Prologue
Tewkesbury to Birmingham to Geneva, then on one of the most beautiful train journeys i’ve known, round Lake Geneva and along the Rhône valley into the mountains. Going beyond Leuk, where i’ve always disembarked on my trips to Switzerland, feels weird and wrong. i acknowledge the Schloss on one side of the train (the previous location of Forum Wallis concerts), the summit of Illhorn on the other (which i climbed during the 2020 festival), and we continue on to Brig. The fact it’s the end of the line feels significant: full-stop, end of paragraph, something new. By car to Münster, and despite having become familiar with these Alpine vistas in recent years, i’m struck afresh by the staggering beauty all around me, as if daring my eyes to be able to take it in, and my brain to process it properly. i do my best.
Dinner, my first experience of eating horse, washed down with Puro, a Malbec from the Argentine vineyard of none other than Dieter Meier. Echoes of being a teenager listening to Yello come flooding back; the music was good; the Malbec is magnificent. i usually avoid alcohol before concerts i’m writing about – but there are no concerts this evening. The wine flows. (I need it and I’m ready and I haven’t got a clue.)
Day 1
Hike to the Galmihornhütte. White noise from the Minstigerbach crossfades into distant bells from goats and churches. At the hut, over 2,100 metres up, all that remains are guiro-like calls of circling ravens in an azure sky, answered by infinitesimal pitches from invisible birds nearby.
Then all in reverse, diverting via St Antonius’ Chapel, which at next year’s Forum Wallis will be filled with Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2. i think of the many hours of the Feldman; i look at the austere, stiff, cushionless pews; i feel i should start limbering up now.
Woyzeck
It’s not the first time a work by UMS ‘n JIP (Ulrike Mayer-Spohn and Javier Hagen) has felt like a fever dream, but here that seems right. Woyzeck is fevered; he dreams. At least, he hallucinates, and throughout the performance i’m inclined to feel the same way. JIP (pre-recorded) shape-shifts: now the Captain, careening countertenor flamboyance; now Woyzeck, dull spoken words, a total contrast. It’s an amazing opening scene, the two characters surrounded by upbeat, synth-pop electronics, seemingly emanating directly from the Captain. On stage, UMS sorts through a large number of screws, symbolically searching for order within chaos; JIP wields a small keyboard as the low-key, live member of the virtual pop group. Marie is rendered in whispers, lending the intensity of her words a quality bordering on menace. Yet combined with Woyzeck’s soft speech, it becomes almost unbearably intimate; if we didn’t know better, we might actually attribute love to these two. The shape-shifting continues, JIP presenting the Sergeant and Drum Major with extreme vocal fry, which in combination with dark-hued beats evokes the industrial aesthetic of Laibach. Again the absolute contrast, Woyzeck’s the only voice without affectation.
An uncanny feeling starts to prevail. UMS’s recorder wails, moans, like the thin end of crying; faint metallic impacts materialise all around us, and something granular suggests insects. A texture caught between passivity and activity, not unlike the characters in the drama. It also intensifies the intimacy, and Woyzeck and Marie’s subsequent exchanges are now so soft and elusive they feel entirely private. Discomfort increases; the visuals include coloured fluids in water, suggesting semen and blood, and branches in snow indicate things freezing and dying. Whereas hitherto it seemed Woyzeck had composure – almost, of all things, a voice of reason – as the pop becomes more punchy his speech turns to strains of keening. Yet the opera continues to flip emotions on their head, madness is internalised, and the sense we’re inhabiting Woyzeck’s mind becomes every stronger (could it all be in his head? one massive, grotesque dream or hallucination or nightmare or flashback?).
The music is pared away, the Grandmother’s song is an long, eerie reverie, and we arrive at the climactic scene. Could it be any more disturbing? Woyzeck murders Marie, his voice now a high avant-crooning – as if, horrifically, he had partly morphed into the Captain – the blows of his knife quantised to the beats of the synth-pop, now weirdly laid-back and harmonically oblique. His voice refracts around the space, and finally, fully, JIP manifests Woyzeck live on stage – shining a lamp directly into his own face, simultaneously both interrogation and confession – in an extended coda where his search for the knife results in his own demise. In front, on screen, the liquid turns blue mingled with pink, blood diluting in water; from behind, in darkness, recorder tritones jar against a drone. The synths tick over, the metal impacts surround us again, and for an uncomfortably long time we sit in this bleak no-place, droplets of water delicately torturing our ears.
