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Winterreise, D9.11
16, 18 September 2003
The Barbican, London
Simon Keenlyside, Brandi L Norton and Lionel Popkin perform Winterreise, choreographed by Trisha Brown. Photo: Tristram Kenton
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)
Two articles about this production
All singing, all dancing. A feature by John O'Mahony for the Guardian,
Monday August 25, 2003
The singer's dance of death. Ismene Brown for The Telegraph, 13 September 2003
What the critics say
Judith Mackrell for The Guardian, Wednesday September 17, 2003.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/review/0,,1043946,00.html
Rating 4 out of five stars
For years Trisha Brown refused to allow music anywhere near her brainy, minimalist works. Now she not only choreographs to her pick of the world's great scores, but in this new staging of Winterreise she tries to get dance and music deep under each other's skins.
With baritone Simon Keenlyside performing alongside three of Brown's own dancers, the breath and muscle of his singing merge with the breath and muscle of the choreographed action.
During some sections the dancers are used, straightforwardly, to populate the world of Schubert's wanderer. As Keenlyside paces the stage their movements assume the shapes of the trees, birds, and sleeping villagers which the hero passes en route.
But much of the time Keenlyside is not just travelling through this animate world he is dancing in it, too. At the minimal least, he works a stylised vocabulary of austere gestural emotion but at impressive full stretch he allows himself to be lifted and flung by the three dancers as he sings of his grief, or to fall back into their cradling arms when he longs for rest.
And the marvel of Keenlyside is that while he's singing this marathon of a tensely modulated, vividly imagined Winterreise, his body never loses its poise.
Of course, his actions affect the quality of the singing, but this is part of the performance's drama. When the hero is dreaming, Keenlyside is lying on his back, balanced on the dancers' hands and feet, and his voice sounds as if it's physically floating into fantasy. When he falls forward to sing to the snow covered ground his voice, sent deep into his belly, has a harsh muscular anguish.
There are, inevitably, moments where Brown's choreography is a distraction, even an irrelevence. But in the two closing songs, music and staging create a joint intensity that scotches any doubts about the truth of this collaboration.
In the hallucinatory Mock Suns, Keenlyside hurtles to the piano and crouches beneath it, seeking refuge from his demons. And by the time he's begun The Organ Grinder he is standing in darkness, a man ousted forever from the real world.
These images explode out of the music with a shocking visual force, but the greatness of this Winterreise lies in the fact they don't shatter the score. They hold it and fix it in our memory.
Shuffling around to Schubert.
Rupert Christiansen for the Telegraph, 18 September 2003
One constantly sensed the choreography being restricted by the necessity of allowing Keenlyside to sing - which he does marvellously. As a former competitive middle-distance runner, he is a nifty mover, too, but no dancer: every gesture looked learnt, counted and calculated.
Simon Keenlyside isn't the first singer to dramatise Winterreise. Thirty years ago, I remember a ludicrous BBC television version in which Peter Pears, clad in Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, stumbled across the studio as paper snow was dropped all over him; more recently, on Channel 4, the director David Alden provided Ian Bostridge with a context of fashionable postmodern anguish. In neither case did the imagery do anything to illuminate Schubert's song-cycle.
Keenlyside's ambition was more radical. He asked the American modernist choreographer Trisha Brown (with whom he had previously collaborated on a hugely successful version of Monteverdi's Orfeo) to animate his performance with dance. She was sceptical, according to an interview in last Saturday's Daily Telegraph ("No one knows better than me just how Schubert doesn't need my dancing") to the point at which one wonders why she accepted such a commission. But she agreed to do "the best I could", and the result is this tasteful and tactful but half-hearted and pretty pointless exercise.
The power of Winterreise is surely the intensity with which it conveys what is going on inside the Wanderer's head, and the way that the objects and events he encounters are consumed into his obsessive thoughts and feelings.
Brown can't turn that into dance. Instead, she sets a mood of cool alienation, against the music's romantic grain, and her abstracted style of movement embodies neither the internal nor the external.
In the opening song, a pacing Keenlyside is encircled by a woman wearing a hollow crinoline. Later, a sort of leitmotiv to his movement emerges - a pose of crucifixion, which can suggest either the character's suffering or, at a nursery-school level, a crow, a tree or a signpost. Three dancers, two male and one female, provide support and strike poses.
