Playing sheep, not counting them

Cuddly rock was yesterday, cuddly baroque is today, because it has spikes. Bregenz (VN) - Baroque greets pop, that's been around for a long time. Handel with tuba, hammered dulcimer and accordion, that is perhaps also not absolutely new, consistently pulled through the combination however of the Austrian Musicbanda Franui. Once again, the - mainly - East Tyrolean performers work with the German ensemble Nico and The Navigators. After a Schubert evening that thrilled the Bregenz Festival audience, they delivered a pastiche opera for the 250th anniversary of the death of George Frideric Handel. First performed in Halle, "Anaesthesia" had its premiere last night on the Bregenz workshop stage. Somehow the sequence of scenes from 20 stage works by the baroque master reminds one of those "The whole Shakespeare" evenings with which, a few years ago, pretty much all German-language theaters succeeded in attracting even the classical music abstainers. Whereas there, the most banal jokes possible were filtered out of the tragedies and comedies, here the focus is on the real worlds of emotion that Handel unleashes. Loving or perfidious Whatever method director Nicola Hümpel uses in her ensemble work, her colleagues succeed in creating extraordinarily filigree scenes. The great parade, the affectionate finger theater, perfidious malice and the eternal longing for Arcadia - once the shepherd's play is set in motion, one stops counting the numbers, doesn't even think about the (other) content of the works "Theodora", "Agrippina", "Rinaldo", "Saul", etc. The dancers, especially Yui Kawaguchi, and the singers do their part to keep the fantasy web "Anaesthesia" alive on the great stage ramp by Oliver Proske. The musicians provide tension anyway. The repetition effect, which causes limping relatively quickly in the original, only sets in towards the end, at which one has long been sure, however, that this cuddly baroque is so beautiful because it has spines.

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