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Mahler and Dance
2, 3 & 4 (?) September 2004
Playhouse, Edinburgh
“…magnificently sung by Finley…” The Observer
“…the musical performances… with tremendously good and persuasive singing from Jane Irwin and Gerald Finley, were heart-wrenching, and elegant.” The Financial Times
Jane Irwin, mezzo
Gerald Finley, baritone
Paul Hoskins, conductor
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Rambert Dance Company:
Lucila Alves
Thomasin Gulgeç
Ana Lujan Sanchez
Fabrice Serafino
Angela Towler
· Songs of a Wayfarer (GF), choreographed by Kim Brandstrup, danced by Thomasin Gulgeç and Lujan Sanchez
· Five Ruckert Songs (JI), choreographed by Peter Darrell, danced by Angela Towler
· Dark Elegies to the Kindertotenlieder (GF) choreographed by Antony Tudor, danced by Ana Lujan Sanchez, Lucila Alves, Fabrice Serafino, Thomasin Gulgeç
What the critics say
Judith Mackrell, the Guardian, 4 September 2004
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/review/0,,1297019,00.html
Rating four out of five stars
It's easy to think of Mahler in terms of giant weather fronts - swirling emotional currents before which listeners can only bend their heads. It's the kind of music you'd think choreographers would be mad to tackle, facing the serious risk of ending up disoriented or dwarfed.
But, as Rambert's programme underlines, Mahler's song cycles have a natural affinity with dance. Their powerful folk memories, narrative drive and strange silences actively invite choreographers to tell their own stories. In 1937, Antony Tudor set a benchmark for the best way to accept that invitation when he created Dark Elegies to the Kindertotenlieder.
Rambert's current dancers have been schooled to pitch their performances adroitly between abstraction and emotion, and if some of the men's dancing looks underpowered, Ana Lujan Sanchez and Fabrice Serafino are outstanding for the savage glitter of pain they bring to the work.
Kim Brandstrup achieves a parallel kind of triumph in his new setting of Songs of a Wayfarer. In pure choreographic terms, the dancing in which the protagonist (Thomasin Gulgec) tries to win back the woman he loves (Lujan Sanchez) is superbly musical. Brandstrup's articulation of Mahler's restless dynamics and the range of his invention across solo and group dances has never looked better.
When Peter Darrell made Five Ruckert Songs in 1978, his portrait of a woman cutting her ties with worldly pleasure apparently made an equivalent emotional impact. What is striking today is the stylistic and dramatic debt the piece owes to Martha Graham. Despite a fine performance by Angela Towler, the work's rhetoric looks slightly tired and slightly fake. Edinburgh has however had mezzo soprano Jane Irwin defying the Playhouse acoustic to sing the Ruckert Songs. And with baritone Gerald Finley singing Elegies and Wayfarer, this programme adds up to a huge argument for Mahler as an inspiration to dance.
Jann Parry, The Observer, 5 September 2004
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/observer/story/0,,1297411,00.html
A brief return to Tudor's reign
…Rambert Dance Company's triple bill concluded with Tudor's Dark Elegies. Well done, it sears the soul. Rambert had cautiously accepted Tudor's proposal for a ballet to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder in 1937, wondering how a community would ever need to mourn the loss of its children. The years have shown how prescient the ballet was.
The women grieve first (Ana Lujan Sanchez and Lucila Alves, fiercely dignified), joined by the men. Fabrice Serafino expressed a father's barely containable despair, his outbursts fusing with the singer's voice. Baritone Gerald Finley was the conduit through which the group found consolation, rounding off the three song-cycle ballets given together for just three performances.
Peter Darrell's Five Ruckert Songs (from 1978) looked overpowered by new designs and a staging that isolated the singer, Jane Irwin, from the principal dancer, Angela Towler. In Kim Brandstrup's new work to Songs of a Wayfarer, Thomasin Gulgec and Lujan Sanchez established their unrequited relationship in silence. Then Mahler's romantic poems, magnificently sung by Finley, contrasted savagely with the young man's rage and denial, the woman's disdain. Brandstrup's angry elegy will be better served on its own, more brightly lit, though in touring programmes it won't be powered by the full Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Clement Crisp, Financial Times, 6 Sep 2004
Not the cheeriest of evenings. A programme of ballets using Gustav Mahler song cycles may initially have seemed a "bright idea". Yet a moment's pause should have brought the realisation that, magnificent as the music may be, the scores tend to plough the same emotional (and musical) furrow - unhappy love (at best, in Songs of a Wayfarer) leading via none-too-happy-love (in the Five Ruckert Songs) to the final desolation of the Kindertotenlieder, a work given frightful added relevance by the Ossetian school siege. But brave as ever, Rambert Dance staged the event on Thursday, with intriguing choreographic elements: a new work by Kim Brandstrup to the Wayfarer songs; a revival of Peter Darrell's Ruckert Songs, which he made for Scottish Ballet a quarter-century ago, and finally Tudor's Dark Elegies (to the Songs on the Death of Children), an ancestral Rambert treasure from 1937.
