Romeo Castellucci activates our countdown to Mozart’s’ requiem | Culture

“Everything will end in a slow fading towards nothing. This same theater, this same music, this reality. Even The Mona Lisa It will be dust someday, ”the manager Romeo Castellucci to the question of why the great and unfinished Mass of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart in the program of the hand of Requiem. A production that was born at the Aix-En-Provence Festival in 2019 and that has traveled several theaters from around the world, including the Palau de Les Arts of Valencia, where it could recover in October 2021, then influenced then by the terrible echoes of pandemia. Last Tuesday, February 18, Castellucci debuted with her in the Liceu in Barcelona, ​​where it is supposed to soon be seen the first two parts of their unfinished production of THE NIBELUNGO RINGfrom Wagner.

Castellucci admirably handles any operatic show, with enough doses of scenic ambiguity to capture their philosophical and creative ideas. Its powerful production of Moses and Aaronof Schönberg, although his greatest successes are usually related to works without dramaturgy. That is the case of its impressive version of Juana de Arco at the bonfireof Honegger, but also of this Requiem De Mozart, who had its continuation in Aix-en-Provence three years ago with another production-installation centered on death entitled Resurrection and based on the Symphony no. 2 the mahler.

In the hand program, the stage director speaks of Requiem as a celebration of life. However, his dramaturgy works, in fact, as a gigantic countdown towards our own extinction. We see projected on the bottom of the scene an endless enumeration of species, places and objects that no longer exist, which he calls Great Atlas of Extinctions. The list transcends until the present time and the extinction of emblematic places in Barcelona is projected, even the theater where we are sitting. It continues with everything that surrounds us at the material, physical, human, moral, intellectual and affective level, even the music we hear is announced among extinctions.

That chilling moment occurred, specifically, at the end of the repetition of the counterpoint of Hosanna of the Spirit. This is one of the less musically achieved moments of the great Mozart Mass, the work of his student Franz Xaver Süßmayr, who was in charge of finishing it. But here Castellucci finds the fundamental key in collaboration with the French orchestra director Raphaël Pichon, who premiered this production and proposed to add an arrangement of O Gotteslamm, your lifethe first of the two beautiful German sacred songs K. 343, which Mozart wrote in 1787. Canted first alone by the exquisite voice of the mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti and repeated as a Lutheran coral by the members of the choir lying as dead on stage, was one of the most emotional and unforgettable moments of the night.

Until that time, Castellucci had been superimposing layers on stage in a kind of flashback With bright images, dynamic moments and others somewhat more monotonous. Scenes composed with its characteristic visual elements, but with little connection with the music performed. Proof of this is his strange concession to popular dance in the most dynamic passages of the Requiemchoreographed by Evelin Facchini, where it seemed to evoke the primitivism of the original production of Spring consecrationof Stravinski, although with the intervention of the choir, which is the great character of this production.

Everything begins with the death of an old woman who disappears in her bed after bedtime. Then that reverse trip begins that will make it in the end into a lonely baby in the face of the immensity of a completely razed and previously raised scenario until reaching verticality. The music starts with the simplicity of two antiphons to flat song, which follows the first composition of Mozart, which is a reconstruction of the original orchestra and choir version of Music for a Masonic funeral, K. 477. Next, another musical achievement of this production is heard: the early Kyrie and Re Menor, K. 90with its parodied text like Miserere, which connects directly to the Income of the Requiemwhich is in the same hue.

The rest of the musical inserts selected by Pichon were also successful. As was the case of Prevent dust and ashes, K. anh. 122before the start of the sequence, a divine version of a fragment for bass, choir and orchestra of the incidental music of Thanos, king of Egypt, K. 345. The scene was very successful, with the bass Nicola Ulivieri throwing dust and ashes before brilliantly interpreting the Trumpet. The Mass sequence was divided into two with the inclusion of Solfeggio en Fa Mayor, K. 393/2a vocalization for soprano in which the crisp and transparent voice of David González, child singer of the Escolanía de Montserrat. And the offertory also had its musical intermediate with the nickname Who will arrange, K. anh. 110a late and apocryphal reworking for choir and orchestra of a fragment of the third movement of the famous Gran Partita, K. 361.

The musical responsibility of this Barcelona replacement of Requiem from Castellucci was carried out by the Italian director Giovanni Antonini. Under its direction, the Liceu Great Teatre Symphony Orchestra achieved dynamic and contrasted sonorities of historicist dyes. Of course, there were some imbalances in the general balance and also with the voices. In fact, production was a true fire test for the choir of the Great Teatre of the Liceu, directed by Pablo Assante. They exceeded the scenic part with a note, after not stopping dancing, lying, getting up, dressing and undressing for an hour and a half. However, their vocal interventions fogged promptly in the most counterpoint moments and a soprano rope with forced and even screaming.

The best of this production were the four soloists, apart from their constant scenic activity. Starting with the agile and crystalline bell of the Anglo-Austrian soprano Anna Prohaska, the velvety tone of the mezzo Switzerland Viotti, the exquisite lightness of the South African tenor Levy Sekgapane and the harmonic wealth of the Italian bass Nicola Ulivieri. Not forgetting the interventions of the soprano child David González, who also had his scenic moment playing football with a skull and closed the function singing the antiphon of deceased In paradiseit was deservedly who received the greatest cheers at the end.