Off to the monastery

Kirill Petrenko performs Puccini's "Suor Angelica" at the Berlin Philharmonie with young singers and musicians. In the Middle Ages, monasteries were bearers of civilization, keepers of ancient knowledge, islands of education in a sea of illiteracy. Those who lived in a monastery did not have it worst, were provided for, reasonably safe, born into a community. Already in the age this must have been long gone. With his 1917 opera "Suor Angelica" wanted to honor the highest form of love for him, mother love. But he also created a haunting document of the spiritual torpor that prevailed behind convent walls. The plot is grisly: Angelica is forced to become a nun. Only after seven years does she learn that her illegitimate child has died. In desperation, she mixes a poisonous potion - and is lucky that her grandmother saves her from eternal damnation, which would have threatened her as a suicide. Compulsions everywhere, permanent feelings of guilt, a guilty conscience, repentance is always demanded. Is such material suitable for young musicians? Kirill Petrenko and the Berliner Philharmoniker are of this opinion and performed the piece - for which Puccini was inspired by the convent life of his sister Iginia and which actually forms the middle section of "Il Trittico" - semi-staged in the Berlin Philharmonie at the beginning of February, under the title "Faith to Face". It is the first education project of the new principal conductor. Nico and the Navigators director Nicola Hümpel takes great pains to emphasize the story's relevance for today - as a tale of humanity in inhuman surroundings. Above all, she pads the supporting roles of the other nuns heavily. Composer Matan Porat has written a prologue and sits at the piano himself; he gives each of the women (sung by students from the two Berlin music academies) one minute to gesturally present her character on a bridge (choreography: Yui Kawaquchi). It is precisely in these portraits that Hümpel's production achieves a high degree of liveliness, coming particularly close to our present. This is also supported by the large video screen on which the action is projected live. Petrenko's gestures are uncommonly soft, flowing, and he achieves with the instrumentalists of the Karajan Academy a lean, iridescent, dynamically, however, quite leveled, largely low-risk sound. A good soundbed for the central conflict between Angelica (Ann Toomey) and the Princess (Katarina Dalayman), who is also her aunt and brings her, almost casually, the terrible news of her son's death. As an educational project, "Faith to Face" is quite successful. The staging is modern and coherent, and it also involves the offspring of the Philharmonic's own "Vocal Heroes" chorus. But even on this evening, the libretto is not rewritten. Once again, as so often in musical theater, everything revolves around a terrible female fate. The title heroine in Benjamin Britten's "The Rape of Lucretia," an opera that the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester had performed a few days earlier in a similar project for young musicians in Berlin, fared little better. Working with young musicians and singers does not automatically mean that new, forward-looking material is also dealt with.

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