As it often goes, when something as personal and important presents: The audience met in Bach’s Johannes-Passion, as you suggest, Peter Sellars and sir Simon Rattle in the Philharmonie, first of all, the own defensive reflexes. Is it not awkward to embarrassing, as the singer lay female singers of the Berlin radio choir “in the greatest lowliness” on the stage and parquet floors, the hands deckenwärts stretched from the glory of the son of God sing? You don’t want to look aside, when Magdalena Kozena groped the bound Saviour, while she sings of finally your load bumps to get rid of?
That you will feel touched but, the special quality of Sellars’ “ritualization” of the Passion narrative, which returns after its Premiere in 2014, for three performances in the Scharoun building. At the same time, it is the first baton of Rattle to the end of his tenure as the orchestra’s chief, exultant, he will be received by the audience. Already in the first bars of his flair for musical drama lives on in the heartfelt pain that the far apart from each other positioned in flutes and oboes over the entire width of the podium, the choir-wide, all of the harmony aufzehrend.
An evening of uneasy questions
Sellars’ figure drawing is in its silence relentlessly, his Passion of unheard-of darkness. How distressing is the despair of the faithful to Peter about his betrayal acts, as of know, the fear by twitching of the resistive Pontius Pilate. Georg Nigl, for the sick, Christian Gerhaher stepped in, lending two unconditional expression. The Tenor Andrew Staples, Sellars anguished torturer of the defenseless Jesus, plunges into an Aria that reinterpret the blood mass of bloodstained back of his victim to “all the most beautiful rainbow”.
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a disturbing force. The gray-haired Evangelist of Mark Padmore in all sovereignty, an idea of the insult is to have to this story of human failure, once again, to tell. Padmore sets of breaks, where storms rage, his eye is sore. Simon Halsey-prepared, rote-singing radio choir is always mandatory in an evening of uneasy questions: “Can I through your pain and Dying, shall inherit the Kingdom of heaven?” Who can hear, who can see in the Philharmonie, must be answered in the negative. The final chorus, which solicits a place in Abraham’s bosom, sounds suddenly very remote.
