The Berlin Edition of the New York Feuilleton (fɶ'yə-tôɴ')

This was meant to be my first post from Berlin, but you'll notice that I'm a little bit behind...

I've done a bit of reformatting in order to inaugurate the Berlin edition of the NY Feuilleton.

For the moment, forget that today is Friday, and transport yourself all the way back to Tuesday:

That's me in the middle looking ready to fall asleep in my teacup. The image isn't mine. I swiped it from Click Opera , the blog of the musician/artist/journalist Momus, alias Nick Currie.

I met Nick Monday night at a living room cum performance space / gallery called "Studio Aporee" in Neukölln, where he was doing a live / digital spoken-word piece. Equipped with laptop, Nick extemporized a surreal and poetic story into his headset. The words were transmitted via a live feed through the internet and spit back into the room after a five-second delay. Using the web as a vast sound chamber caused odd echoes and distortions and seemed to influence the trajectory of Nick's Vianesque prosody.

Earlier that evening I had attended a dance performance called "Symmetry and Other Strategies" at a performance space in Prenzlauer Berg / Pankow called "Das Pumpwerk," which despite the name, is not a gay club.

My friend Nathan (the non-Japanese person sitting next to me in the photo) knew some of the dancers and so we embarked on an hour-long biking-odyssey from Kreuzberg to attend the final performance.

The first dance on the program was titled "Dialogue - Triovariation for a Square" and featured three female dancers wearing nearly identical black tanktops who performed an (improvised?) series of small movements: rotations of the shoulders, toes and neck. Everything was excruciating slight, yet impressively controlled. All in all, the movents seemed to bear little relation to the electric soundtrack of hauntingly strange music, which, ironically, was the dance's most successful component.

The second part of the program was a "Diverse Lecture Performance" by Peter Pleyer, who came out in a clear poncho-like garment and began to carefully arrange a couple dozen books around the performance space. In a rather professorial tone, he proceeded to lecture (in English) on modern dance since the 60's and read selections from books by choreographers from the san Francisco gay scene in the 1980's. Pleyer read in a very dramatic radio voice and kept shifting position - moving from the floor, to the table, to on top of some boxes - every time he introduced a new topic or epoch. Though hugely entertaining, I was somewhat confused and reluctant to label the performance as "dance."

They were saving the best for last. After intermission came "The Symmetry Project," a 20-minute multimedia performance with music, video and dance. Two dancers, Jess Curtis and Maria Francesa Scaroni, realized the erotic and acrobatic work with equal parts grace and furiosity. Dancing naked, they performed a predatory mating ritual of sorts that involved them in a variety of remarkable balancing acts. They rolled onto and off of each other's bodies with dexterity, never breaking the equilibrium and parallelism that seemed to be the only creative restraint. The video projection would often mirror their movements by spitting out foggy black-and-white distored images of the dancers coupling.

From Das Pumpwerk, we went to see Nick perform in Kreuzberg / Neukölln / Kreuzkölln / Neubeca (Nick's wonderful abbreviation for "Neukölln Below Canal). Afterwards, we joined Nick and his girlfriend Hisae back at chez eux for some late night snacking, schmoozing and video-watching.

We'd brought fresh-baked bread from a Turkish bakery on the street corner (50cent/loaf). Nick was a dutiful host and opened a bottle of prosecco. He also brought out olive-oil and wasabi (Nathan's suggestion) to eat with the bread, and made some strong and aromatic Chinese tea.

After an hour or so of Robert Ashley, we turned to YouTube. Nick introduced us to the New Zealander parody group, the Flight of the Conchords.

And thus did another fun-filled evening draw to an end.

An overview of the Berlin music scene that I wrote for Carnegie Hall's upcoming "Berlin in Lights" festival is up on the slick, new "Berlin in Lights" website:

"Berlin is a city of contradictions. It is an old European capital with a youthful energy and vibe. Situated at the crossroads between East and West, the reunified city has the culture and sophistication of London or Paris and the run-down and grungy feel of Prague or Budapest. It is a place that is so burdened with history yet so free: a city where the weight of the past is countered by the vibrancy of nonstop artistic excellence and experimentation.

Zitty, a bi-monthly listings magazine, teems with music listings on everything from all-night raves in abandoned seven-story buildings to radical reinterpretations of Wagner operas. In between is exciting music of every stripe..."
READ FULL ARTICLE

The Komische Oper’s revival of Don Giovanni is a puzzle. Though musically strong, the production of Peter Konwitschny is confusing, muddled and fairly insipid. One needs to put up for a long evening of unexplained shenanigans and tomfoolery in order to grasp the kernel of Mr. Konwitschny’s interpretation: Don Giovanni is a debauched aristocrat whose punishment means surrendering his libertine ways and conforming to the respectable, tie-wearing bourgeoisie.
Before the overture starts, the curtains open to reveal a young Mozart silently playing the harpsichord while Leopold keeps time with his cane and nods approvingly. The young Mozart winks at the audience, bangs on the keys and begins demolishing the harpsichord. Leopold pantomimes his fury yet halts when the Commandatore steps out of the coffin-like instrument and leads the child prodigy by the hand…This is where the overture begins.

That introduction should have been warning enough that I was in for a Komische Oper special. During the first act, however, the conducting and singer were both so strong, that the odd bits of the production – the Don seducing Zerlina while saddling Masetto, a cameo from a stagehand to help get Zerlina’s corset off - weren’t all that perplexing or distracting. The young conductor, Constantin Trinks, seemed eager to leave his mark. In the overture, the strings played with a surprisingly incisive and clipped quality. Lush cellos accompanied the obbligato in “Batti, batti,” and the lyrical “Dulla sua Pace” featured robust, dependable horns.

There were distractions as well. Take, for instance the recitative, which were often treated like dialogue in a Singspeil, and accompanied by piano (instead of harpsichord). This had the effect of making the opera sound far more Teutonic than the Komische’s wonderful production of Figaro. Add to this, the performance of Anna Bolstad, who sang Donna Elvira the way Lotte Lenya might have.

Staging-wise, production was fairly tasteful and standard up into the Act 1 finale, which was treated as a massive bacchanal where Zerlina did a pole dance and Leporello pantomimed gay sex with Masetto. The confusion expended to the music and the three dances were plays simultaneously.

Then in the second act everyone began shooting each other and then coming back from the dead just as mysteriously. There were some great touches like Masetto and Zerlina laughing at Ottavio's nauseatingly sincere demeanor. But then, Ottavio interrupted his aria “Il mio tesoro intento” to apostrophize for five minutes. And naturally, Donnas Anna and Elvira shared a lesbianic moment during “non de dir.”

Of the singers, the biggest stand-outs were the brazen Don Giovanni of Johannes Weisser and the lyrical schlemiel of Thomas Eberstein’s Don Ottavio. The powerhouse Jens Larsen made a somewhat buffoonish Leporello, while Ingrid Kaiserfeld did her best as Donna Anna to infuse her singing with Italian flavor.

The orignal Zerlina had a cold and was sung by an honey-toned understudy (Christiane Hossfeld) who only knew the role in Italian. As can be imagined, this made for some bizarre moments, including “Lá ci darem la mano.”