So there, in the mortuary gloom of Edinburgh's Playhouse, with the worst possible - because far too large - setting for essentially intimate dances, we were ready, I suppose, to be cheered down rather than up. I must here interpose that the musical performances, with Paul Hoskins conducting the Royal National Scottish Orchestra and with tremendously good and persuasive singing from Jane Irwin (for the Ruckert Songs), and Gerald Finley (for the Wayfarer and Kindertotenlieder), were heart-wrenching, and elegant in means. The Brandstrup Wayfarer Songs is sensitive, very well made - I much admired the added sharpness given by sudden naturalistic gesture - musically alert, and traces the young man's anguish as his beloved ever eludes him. The interpretations of these two roles by Thomasin Gulgeç and Ana Lujan Sanchez were taut with emotion. But the piece looked underlit -the stage awash with dimmest blue - and hence oddly under-communicative. Darrell's Ruckert Songs are a study in the journey through worldly things to spiritual peace for a superb female dancer (I recall how that great artist Elaine MacDonald seemed to inhabit them as naturally as if they and the music were her skin), but the present cast looked rather o'er-parted, and bemused.
Zoe Anderson, the Independent, 7 September 2004
http://arts.independent.co.uk/theatre/reviews/article40700.ece
Mahler calls the tune
Rating four out of five stars
The Edinburgh Festival's last dance programme is its boldest. This is a collaboration, a series of performances that would not happen without the Festival's resources. Rambert Dance Company shows three dances, all to Mahler song cycles. The music is played live, in full orchestral versions; the bill includes one new ballet and two unusual revivals. The dancing is splendid.
In his new Songs of a Wayfarer, Kim Brandstrup builds on the sense of drama he discovered in last year's Afsked. After the dithering speed and repetition of Brandstrup's work for Arc, his steps have slowed enough to have heft and impact.
The central relationship here is outside Mahler's song cycle. Rather than showing the poet's wanderings, Brandstrup returns to his broken love affair, with duets danced in silence between songs. The first gestures look limited - the poet catching at his beloved's foot. As the dance goes on, it becomes something like an Ingmar Bergman drama: you can see the hero's needs and insecurities driving him to make the same mistakes.
In the last duet, the relationship is ending. She moves away before he can catch her, or turns to stare him down. They both crumple. Thomasin Gulgec and Ana Lujan Sanchez are sternly sad lovers, giving emotional point to their still confrontations.
Brandstrup's choreography for the corps is weaker - or rather, his choreography to music is weaker. Mahler is popular with choreographers, but this isn't musique dansante. Branstrup follows the melody or drifts away, but never gets hold of his score. Paul Hoskins conducted a sumptuous performance by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, with fine tone from the baritone Gerald Finley.
Steven Scott's designs are simple, a set with glowing panels and costumes of blue textured silk. A gauze casts a haze around the ballet, but it does blur the dancers' features. Throughout this programme, the lighting is too soft.
Five Rückert Songs is a tribute to Peter Darrell, the founder choreographer of Scottish Ballet, born 75 years ago. Rambert's new staging is much lusher than Scottish Ballet's own: full orchestra, opulent new designs by Yolanda Sonnabend. The men's jackets are fussily overtrimmed, but the women's dresses are splashes of crimson and yellow. "Scottish Colourist tones," said my companion, with approval.
In this ballet, Darrell abandoned his usual elaborate partnering for swoons and walks, simple duets. His heroine remembers her past, dancing with lovers and the corps, then sets herself to face the future alone. It looked stricter in Scottish Ballet's production, but no deeper. Darrell glides alongside Mahler, following the music's emotional haze.
The steps aren't distinctive, but Rambert's dancers give this ballet a moving sobriety. As the heroine, Angela Towler danced with thoughtful authority, holding still as music and dancers swirl around her.
Hoskins and the RSNO are at their most lush in Dark Elegies, Antony Tudor's ballet to the Kindertotenlieder. Some of the score's tautness gets lost, but it can be found in the clarity of Tudor's craftsmanship. A plain gesture fills a whole rich line of melody. Folk steps, with quick changes of direction, pull different rhythms to the surface. Tudor's ballet has no story, but it shows the aftermath of a tragedy. The company are dressed in plain peasant costume, their grief shared. The folk steps make it part of everyday life: these are working dances, built into the lament.
This is an impressive revival, danced with clear-eyed attention. Despite its reputation, Dark Elegies doesn't come across as a devastating ballet. Those layers of step and implication are sober, thoughtful rather than heartbreaking. It's not until the last song that the ballet turns to powerful sorrow. Fabrice Serafino tears into an angry solo, grief as rage. The corps churn into circle dances as darkness falls, then settle into calm as the music ends.