Otherwise almost nothing seems to happen. Apart from the piano (competently played by Pedja Muzijevic), the stage is bare, and only Jennifer Tipton's beautiful lighting and some spooky shadows contribute atmosphere. One constantly sensed the choreography being restricted by the necessity of allowing Keenlyside to sing - which he does marvellously. As a former competitive middle-distance runner, he is a nifty mover, too, but no dancer: every gesture looked learnt, counted and calculated.
As Brown had suspected, it all amounted to a lot of bother for no expressive purpose. I ended up craving something more daring, more theatrical, more vulgar. Winterreise on ice, anybody?
Helen Wright for musicomh.com
http://www.musicomh.com/opera/winterreise.htm
How typical of this self-effacing and modest performer that after the initial curtain calls involving the whole team (including the fine accompanist Pedja Muzijevic and Trisha Brown) he almost forgot that without his particular combination of talents, an evening like this would simply not be possible. Finally taking a solo call, the applause must have left him in no doubt that this is one national asset we treasure highly.
Simon Keenlyside is not only Britain's finest lyric baritone but also its most active. This is the singer who scales walls as Don Giovanni, somersaults into bed with Papagena even when sporting a broken wrist (from falling through a Royal Opera House trapdoor) and is palpably uncomfortable when merely standing by the piano for a recital.
Fitting therefore that he should have approached Trisha Brown, the choreographer with whom he collaborated on a production of Monteverdi's Orfeo at the Barbican in 1998, to stage Schubert's last song-cycle Winterreise (Winter's Journey). Equally at home with lieder as with opera, Keenlyside wanted to find a new kind of project that would transcend the limitations of the recital format and the constraints of standard opera productions.
Schubert is often thought of as a composer of beautiful, carefree songs. Winterreise is certainly beautiful but it is a very bleak, melancholy beauty, setting 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller that tell of a wanderer through a winter landscape, isolated and alienated from society and the world.
Keenlyside's haunting voice, with its impressive range, combines with stylised movements from the singer and up to three dancers to give visual presence to the emotions described in the songs - occasionally hopeful (Der Lindenbaum, Dream of Spring) but more often longing for death. The choreography and the simple staging (basic androgynous costumes, simple lighting changes as the only props) bring them an immediacy that is refreshing and at times heartbreaking.
In the opening song (Good Night) shadows of The Wanderer and the girl he has left behind (dead? deserted? - we are never sure) loom vast on the backdrop, the shadow hands and bodies touching even when we can see that the corporeal figures are far apart. In others simple arm movements create trees or birds, or bodies become a frozen stream, the movement underneath unable to break through the icy crust.
The final song - The Organ-grinder - is devastating: as a dancer projects eerie black shadows on the backdrop, Keenlyside himself has moved out of the light so that he becomes a disembodied voice, in effect already dead while life goes on.
How typical of this self-effacing and modest performer that after the initial curtain calls involving the whole team (including the fine accompanist Pedja Muzijevic and Trisha Brown) he almost forgot that without his particular combination of talents, an evening like this would simply not be possible. Finally taking a solo call, the applause must have left him in no doubt that this is one national asset we treasure highly.
Reviewed by Melanie Eskenazi for Seen & Heard, 18th September 2003.
http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2003/July03/Winterreise189.htm
‘I was deeply moved by this music, I have such a great respect for it, and I just took the gestures from the words and music… everything for me is rooted in the text…’ thus Trisha Brown in an interview for Seen & Heard last year: she was referring here to her production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo but the same kind of dedication to text and music is evident in this Winterreise in which Simon Keenlyside is also the protagonist. Both Brown and Keenlyside were both obviously aware of the daring nature of this undertaking, with its potential to offend those who are disturbed by radicalism, but Winterreise like all masterpieces will survive whatever we do to it – in this case it would be more appropriate to speak of illumination.
The traditional song recital in which the soloist, resplendent in his penguin-suit, stands in the curve of the piano is of course the perfect form of musical communication for those attuned to it, but it has disadvantages which the present event seemed to me to overcome. In most London recitals the singer can look out onto a sea of heads buried in their translations as he swelters in his elegant evening-wear – here, to what I am sure is to the dismay of curmudgeons, the English translations were projected on screens at either side of the stage and the singer was liberated from his dress-suit and wore a loose shirt and trousers which, though hardly suitable for a winter journey, must surely have felt more comfortable. It certainly sounded that way; this is the fourth time I have heard Keenlyside sing this work and it was by far the finest – perhaps he is such an individual that only this form of communication can bring out the best in him, but whether or not this is true there were certainly songs within the cycle performed at the level of Goerne or Quasthoff, and I cannot think of higher praise.
