WINTERREISE

Winter Journey (WINTERREISE) — it’s a multilaterally yet integral masterpiece, which absorbed the lyric fragility of Wilhelm Müller’s poetry and the inner turmoil of Franz Schubert’s music. The Hans Zender’s interpretation for tenor and small orchestra has enhanced the reflexing of musical themes and has made the dramaturgy of the character even deeper. The vibrant music and singing immerse the audience into the on-going process of creation.

The Christian Spuck’s choreography, though based on the musical narrative, does not repeat the music nor the text, but it creates an open space for expressing its own emotions. Spuck is the master of the richest chorographical lexicon (he always finds appropriate methods to make the audience feel a particular emotion), and the virtuosic Ballett Zürich always realizes all his ideas with a phenomenal accuracy. Solidity and gentleness, angular hands and legs which turn into flowing forms and movements, the choreography of silence and reflection — all that weaves dances both magic and horrible. The choreographer sets great challenges not only for his solo performers: all crowd scenes and passages between the songs are very important for him, as well as the personal contribution of each artist to the whole piece.

Müller and Schubert meditate about the solitude, thrill and world pain in their works. And the German composer Hans Zender brings additional layer of this anxious transmigration of souls. Very few artistic works would be able to express such an existentially disrupted human life. But Spuck abstracts himself from the original material and thus he acquires deeper meanings, develops his own new dancing and musical genre which, according to the critics, has nothing in common with the traditional ballet. But meanwhile, he explores such universal themes as love, melancholy, estrangement and omission… Basing on one of the greatest world masterpiece he discovers new horizons for understanding the human life by using the language of dance.