The Rundfunkchor Berlin is one of the great virtuoso ensembles of our capital city, partner of the world's greatest orchestras and conductors. It's time to highlight and develop our choir music concerts, time to develop a new audience. So we're striking out in bold new directions: collaborations with dancers, film-makers and recording artists. It's time to look and hear choir music with new eyes and ears!
Simon Halsey
Since its premiere in May 2005, Rodion Shchedrin’s Sealed Angel has made the rounds in Lars Scheibner’s visionary staging with Rundfunkchor Berlin. This drama for chorus, dancers and soloists has been presented in a burnt-out Baroque church and in a converted pumping station from the turn of the 20th century. Its images have exerted their suggestive power from the stage of the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus as well as the choir loft of a Gothic Dominican monastery. Whether the choir is positioned horizontally across a wide space or ranged vertically in the heights, the combination of modern dance and Orthodox chant in Shchedrin’s enthralling 1988 liturgy has already manifested a powerful impact and is certain to affect more and more spectators in each new venue.
“Rundfunkchor Berlin and the five dancers from the Berlin Staatsballett celebrated a liturgical ceremony in the staged performance of Rodion Shchedrin’s romantically tinged choral work – while at the same time enlarging its scope by means of the language of contemporary dance”, emphasized the Badische Tagblatt in its review of the performance in Baden-Baden, declaring it an “intoxicating feast of beauty”: “Singers and dancers as well as a flautist assume a number of different parts within an interplay of intellectual and spiritual processes.” Some media sources cited it as a high point of the summer festival.
Scheibner’s staging is spatially flexible because it is grounded on a powerful idea and a clear choreographic conception: the human being caught in the play of external and internal forces. Rundfunkchor Berlin moves throughout the space, sometimes coalescing into a mass, then drifting apart in all directions, dwindling away among the spectators and thereby creating new structures. Attraction and repulsion, an unstoppable process of waxing and waning, activated by the motion in the music. Out of the mass there emerge vocal soloists and dancers who form and accompany the trajectory of human life.
The eternal cycle of violence is broken by remorse, atonement and hope. At the climax of the performance two boy soprano soloists take the limelight: the irruption of the “other” into this world, reinforced by the magical lighting design of internationally prominent lighting artist Rico Heidler. The end returns with Shchedrin’s music to the beginning: the eternal cycle of life.
Lars Scheibner’s choreographic staging of Rodion Shchedrin’s The Sealed Angel marks the beginning of a long-term, systematic exploration. Its aims: finding new ways of presenting choral music through interaction with other art forms and stimulating interest in this special repertoire – even among segments of the public with little connection to choirs – by means of scenic condensations of its musical statements. Shchedrin and his wife, famed ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, were present at the final rehearsals and premiere and were profoundly moved.
The Rundfunkchor’s search for alternatives to traditional, static concert placements in presenting choral music has already caused an international stir. Its potential for energizing the classical a cappella repertoire as well as for new works is incalculable.
