Klara Festival
It’s party time for the depressed, the gloomy, the heart-broken: For two weeks, they, and the rest of us, will be encouraged to wallow in spleen courtesy of the Klara Festival, which this year revolves around melancholy.
Such sweet sorrow
Part of the months-long Festival of Flanders, Klara is a lavish affair and a non-misser for anyone with even a remote interest in classical music. It fills the city with world-class, historically informed concerts, cross-disciplinary performances, intimate lunchtime recitals and edgy live music in night clubs.
This year’s edition, prettily titled “Go Crystal Tears” after a song by Renaissance English composer John Dowland, is the final stage of a three-year cycle exploring the human condition. After “Utopia” and “Spirituality”, artistic director Hendrik Storme has devised a programme centring on this bitter-sweet feeling Victor Hugo called “the joy of being sad”.
An inspiring theme if ever there was one: from Thomas Tallis to Kaija Saariaho, countless composers down the ages have been transmuting their suffering and anguish into pure musical gold and we listeners deriving a strange and ineffable pleasure from hearing and sharing their private griefs.
Dowland naturally looms large on the programme, and not just because this year marks the 450th anniversary of his birth. A Roman catholic exile who called himself semper dolens (ever mourning), he epitomised Elizabethan England’s love affair with sadness, penning lute songs filled with pungent conceits and aching harmonies.
From Peter Pears to Alfred Deller down to Sting, many interpretations of his songs exist, and Klara plans to add a few to the list, including the unorthodox Dowland Recomposed by Liesa Van der Aa (pictured), an Antwerp singer and violinist whose diverse influences range from Bach to The Velvet Underground.
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) also has an anniversary this year, and he too had a knack for gloomy yet irresistible music. Not only that, but his Lachrymae is directly inspired by Dowland. It will be performed, along with Dowland’s original and pieces by Purcell, Muffat and Hindemith, by Ghent-based baroque ensemble B’Rock. His sublime Serenade for tenor, horn and string, meanwhile, will be sung on another night by British tenor Ian Bostridge.
Watch out also for Roger Norrington and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Beethoven, Chopin and Berlioz; Bach polyphony played on four saxes by the Bl!ndman ensemble; a new project by Flemish actor Josse De Pauw called Escorial, which welds texts by Michel de Ghelderode to music by Orlando di Lasso; Mozart’s Requiem conducted by Jérémie Rohrer; and an evening of Schubert Lieder sung by a vocal quartet whose performances so moved the public in previous years that it is hard to imagine an edition of the festival without them.
Then there’s C(h)oeurs, a new choreography by Ghent iconoclast extraordinaire Alain Platel that splices together Verdi’s Va pensiero, Wagner’s Pilger-Chor and other rousing operatic moments. It sits oddly amid the melancholy, as though Platel had lost his way trying to get into the 2011 edition on utopia. But cheer up, that’s nothing to cry about.