Winterreise is not merely the story of a journey: it is as Richard Capell says ‘an outcry of scorched sensibility’ and it is in the evocation of this sensibility that Keenlyside and Brown triumphantly succeed. The road upon which the wanderer embarks is just as ‘latent with unseen existences’ as Whitman’s but here the existences are the stuff of the protagonist’s dreams and self-analysis. Brown’s choreography is fluent, subtle and naturalistic, concentrating mainly on the use of arm and hand movements which she describes as ‘a complex union of arm gestures by three dancers, including the singer, that signals the subject of a song that appears and reappears during the cycle such as trees, exhaustion or the crow’. These gestures stress the vulnerability of the protagonist, who seems very often to be ‘lifting distressful hands as if to bless’.
Gute Nacht is set almost like a satire on normal performance style; the singer wears a frock coat as a girl dressed in a parody of either a wedding gown or a mannequin’s outfit circles around him – the hypnotic quality of the movement here finely echoed the sense of inevitability suggested by the music. Brown has taken her cue here from the lines ‘Es zieht ein Mondenschatten / Als mein Gefährte mit’ and Jennifer Tipton’s lighting eloquently implies both closeness and distance, since the man and woman meet only as shadows on the backdrop leaving the physical shell of the wanderer to trudge on alone. Pedja Muzijevic’s playing was not merely supportive of the singing but nuanced and sensitive in phrasing: the deceptively simple shift from D minor into the major key at ‘Will dich im Traum nicht stören’ beautifully counter-pointed Keenlyside’s poetic rendition of the text. I can only assume that the style of this interpretation naturally slowed down the singing since it seemed to me that this was the first time that the F sharp on that phrase and the jump of a sixth at ‘An dich hab' ich gedacht’ sounded not only comfortable for this singer but heartbreakingly expressive.
Die Wetterfahne shows us a dancer representing the wind which mocks the poor fugitive and plays with hearts: the singing of ‘eine reiche Braut’ sounded less resentful than is usual. In Gefror’ne Tränen and Erstarrung the patterns of the gestures echo the speaker’s tears, eschewing any literal notions of kissing the ground or seeking green grass. Der Lindenbaum employs Brown’s ‘cell’ of gestures, in this case suggesting perhaps the goddess Devi, at once benign and ferocious. At the lines ‘Komm her zu mir, Geselle, / Hier find'st du deine Ruh'!’ Keenlyside’s beautifully inflected and coloured singing found its perfect counterpart in the movements suggesting the temptation to finish his journey here and find the rest which eludes him.
Rast and Frühlingstraum could be seen as the centre of this interpretation: in the former Keenlyside is required to become part of a quartet of dancers within which he is at times partially, at times entirely, supported by the others, suggesting the trusting, almost instinctive way in which the wanderer responds to the world around him. Keenlyside’s singing of ‘Fühlst in der Still' erst deinen Wurm / Mit heißem Stich sich regen!’ superbly evoked the protagonist’s inner bitterness, all the more evocative when contrasted with Frühlingstraum where the dancers form a bed where the singer can briefly indulge in his dream. This was for me the most moving and involving part of the whole performance: as the voice mesmerizingly reflects on who might have painted the leaves on the glass, the singer’s hand delicately traces their shape in the air – somehow this made even clearer the irony that the flowers are merely ice-crystal patterns, and the artist Winter – and we are then able to contemplate those heartbreaking lines where the protagonist faces his desolation yet still feels his heart beating warmly after his dream. ‘Die Augen schless’ ich wieder, / Noch schlägt das Herz so warm’ was perfect in its understated yet fervent expression, ‘warm’ being given just enough slight pressure, and Muzijevic’s playing of the right-hand figure suggesting the heartbeat, and his response to the final question, devastating in its eloquent finality, were both as fine as could be wished – the leaves will never be green again for him, just as he will never hold her in his arms – was the clear answer given by that desolate A minor chord.
