Lulu, Royal Opera House, London One Evening, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London Mitridate, Sadler’s Wells, London
Posted on June 16, 2009
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Excerpt from: The Independant
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Here, the unlamented corpse of Beckett’s poem becomes that of Schubert’s narrator. With spoken verse insinuated between the songs and into the fabric of their cadences, and the three performers busy with chamois leathers, door latches and sandpaper, Mitchell creates a pervasive soundscape of trudging footsteps, shuddering breaths, frigid fingers clumsily pawing at tobacco tin and cigarette paper or scraping at the ice-bound earth. Spring, remembered or imagined, is brought to the foreground in a soundtrack of rippling water, hissing leaves and distant sheep. Sunlight is the sharp whine of a violin bow drawn across the rim of a hand-bell.
Some songs are spoken or omitted. Half-howled, half-crooned into a microphone, those that remain achieve a lunar, distracted quality exemplified by Padmore’s “Wasserflut” and echoed in Dillane’s rasped intonations. Having puzzled over Simon Keenlyside’s danced Winterreise in 2003, I was surprised by how much I wanted to hear One Evening again, preferably with West’s playing higher in the mix. Not as a replacement for conventional recitals of Winterreise, but as a complement to them.
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