Chocolate and self-mortification

Nico and the Navigators use the openness inherent in Rossini's mass for a general meditation on faith and doubt that is light-footed, imaginative and amusing – all of which is perfectly in keeping with Rossini. What is shown is a kind of total work of art made up of dance, pantomime, acting and musical performance, but oddly enough it never seems overloaded, even though quite a lot is happening on stage (directed by Nicola Hümpel). Dressed in colourful sixties clothes, the twelve singers spread out on the stage and create alternative teeming pictures: here is someone chewing on a rose petal, there one of them is stroking the man in front's head, here someone is dancing to music, there one of them is standing stiff as a poker at the edge of the stage and silently moving his mouth. You don't have to understand everything and indeed you can't, and yet it comes across as strangely meaningful and enigmatic. Only exceptionally does the Navigators' imagery fall back on clearly decipherable and then quickly flat symbolism, as when at the beginning of the “Credo” material wealth and greed is referenced, with banknotes perpetually being waved or with one of the performers flagellating himself with his suit jacket. The dance of images is held together by an unobtrusively added background story. Two seekers after God keep on appearing amid the various sections of the mass to contest the clash between cool reason and spirituality. The latter, represented in the person of a solemnly purring monk (A. Gillot), ultimately collapses into compulsive self-mortification (“I ate chocolate last night. Oh God, I am a bad person). On the other hand, the pedantically hesitant and matter-of-fact Benedikt (P. Fasching) hasn't got much further by the end of the evening either. There is no one on stage who is not acting: even the conductor (N. Jenkins) is transformed into an actor and conducts the music with pantomime-style dramatisation. Despite all the activity on the stage, it goes astonishingly well, with the twelve excellent and alert singers also on hand to help the conductor. The result is an exuberant work of art straddling the “holy” and the “damned” and a piece of world theatre of the most entertaining and exciting kind.

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