Der greise Kopf was remarkable for the way in which the body of the singer is used, at one point he is carried by the dancers after having ‘failed’ to travel the distance he desires: the most powerful hand gestures are used here too, especially where one of the dancers seems to be stopping the protagonist’s descent into the grave. Both Letzte Hoffnung and Täuschung superbly evoke the consoling and yet capricious power of nature. The one leaf falling to the ground is simply shown with a hand gesture rather then the singer hitting the floor, and the will o’ the wisp is characterized by subtle lighting and, in the piano, Ländler-like phrasing which serve to make the delusion even more touching. Der stürmische Morgen is one of the most energetic songs in the cycle, with the singer grimly commenting that the stormy morning is after his own heart – appropriately this is the song during which Keenlyside actually has to leap, and far from being embarrassing, such movement seemed the only choice for a song dominated by words like ‘zerrissen’.
Brown’s understanding of Winterreise is well displayed in Der Wegweiser and Das Wirtshaus where she rejects what might be the expected visual image of walking in different directions and instead sees the lines ‘Habe ja doch nichts begangen, / Daß ich Menschen sollte scheu'n’ as central: the wanderer does not pace the stage, but in Das Wirtshaus he lies facing the audience in the most vulnerable intimate position, the lighting dramatically emphasizing his drawn features so that in his desperation that the rooms in the ‘inn’ are already taken we cannot help but recall his forlorn question about shunning mankind. Keenlyside sang both songs with searing power, achieving a daring approach to ‘matt zum Niedersinken’ and the exact tone of grim determination required at the end.
Die Nebensonnen was staged with elegant simplicity, dancers and lighting suggesting the three suns and finally in a subtle projection the one whose disappearance would make the speaker feel better ‘Im Dunkeln’. Graham Johnson perceptively remarks ‘…this is dance music in slow motion… his (Schubert’s) music encouraged romantic embraces from which he himself was excluded. When his keyboard was the only thing he could lovingly touch all evening, it is hardly surprising that he should associate dancing with being on the outside looking in and that many of his dances are suffused with an almost physical sense of longing’. Brown’s choreography finely evokes not only the words themselves in a literal sense, but the longing behind them.
In Der Leiermann, the three dancers are pared down to one, whose shadow is cast across the stage, his distorted beckoning fingers at once frightening and consoling. In that tremendous moment when the wanderer, for only the second time in the cycle, questions another being at ‘Wünderlicher Alter’ Keenlyside’s upward inflection on ‘Alter’ and his anguished final enquiry formed a few of those rare moments in performance when one wishes that what is heard and seen then could last forever. The postlude refuses any consolatory answers to the question: this interpretation of ‘Winterreise’ is equally reticent, but in its respect for the music and poetry, born out of what the choreographer has called her desire to ‘understand the languages of both music and drama in the deepest way I can’, Trisha Brown, Simon Keenlyside, Pedja Muzijevic and the dancers Brandi L. Norton, Seth Parker and Lionel Popkin, have created a work which reminds us once again of the true nature of a masterpiece: just as the hurdy-gurdy man circles slowly as the voice mesmerizingly evokes his part in the drama, so the world continues to turn, oblivious to, or heedless of, our part in it, and the great work stands at the still centre as perhaps our only recognizable evidence, apart from the love of children, that we have even influenced it.
This was unquestionably one of the greatest Winterreisen I have seen, both in terms of the singing and playing, and of the overall nature of the experience itself. I’m sure there are plenty of people who were either outraged or bored by it, but they were clearly not much in evidence on Thursday night, when the performance was given an ovation the like of which I have not heard for many years – and what a joy it is just to contemplate these little words: ‘nearly two thousand people packed the Barbican to hear Winterreise’. They will be privileged indeed if they ever hear a finer performance.
Choreography of thoughts.
Anna Picard for The Independent, 21 September 2003
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/article88027.ece
Ours is a tri-musical age; an era in which performers will try anything once. Recoil if you must at Israel in Egypt accompanied by a slide-show of the Gaza Strip or Mark Morris simulating masturbation to Dido and Aeneas but rules are there to be broken and it doesn't stop with opera or oratorio. So, after Peter Sellars's gestural, gymnastic, discursive staging of Bach's Cantatas BWV 82 and 199 for Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Trisha Brown's choreography of Schubert's Winterreise for that most balletic of baritones, Simon Keenlyside, seems a natural progression within the current trend of re-presenting core repertoire. But is it?
