'Das Paradies': A Giant Globular Tear as Ticket to Heaven
Music and artistic director Gustavo Dudamel joined forces with distinguished professor and iconic director Peter Sellars and innovative video artist and alumnus Refik Anadol for the poignant and rarely performed oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri.
Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Schumann's 'Das Paradies und die Peri' with projections by Refik Anadol overhead at Walt Disney Concert Hall "There he goes again: The director Peter Sellars has taken an obscure 19th century work by Robert Schumann based on dated Victorian Irish poetry, and he’s related it to the current incendiary Islamic hot spots of Kashmir, Egypt and Syria.
There it goes again: The video-besotted Los Angeles Philharmonic has turned Walt Disney Concert Hall into yet another computer light show.
There Gustavo Dudamel goes again: Rather than compete with the master East Coast maestros in core repertory, he is hiding behind “Das Paradies und die Peri,” a dated 1843 work about a fallen angel trying to get into heaven by schlepping a tear of a scoundrel to the pearly gates, as though that were some kind of forgotten masterpiece. No respectable American orchestra has had any use for it in recent memory.
But guess what? “Das Paradies” is a magical masterpiece, as a gorgeous performance confirmed over the weekend to conclude Dudamel’s “Schumann Focus” festival and the L.A. Phil’s season.
“Das Paradies” is about uprisings and terrors in Kashmir, Cairo and Syria, and Sellars’ staging of it had absolutely nothing foreign to the Schumann original. Everything about media artist Refik Anadol’s abstract, 3-D, artificial-intelligence video imagery and the huge inflatable sculpture on which it was projected was directly derived from Schumann’s score.
“Paradise and the Peri,” the English title, is not without champions. In Schumann’s lifetime, “Das Paradies” was one of the composer’s most popular pieces, and his wife, Clara, thought it his finest. Simon Rattle is a fan. Carlo Maria Giulini called it his favorite Schumann, but the beloved L.A. Phil music director was rebuffed when he wanted to program it in the 1980s.
Why, then, the neglect? There are surprisingly few good answers. The gaudy orientalism of Thomas Moore’s poem (translated into German for Schumann’s setting) is the usual insufficient one."— Mark Swed, Jun. 4, 2018
This post is an excerpt, read the full article on the Los Angeles Times website.
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