Full body poetry that sounds excellent

It was not surprising that the theater troupe Nico and the Navigators should be back at the Bregenz Festival, for the ensemble around Nicola Hümpel is one of the best that the German music theater scene - the innovative one, of course - has to offer. Exciting was the fact that this year, the artistic director David Pountney and his "Art from Time" director Laura Berman, who always focuses on new things, came up with an old Rossini mass. The expectations regarding a not only new, but also surprising garb had been fulfilled yesterday evening on the very well occupied workshop stage at the Festspielhaus. And in this respect it is not tragic that the "Petite Messe solennelle" had already been seen in several places before it landed - as an Austrian premiere - on the workshop stage at the Festspielhaus in the center of this year's streamlined KAZ program. Everything that Nicola Hümpel (direction), Nicholas Jenkins (music) and Oliver Proske (set design) approach seems fresh anyway. As a group that does not focus on the clownish, but always on a profound and sometimes abysmal humor, to give sacred works a wide berth does not apply here. Eye-twinklingly illustrated Gioachino Rossini was not inhibited by reverence when, years after he had already put composition aside and devoted himself more to cooking, he accepted the request of a count and his wife for a mass. The fact that the not so small, extraordinarily orchestrated work, first performed in 1864, does not deny the creator of many entertaining operas, also justifies the tongue-in-cheek discussion that the Navigators decided to have a few months ago. May questions of faith be asked to the sound of a mass traditionally structured according to the liturgy? The answer is yes, and without reservation. Nicola Hümpel doesn't make the mistake of getting into criticism of Catholicism. The figure of a scientist is introduced and contrasted with that of a priest. Instead of a text-rich discourse, there are some text fragments complementing the mass and, above all, physical theater, which comes across so poetically that one spontaneously agrees with the opinion that clever questions do not need an answer at all. Whoever gets involved in this mechanism, which is driven by dance in an immensely exciting way, will experience the awakening of the senses that this troupe demonstrates. A choral choreography grows here into great theater, which does not build itself up into a scenic oratorio, but contains many small but significant individual moments.

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