Generally speaking, I'm happy to be challenged or even offended by an artist's interpretation of a work if the end result is illumination. Thus, having had my preconceptions of "authenticity" quite overturned by Sellars's ecstatic, metaphysical Bach, I determined to keep an open mind during the first British performance of Winterreise at the Barbican. Sadly it proved impossible. That Keenlyside, whose singing was as assured as ever (if, along with pianist Pedja Muzijec, somewhat compromised in intensity and expression by the size of the venue and by having to keep time with the dancers), has experimented in this fashion is to be applauded. But I fear he may have chosen either the wrong collaborator or, dare I say it, the wrong work. Striking as some of Brown's images are - in particular the human cradle in Rast and the deformed silhouette of Der Leiermann, a figure straight from the eugenic fantasies of Nazi propaganda - and faultless as Keenlyside and his fellow performers' execution of them appeared to this dance-illiterate member of the audience, her over-literal approach to the text closes more doors than it opens. Scarcely an image of Wilhelm Müller's poetry goes by without physical comment; Der Lindenbaum - which sees Keenlyside and the dancers assume the shape of, gosh, a tree - being only the most obvious example. Alas, this trend towards the blunt is not restricted to movement; the colour green - first "Die liebe..." then "Die böse Farbe" of Schubert and Müller's effective prequel, Die Schöne Müllerin - again figures prominently in Winterreise and is, with thudding predictability, picked up in both Jennifer Tipton's lighting and Elizabeth Cannon's costume designs. More restricting still is Brown's depiction of the anonymous beloved in the first song, Gute Nacht; ever circling, never touching, but here apparently real.
With another singer, Brown's flat corroboration of the narrator's history through physical evidence would be less surprising. (Time was when Schubert's songs were uniformly taken at surface value.) But, as those who have seen Keenlyside perform Winterreise in recital - a devastating example of "less is more" - will understand, the veracity of this anti-hero's romantic experiences is far from proven. Furthermore, as there is little recollection of her words in his telling of the narrative, it may even be that the relationship itself is pure fantasy; a crazed exaggeration of what might well have been nothing more than casual courtesy. You might argue that considering such a possibility is anachronistic or too post-Freudian to be applied to a work written in 1827. Yet increasingly it seems to me that this is the same voice as the narrator of Die Schöne Müllerin - case studies recorded only a matter of weeks apart, as it were - and that the anguished abstraction and isolation of Winterreise is a natural, if not inevitable, extension of the increasingly intemperate reactions of the Miller's apprentice in the first song cycle; just as the incipient madness of its creators was the natural extension of the tertiary syphilis that killed them both, so very young. So here we have the fantasist, the stalker; a figure not dissimilar to Pat Barker's Billy Prior (Regeneration), perhaps. Why choreograph his thoughts? To return to the Bach for a moment, the physical demands placed upon Hunt Lieberson - easily equal to those on Keenlyside - were of secondary interest to her response to the music and text and synchronous to, rather than directly illustrative of, both. How odd then, and how disappointing, that a performer who has done more than anyone else to demonstrate that the landscape of Winterreise is a mental landscape should turn psychosis into nothing more than a broken heart.
Murdered by a dance of death.
Edward Seckerson for The Independent, 18 September 2003
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/article87466.ece
What is it about Schubert's Winterreise that directors, choreographers and filmmakers are hungry to reinvent? Why this song cycle? Because that's what it is - a cycle of songs, pure and simple. Well, not so simple, actually. And there's the key. The way in which the songs are ordered presents us with a narrative of sorts - a stream of consciousness, a drama of the mind. One man's broken heart, one man's torment, one man's bleak winter journey.
What is it about Schubert's Winterreise that directors, choreographers and filmmakers are hungry to reinvent? Why this song cycle? Because that's what it is - a cycle of songs, pure and simple. Well, not so simple, actually. And there's the key. The way in which the songs are ordered presents us with a narrative of sorts - a stream of consciousness, a drama of the mind. One man's broken heart, one man's torment, one man's bleak winter journey.
The words tell us why and wherefore, to a point; the music unlocks the subtext and triggers the emotion, to a point. Still, a great deal is left unsaid for the listener to ponder. And I say listener because there is nothing quite like the still, strange formality of a recital stage to concentrate the minds of singer, pianist, and audience alike. To add yet another dimension - to probe the narrative in "visual", physical terms - seems to me an unnecessary violation of the work's "inner" life. As I've already implied, others have tried. Choreographer Trisha Brown is the latest not to succeed.
