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Franz Schubert: Winterreise, D9.11
July 29, 31, August 2, 2003
Lincoln Center, New York
Simon Keenlyside
And The Trisha Brown Dance Company
Director / Choreographer
Trisha Brown
Simon Keenlyside, Baritone
Pedja Muzijevic,Piano
Trisha Brown Dance Company
Brandi L. Norton
Seth Parker
Lionel Popkin
Jennifer Tipton (lighting), Elizabeth Cannon (costumes)
What the critics say
Mostly Mozart reviews; A Wanderer In Search Of Solace
By Allan Kozinn for the NY times, July 31, 2003.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04E7D6173EF932A05754C0A9659C8B63
At Lincoln Center these days, it might be difficult to tell when one festival ends and another begins if someone didn't helpfully change the signs. Until Sunday the center had spent July presenting the Lincoln Center Festival; on Tuesday the curtain went up on the Mostly Mozart Festival. And instead of one opening, Mostly Mozart had two: in addition to the traditional opening-night orchestral concert, at Avery Fisher Hall, the festival presented a revival of the choreographer Trisha Brown's inventive staging of Schubert's ''Winterreise,'' sung by the English baritone Simon Keenlyside, at the John Jay College Theater.
It was a performance that may have seemed more at home in the more expansive Lincoln Center Festival, although perhaps its inclusion in Mostly Mozart was meant to give that somewhat more staid festival a burst of experimental credibility.
Mr. Keenlyside, who invited Ms. Brown to stage Schubert's rich, emotionally raw song cycle (with a commission from Lincoln Center and a handful of European halls and festivals), presented a run of the work here last December. Lincoln Center was right in deciding that it merited a second look, and so quickly: even if Mr. Keenlyside were standing still and singing, the gentleness and expressive depth of his performance would eloquently and believably characterize the wanderer of Schubert's music and Wilhelm Müller's poetry.
Both Mr. Keenlyside and his accompanist, Pedja Muzijevic, are adept at using dynamic and coloristic gradations to suggest the wanderer's blend of lovelorn frailty and determination to push on. In the early part of the 24-song cycle, when the wanderer takes leave of his town, Mr. Keenlyside captures the precarious balance between wanting to linger at places of past happiness and wanting to reject them completely. Even in the later part of the cycle, as the wanderer moves inexorably toward what he regards as the solace of death, a glimmer of this flirtation with past happiness remains: the sound of the post horn enlivens him briefly, even though he cannot realistically expect a letter. Mr. Keenlyside captured that brief flicker of brightness perfectly.
Ms. Brown's contribution was a layer of hieroglyphic choreography for Mr. Keenlyside and three dancers from her troupe, Brandi L. Norton, Seth Parker and Lionel Popkin. On a stage that is virtually bare (Mr. Muzijevic's piano is at the left edge) and against a backdrop that vaguely suggests a clouded night sky, Mr. Keenlyside and the dancers adopt a physical language dominated by hand and arm gestures. Jennifer Tipton's use of stark light and shadow abets both the physicality of the production and its sense of the wanderer's increasingly gloomy journey.
Sometimes Ms. Brown's arm gestures suggest trees, crows and other images in Müller's poetry; elsewhere they are more abstract. Often, Mr. Keenlyside becomes part of a close-knit configuration of two or three dancers, all with arms in different and changing positions. And while that effect occasionally suggests ideas well outside the realm of ''Winterreise'' -- ancient Egyptians, space aliens and wriggling bugs, for example -- most of the time the movement creates an otherworldly effect that seems to suggest the wanderer's emotional state in a way that mirrors what's in the music and goes beyond what's in the text.