Sydney Chamber Opera is currently presenting a second offering for the Sydney Festival which familiarises local audiences with the French composer Pascal Dusapin. This time the compelling piece is O MENSCH! (2008) for solo baritone and piano.
This event is part of the About an Hour series during the festival. Its focused romp through the shifting emotional reactions of one character is a dramatised cavalcade of Fredriech Nietzsche’s quite anguished poetic texts. This uninterrupted journey of self-analysis through contemporary music is not for the feint-hearted but very worth the ride.
The torments, doubts, desires and moral fragilities of the mortal illustrated by the single character on stage is given slick direction by Sarah Giles. Giles’ guidance of baritone Mitchell Riley, who is perched delicately on a small landing halfway up a set of stairs leading nowhere masterfully enhances the ebb and flow of the texts.
From the outset, Riley delivers the dense poetry with engaging animation and quickly-shifting intensities which are always interesting to follow. Dusapin’s musical setting is steady throughout and his energised clarity in approach to the philosophy pleases. The character’s inner struggles are sung sensitively by Riley, displaying a solid range and a carefully nuanced tonal palette.
Dusapin’s vocal lines are quite tuneful and often smoothly conversational for the listener to absorb. These are combined with effective piano punctuations, warm chordal reiterations as well as angular figurations and experimental techniques borrowed from times of the avant-garde.
Musical reactions to the text and described environments or human predicaments are well elaborated in Dusapin’s tight musical mesh and here are always cleanly delivered by the performers.
The sonic tapestry is often as sparse and as exposed as the character’s emotional journey and the fine line of poetic extracts threaded together.
Jack Symonds’ contemporary pianistic skill brings this work to life with tremendous colour and character in the accompaniment and the potentially disparate excerpts are linked by Dusapin’s bridging music from the piano, which is played with knife-edge mood shifts by Symonds.
The well balanced blend of piano and voice creates a mesmerising backdrop to the undulations of Nietzsche’s poetry. It illustrates human effort, self-criticism, or the yearning for control over reactions which disable or excite and even tempt contemplation of Nietzsche’s above-human or Ubermensch ideal, which is less prone to such primitive agonies.
The piece is sung in German over a challenging unbroken seventy minutes of unique pastiche-monologue with tightly harnessed physical expression. Assisting us to process all texts on offer from the twenty-one poems sourced is a large surtitle screen hanging to the left of the vocalist’s platform. The size of the surtitle space is rewarding, as it allows for a full stanza to be gradually displayed and its gravity reviewed by the audience at their will.
Lighting is subtle and superbly effective in tracing the mood and level of revelations within the soloist. An imposing suspended light box shines various colours and degrees of illumination down on the baritone as Charles Davis’ layered costume design allows for the baritone to deliver his outpouring in various states of formal or informal dress.
A final floor spot casting a shadow against the wall texture of the exhausted human finally trudging away from centre stage is an effective visual with which to end the work’s elaborations. It is also a celebration of the historic Carriageworks space.
This clever microcosm of Nietzsche’s expansive and controversial philosophy is finely crafted and performed. Its exploration of human reaction and limitation remains thought-provoking for our current climate of human evolution. O MENSCH! is yet another musical and theatrical success from the Sydney Chamber Opera. It further highlights the company’s contribution to the 2016 Sydney Festival.
Performances continue at Carriageworks Track 8 on Saturday 23 January And Sunday 24 January at 8.30pm.