La Ronde | Franui | Regina Fritsch, recitation | Sven-Eric Bechtolf, recitation

Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde as a ‘dramma per musica’: Together with two actors (Burgtheater stars Regina Fritsch and Sven-Eric Bechtolf for German stages), Franui clads each of the play’s ten scenes into new musical cloth. The Parlor Maid holds hands with Gustav Mahler. The Husband leads the Little Miss into the chambre séparée to the tinkling of Erik Satie. The Poet’s effusions are accompanied by John Cage. Giuseppe Verdi wafts in the air around the marital bed: memories of their honeymoon in Italy. And at every moment that two lovers’ passion is consumed, which Schnitzler pithily suggests with an ellipsis, there’s plenty of room for (more) music. Text and music interact in ever new ways with each other. The musicians and the actors sit on twelve chairs for a program that’s itself caught in the middle: Neither concert nor recitation, not play nor opera or even audio drama, it yet contains a bit of all of these formats.

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