Nonverbal Announcement

Gioacchino Rossini's "Petite Messe solennelle", theatrically prepared in Erfurt Questions about opening times arise at the beginning of the creation, at which two performers emerge from under a jauntily curved arch. This arch - possibly in memory of the rainbow set by the God of the Old Testament and of the product aesthetics of the 1950s - vaults the stage of the Erfurt theater. Such questions form a probable prelude for a theater project that intended to enrich a mass composition "with intimate testimonies of faith and doubt". The festival pèlerinages, which was actually based in Weimar, presented Gioacchino Rossini's "Petite Messe solennelle" in the state capital, a work premiered in 1864, shortly before the death of the grand master of opera buffa and creator of the Grand Opéra. Nico and the Navigators - the artistic duo Nicola Hümpel (group dynamics and direction) and Oliver Proske (stage), who have been active in the Berlin off-theater scene for years, along with character actors who cross borders as actors and body artists - were appointed as the performing bodies. For many listeners, Rossini's little mass did not and does not seem particularly solemn, but rather all too cheerful, sometimes "quirky" and altogether nourished more by the spirit of musical entertainment than by church music genre traditions: Music with "slipped" dignity and occasional situational comedy that may (nevertheless or even more so) be pleasing to the "dear God." Rossini's late work does not rely on the traditional division of labor of solos, chorus and orchestra, but is performed by a dozen singers, two pianos and harmonium. So now in Erfurt, two grand pianos were pushed to the harmonium, which was already visibly positioned on stage and presented the surrogate of a wind section. The three keyboard instruments underpinned and played around the gymnastic and sporting interludes of the quartet of special performers led by Yui Kawaguchi and the twelve singers, all of whom are also characteristic "types": Milos Bulajic, the tenor tenor, and the supple-profound bass Nikolay Borchev, the sharply pointed soprano Laura Mitchell and the mezzo-soprano Ulrike Mayer, convincing with a calm, warm voice. Conductor Nicholas Jenkins, sometimes flailing around the stage as if in a trance or even casually waving, animated the singing and hammering team in an appropriate manner: the contrasts were sharply profiled. Nicola Hümpel presented, in the run-up to Benedict XVI's tour and with various more or less humorous allusions to the Pope, an excessive and intense theater evening, which moves and remains in the wake of Christoph Marthaler, Alain Platel and other dance concept artists who have become significant in the last decade: a "concert of bodies", which "questions" the mass text and the church concert music associated with it with grace, but precisely in a non-conceptual way. However, this procedure does not touch upon the questions of the tradition of faith, religious and church music rites that have possibly become obsolete, or the questions of the authoritarian and self-righteous papacy. To expect the theatrical images conjured up by Hümpel and her troupe to deal sensibly with the currently surging need for faith again or the waves of superstition that are spreading like a torrent would be to hopelessly overtax them. In the pietistic fringe segment of Protestantism (which, according to its genesis, is strictly word-based), ideas of a "non-verbal proclamation" have long been floating around that are possibly not too far removed from voodoo cult customs. Hümpel's sensitive and esoteric approach to the problems of faith in the early 21st century and the critique of creeds creates some pretty theatrical images, but misses all the centers and even the epicenters of the problems at hand.

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