up for a long time. A musical elite, which has experienced the interplay of effort and delight from childhood on, is confronted with a majority of impatient consumers who long for the quick rush. Even if Oliver Wille, the artistic director of the Sommerliche Musiktage Hitzacker, and his quietly amused quartet partners may not be aware of it: the idea of short-circuiting with a performance group that thrives on "translating" musical energy streams into body movement, dance, and light play could work against the basic idea of Germany's longest-running chamber music festival: to make the enormity of great sound art acoustically tangible. Fortunately, the opening concert of the 73rd Musiktage was conducive to dispelling such misgivings. With the numerically first and the actually last of Beethoven's 16 string quartets (not counting the "Great Fugue" op. 133 and the reworking of the Piano Sonata op. 14.1 into a string quartet), it outlined the Herculean task that the festival management had set for itself: to present Beethoven's 28-year string quartet oeuvre in its entirety over the course of nine days. In order to achieve this ambitious goal, Oliver Wille is currently putting not only his regular formation, the Kuss Quartet, to the test, but also students from his Hanover string quartet class as well as scholarship holders from the German Music Competition, who are spending a week gaining experience on and off the stage as the "Prizewinners' Academy". As a foretaste of the Kuss Quartet's intermedia Beethoven project for the jubilee year 2020, Jana Kuss and Oliver Wille (violins), William Coleman (viola) and Mikayel Hakhnazaryan (cello) delivered themselves to the troupe Nico and the Navigators, founded in 1998 at the Bauhaus Dessau, at the beginning of the festival. For Beethoven's F major quartet from the first cast of six op. 18 - fruit of laborious work in view of the hardly surpassable genre models of Haydn and Mozart - and Enno Poppe's entertaining gloss of variations "Freizeit" (dedicated to the Kuss Quartett in 2016) still respectable in cloth, the four not only took off their footwear after the intermission. Barefooted and stripped of their quartet notes, they casually abandoned themselves to their memory of sound, with nothing less than Beethoven's last completed string quartet op. 135 at stake. Into which a dancer of grace now interfered: Yui Kawaguchi, the feline soul of the Nico troupe, a feather-jointed manikin, half gnome, half elf. Reminiscent from afar of the cultic dances from which Japanese No theater sprang, she let the electric shocks of Beethoven's four-part interrupted movement art twitch through her sinews in order to board the stylized moon ship in the serene variation movement "cantante e tranquillo", which had already taken the violins and viola on board. An unparalleled success with the audience, as can be guessed. Beethoven "danced" in this way: not necessarily, but it can be (to parody the enigmatic double motto of the final movement).

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