Brown uses her three dancers - Brandi L Norton, Seth Parker, and Lionel Popkin - as a physical extension of our protagonist, Simon Keenlyside. They are, if you care to dig deep into the elusive subtext of the penultimate song, his three "phantom suns". Their arms (which is where the greater part of Brown's choreography is concentrated) become almost indistinguishable from his own, snaking from behind and around his body like some animated Eastern deity. The dancers' bodies shadow his own, and white stage and white backdrop reflect the bleak white wintry lighting of Jennifer Tipton, who casts her own shadows - tellingly, in the opening minutes, where the illusion is of Keenlyside holding his erstwhile lover's hand, when, in fact, they are some distance apart. Another nice touch is the nod to period in the hooped-skirt frame the girl wears in these opening minutes.
Sometimes, Brown uses her dancers to underline the text in uncomfortably literal ways: they are a linden tree, they are signposts, they are a black crow. They are distracting. They are superfluous. So little of the movement illuminates or enhances the feeling inherent in the songs. I quite see why Brown chose to err on the side of abstraction, leaving the emotion to the exclusive domain of voice and keyboard. But the bodies are already an intrusion, so why the detachment?
In one respect, Brown has hit upon something. The poet's restlessness - the peace that is denied him - is conveyed in the hyperactivity of the movement. The "rest" he craves is, of course, death. Or rather his soul craves it, and his body resists. So Brown has him literally kept from the horizontal through the support of his alter egos, and in one brief but memorable moment his head is held in Death's embrace as he looks longingly into its eyes. At this point, Brown should surely have withdrawn her dancers, and pointedly left Keenlyside alone for the final songs. "I should feel happier in the dark," he sings, as one by one his trinity of suns fade. In the final song, he does meet Death, the "organ grinder". But Brown persists with her grotesque shadowplay, when surely the figure of Death belongs only in the imagination.
Would the excellent Simon Keenlyside - so supple physically and vocally - have been moved to a greater inwardness had his body been confined to the still centre of a recital stage? Would he have found a greater range of vocal colour and atmosphere in that context? I think so. I wanted to isolate both him and his excellent pianist, Pedja Muzijevic. You can add two extra stars for their work, but Trisha Brown's concept left me cold, if you'll forgive the pun. I, for one, wanted more, and longed for less. More spirit, and less pretension.
New York feel to Schubert
Barry Millington, Evening Standard, 17 September 2003
A fine performance of Schubert's Winterreise - no mere song cycle of unrequited love but a psychodrama addressing existential issues - is one of the most shattering experiences to be had in the concert hall. Does it, therefore, need choreography, lighting and stage direction such as Trisha Brown has provided for Simon Keenlyside in this co-production brought to the Barbican from New York?
Choreographed realisations of Handel and Purcell by Mark Morris, Peter Sellars and others have shown how movement and gesture can indeed add a powerful expressive dimension. And Winterreise in one sense calls for it. It's true that "all the events take place before the cycle begins, and we are not even sure what they were", as the pianist Charles Rosen once put it. Nevertheless, there is a narrative thread of sorts and there are also plentiful images such as weather-vanes, rustling leaves, stormy winds and flapping crow's wings.
Brown's staging (with lighting by Jennifer Tipton) makes full use of the Barbican stage, while the text is clearly projected on large screens at either side. Keenlyside (accompanied by Pedja Muzijevic) and three dancers interact in this stage space in what is an indisputable tour de force for the baritone.
The intimacy of the conventional lieder experience is inevitably lost, but Keenlyside projects so well and moves so convincingly that the whole thing must be judged as an enhanced, dramatised version of the original.
As such, it is a brilliant conception and at its best it has a mesmerising potency. The elusive beloved appears in the opening Good Night in a hoop, the lack of clothes signifying her absence throughout the cycle. The dancers twist and turn in The Weather-Vane, flit in and out of the light in Will o' the Wisp, and flap their wings for The Crow. Too often, though, Brown relies on inexpressive arm-waving.
Sometimes they depict shadows, tree boughs, a signpost; elsewhere they are too generalised. The weak linkage between text/music and much of the movement is the production's fatal flaw. However, the two final songs are on a different level. Mock Suns uses a rear screen to project the light of the poet's life as it is movingly extinguished.
In The Hurdy-Gurdy Man, a silhouetted figure with grotesquely elongated fingers slowly turns and turns as his organ-grinding welcomes the poet to oblivion. More like this and it could indeed be an overwhelming experience.