The fascination of evil
Radialsystem. Nico & the Navigators perform a chamber version of "Empathy for the Devil".
"Sympathy for the Devil" was once courted by the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger portrayed the devil as a melancholic figure who, despite all his evil deeds, places great value on style. Jagger's devil also appears transformed on Nico and the Navigators. "Of course 'Sympathy for the Devil' appears, but in Udo Lindenberg's version," reveals director Nicola Hümpel. "Pleased to meet you, guess who I am? What irritates you is my acting without sense," is the refrain of the Lindenberg version. Performer Martin Clausen, one of the original navigators, covers the alt-rocker in a spoken-song variant.
The origin of Hümpel & Co.'s devil's play, however, was the devil's pact of "Freischütz" by Carl Maria von Weber. "For the 200th birthday of the Konzerthaus Berlin and the 200th birthday of the premiere of 'Freischütz' in this building, 'Empathy for the Devil' was supposed to come out. But then Corona threw a spanner in the works. We redesigned the large version for orchestra several times. Now we have a chamber version for the Radialsystem," Hümpel explains. Elements of "Freischütz" are still included. Of course, it's about the seventh bullet, the one that is remotely guided by evil and always hits the target that the devil has chosen and not the one the shooter is aiming at. There are also other opera excerpts, the "Demon Aria" by Anton Rubinstein, for example, and compositions by Claudio Monteverdi and Benjamin Britten. The musical arc extends to today's pop modernity, for example with Radiohead and Jeff Buckley.
In terms of content, Hümpel wants to recast evil. "It seems outdated to me to think about whether man is basically a beast. The diabolical usually lies - see climate change, see Corona - in collective looking away and opportunism rather than in the evil actions of an individual," she says. With such a motif, "Empathy for the Devil" is very contemporary music theatre. Hümpel has been able to win over three outstanding singers: Anna-Doris Capitelli, a mezzo-soprano who belongs to the ensemble of La Scala in Milan, Ted Schmitz, a tenor who performs extensively in the USA and Great Britain, and Nikolay Borchev, a baritone who has sung at the great houses in New York and Paris, Madrid, Munich and Berlin. The orchestra has been reduced to chamber ensemble size with six musicians. The fact that the conductor Jonathan Stockhammer, who is not needed in the chamber version, now straps on his electric bass in order to be able to continue playing, can be seen as proof of the joy of rehearsal work.
Oliver Proske, stage designer of the Navigators productions for almost 25 years and known for overwhelming constructions, holds back on analogue stage construction in this production. Instead, he has put a lot of time and programming work into the video system. This is very unusual for the performing arts in this form. "We work with several self-moving cameras that move into position. They are controlled by software. It works like a light console," Proske explains.
For the performers, this means moving even more precisely to agreed positions. Hümpel sees the artistic added value in the fact that the faces become moving landscapes. "There are so many possibilities for detail. The players also feel this in their feedback. You can play a whole audience with a movement of the eyebrows," Hümpel enthuses. So sometimes evil can be expressed in the twitching of an eyebrow - you can check it out from 16 December at Radialsystem.
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