A decade ago, Jane Moss, the artistic director of Lincoln Center, launched the White Light Festival, intending to foster a reflective, spiritually tinged mode of spectatorship in an age of digital frenzy. The festival’s name came from a remark by the composer Arvo Pärt: “I could compare my music to white light, which contains all colors.” Initially, the concept inspired a few giggles around town; one heard the title pronounced in a breathy, yoga-instructor murmur. Yet Moss was prescient in how she analyzed the cultural landscape of the early twenty-first century. At a time when many people clung to naïve notions about the liberatory capacities of total connectivity, she spoke about the damage that social media and mobile devices were doing to our inner lives. Now we know better how a constant flow of information can obscure, rather than sharpen, our perceptions. Conversely, a period of contemplative distance can put reality in sharp relief. The arts are never simply a refuge from worldly complexities. Even the purest, most ethereal work—an abstraction by Geneviève Asse, a string quartet by Linda Catlin Smith—can leave us in a state of vulnerable awareness.
Moss’s approach to musical presentation may sound quietistic, but it has often challenged the age-old, trance-inducing routines of classical performance. Both at White Light and at other Lincoln Center series, Moss has encouraged experiments in the theatricalization of concerts and recitals. Peter Sellars directed the Berlin Philharmonic and the Berlin Radio Chorus in a majestic staging of the “St. Matthew Passion.” Jochen Sandig made use of the same chorus in a solemn fantasia on Brahms’s “German Requiem.” Schubert’s “Winterreise” has been the focus of two productions: one by William Kentridge, with the baritone Matthias Goerne; another by Katie Mitchell, with Mark Padmore singing Schubert songs and Stephen Dillane reciting Samuel Beckett. Some of these affairs have succeeded more than others, but all have yielded images that linger in the mind.
Mitchell’s latest contribution to White Light, “Zauberland,” has a heady conceit. Once again, a canonical song cycle is at the heart of the undertaking: “Dichterliebe,” Schumann’s emotionally fractured exploration of poetry by Heinrich Heine. “Zauberland,” meaning “magic land,” comes from Heine’s “Aus alten Märchen winkt es,” about the longing for fairy-tale realms. In a program note, Mitchell proposes that one such oasis is the classical tradition itself, which is “trying to hold global change at bay.” Mitchell, in collaboration with the playwright Martin Crimp, creates a framing narrative about a Syrian-born opera singer who has gone into exile in Germany. In what appears to be an extended dream sequence, the singer’s memories of performing Schumann mingle with traumatic impressions of her earlier life. The Belgian composer Bernard Foccroulle supplies music for Crimp’s texts, which flesh out the story.
The piece was designed as a vehicle for the lavishly gifted young American soprano Julia Bullock, who has made her name mainly in new music. I have encountered Bullock in major works by John Adams—“El Niño,” “Doctor Atomic,” “Girls of the Golden West”—and in Tyshawn Sorey’s “Perle Noire,” a meditation on the life of Josephine Baker. The revelation of “Zauberland” was to hear Bullock apply her rich-hued voice and expressive intelligence to a famous group of songs that too often fall victim to the high-minded clichés of the vocal-recital circuit. “Dichterliebe” is usually sung by men. Bullock’s fearless negotiation of this territory deepened the sense that her onstage character was an exile, an outsider. The performance was also a tour de force of stamina: Bullock sang for eighty minutes, with relatively brief breaks, and even when she was silent she was in constant motion onstage.
Unfortunately, the project suffered from a severe formal imbalance, with “Dichterliebe” dominating the first half and Foccroulle’s settings of Crimp taking over in the second half. As long as Schumann was in command, the production proved murkily compelling. The singer was shown in a quick-changing montage: giving a posh recital, being pushed around by well-dressed men, being interrogated, becoming pregnant, raising a child, and so on. As she performed “Ich grolle nicht,” Schumann’s song of forbearance (“I bear no grudge”), two men watched her from the sides: her tense grip on the piano subtly signalled the psychology of exile. Foccroulle’s music, couched in a limber atonal idiom, suggested those eerie moments in dreams when one becomes half aware that one is dreaming. Cédric Tiberghien, at the piano, handled the transitions with seamless agility.
When the Schumann stopped, though, the evening passed from the imponderable to the interminable. Mitchell’s penchant for spasmodic activity—nonspeaking actors marching on and off stage, carrying chairs, lamps, flowers, display cases, and other props—had me writing rude things in my notebook. Foccroulle’s songs were beautifully crafted but somewhat lacking in personality. To be sure, the task of fashioning a sequel to “Dichterliebe” would have been arduous for any composer. Perhaps “Zauberland” could be reworked so that Foccroulle’s settings are more evenly distributed alongside Schumann’s stations of the emotional cross.
The previous night, at Alice Tully Hall, White Light presented a more outwardly conventional event: the baritone Christian Gerhaher and the pianist Gerold Huber performing songs by Gustav Mahler. The only innovation here was the introduction of a service called Yondr, which asks concertgoers to place their cell phones in sealed pouches. I opted out, skeptical that yet another vowel-deficient Silicon Valley company could solve problems created by other Silicon Valley companies. Indeed, a phone went off after a few minutes. When human beings gather, disturbances are inevitable. The answer lies not in trying to control the environment but in cultivating experiences that push distractions to the side.
Gerhaher is the type of performer who makes such experiences routine. In the past decade, he has assumed a preëminent position among German-speaking lieder singers and become the rightful heir to the almighty Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Gerhaher possesses a singular vocal style in which the veneer of classical refinement periodically gives way to the world-weary rasp of the balladeer or the arch charm of the crooner. He has a way of conveying raw emotion with a tinge of ironic detachment—a self-aware Romantic manner that makes him peculiarly suited to Mahler’s intricately multilayered songs.
This recital felt like a trap prepared for the kind of listener who was expecting a couple of hours of comfortable cultivation. One of Gerhaher’s signature techniques is to vary the timbre and articulation of a repeating word or phrase so that a familiar pattern becomes unsettling. In “Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz,” from “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen,” the singer’s insistence that “all, all was well again / Ach, all well again” undermined itself through a slurring together of “alles, alles,” until it became a repressed wail. In “Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer,” from the same cycle, cries of “O weh!” became progressively more desperate. And in the final song of “Kindertotenlieder,” reiterations of “In diesem Wetter” (“In this weather”) captured the self-castigation of a parent who has let his children out in a storm.
Gerhaher’s uncanny ability to conjure images in the mind’s eye—you could see the suicidal lover, the doomed young soldier, the missing children—made me reflect on the latter-day pressure to make concerts more relevant, more visual, more technologically adept. I found myself wishing that Bullock’s masterly rendition of “Dichterliebe” had been granted the same unadorned treatment. Yet White Light still deserves praise for its restless, exploratory spirit, its refusal to lock itself into a single approach. Neither event kept the world at bay: these places of refuge were full of wounded souls. ♦
