Requiem pour L. les ballets C de la B, Festival de Marseille, Berliner Festspiele Fabrizio Cassol, Alain Platel World premiere: 18 January 2018 - Berliner Festspiele (DE) duration: 1h40 (no interval) Requiem pour L. Fabrizio Cassol, Alain Platel les ballets C de la B les ballets C de la B (Ghent-Belgium) was founded by Alain Platel in 1984. Since then it has become a company that enjoys great success at home and abroad. Over the years it has develo- ped into an artistic platform for a variety of choreographers. The company still keeps to its prin- ciple of enabling artists from various disciplines and backgrounds to take part in this dynamic creative process. As a result of its ‘unique mixture of artistic visions’, les ballets C de la B is not easy to classify. It is nevertheless possible to discern something like a house style (popular, anar- chic, eclectic, committed), and its motto is ‘this dance is for the world and the world is for everyone’. www.lesballetscdela.be Festival de Marseille Each year at the beginning of the summer, the Festival de Marseille, a major festival devoted to dance and other arts, combines a whole range of genres and cultures. Dance shows, plays, con- certs, installations, performances, films, public events and parties form an intense summer pro- gramme that takes place across the city: 3 weeks of events relating to the work of highly com- mitted artists, providing fascinating insights into their approaches and worldviews. Diverse, fes- tive and international, the Festival de Marseille reflects the energy and vibrancy of the City of Marseille. www.festivaldemarseille.com Berliner Festspiele Berliner Festspiele stand for a cultural programme where the new becomes visible. All year round, they host a multitude of festivals, exhibitions and individual events in two houses – the Haus der Berliner Festspiele and the Martin-Gropius-Bau. The combination and network of a festival house and an exhibition hall bears special potential for interdisciplinary project formats and the interaction of different forms of art. With the world premiere of “Requiem pour L.”, Alain Platel and Berliner Festspiele continue a fruitful collaboration of several years www.berlinerfestspiele.de Requiem pour L. Fabrizio Cassol, Alain Platel Fourteen musicians from across the world come together around Mozart's Requiem. In recon- structing that Requiem, they merge their own musical influences with genres including jazz, opera and popular African music. Appointed musical director, composer Fabrizio Cassol continues to write a personal artistic his- tory in which he brings together different musical cultures around a theme. Again and again, he looks for ways to write new stories with existing work, with oral and written traditions. For the Requiem, he brings together musicians whom he previously worked with (in Macbeth and Coup Fa- tal, among others) with artists for whom this is their first collaboration. On a theatrical level, director Alain Platel and the group look for a visual and physical translation of the images and associations that a Requiem conjures up: from the requiem mass to the mass grave into which Mozart was himself dumped. Cassol and Platel find each other in the way métissages, the blending of cultures, manage to create a new universe. They previously collaborated on Monteverdi’s Vespers for the Blessed Virgin Vespers - vsprs, 2006), Bach’s St Matthew Passion (pitié!, 2008) and the western baroque reper- toire (Coup Fatal, 2014). © Chris Van der Burght Requiem pour L. Fabrizio Cassol, Alain Platel Cassol has made it abundantly clear that this reinterpretation of Mozart’s Requiem is the most perilous musical undertaking he has ever attempted. This artistic adventure began some three years prior to its performance in Berlin (18 January 2018) when Cassol and Platel began to think about the next stage in their long-standing collabo- ration. It must have been conceived during the Coup Fatal tour, an encounter between 13 Con- golese musicians and the European baroque repertoire, for which the two had joined forces to complete the finishing touches. Their very first collaboration, however, was more than ten years ago. This would normally have been the choir project with which the KVS in Brussels opened its renovated theatre. However, due to delays in the renovation work, VSPRS, based on Monte- verdi’s Vespro de la beata vergine, came out first. Then came pitié!, whose final performances in Kinshasa could be described as pretty historic. These created a strong link with the Congo that still resonates today. An adaptation of Mozart’s Requiem was what most appealed to Platel. This is probably because during that period, death had crossed his path a number of times: he had had to bid farewell to his father, had lost his faithful dog, and had sat at the deathbed of his mentor Gerard Mortier. For Cassol, the knowledge that Mozart had not finished the Requiem opened up the possibility of relating to it as a composer. Others had added to it, in different eras. Why not a fresh interpreta- tion for a time in which the world has become so much bigger and the distances so much smaller? Cassol found a beautiful edition of the Requiem in the library of the conductor Sylvain Cam- breling and set about studying it. The variations in handwriting enabled him to distinguish the parts that Mozart had written from the additions made by others. However, it would be mislead- ing to suggest that Cassol stripped away the additions and only retained pure Mozart. The origi- nal has also been reworked. Cassol has made sketches of it; an imaginary distillate that contains the essence of Mozart’s writing and will always be recognised as Mozart. The texts have been re- duced to their essence. Equally, it would be simplistic to think that the additions are African. As Cassol reiterates: there is little that is African about the added rhythms or harmonies. For him, it is all part of a musical world of sound that he has always advocated and which is fuelled by specific musical traditions (pygmy, India, Mali) that have always been linked to equally specific forms of spirituality. Herein lies the great challenge for Cassol: imagining a different kind of ceremony for mourning that is neither Western nor African. It is likely that this need in him was also fuelled by a serious loss in his own private life, by an acute need for nourishing vitality. What else did he do in terms of reworking? Anyone familiar with the Requiem will immediately think of mass choral singing. Cassol has replaced the masses with individuals, thus creating an alternative expressive space where the melodies follow on from one another. Consecutive vocal parts then become a clarification between people, thus making the Requiem something ‘of the people’. Because of these vocal parts – often the only thing by Mozart that remained – Cassol needed a number of lyrical voices. For this he initially looked to South African opera singers that he had got to know through his work with Brett Bailey, for whom he adapted Verdi’s Macbeth. Generally the vocal distribution rests on a solid foundation of four voices: soprano, alto, bass and baritone. Cassol deliberately opted for triangles, omitting the bass. This allows for greater flexibility, whilst also creating a kind of instability. Across from the trio of lyrical singers stands a trio of black voices that hail from the oral tradition: the Brussels-based Fredy Massamba, along- side Kinois Boule Mpanya and Russell Tshiebua, the backing singers who already worked them- selves into the foreground in Coup Fatal, and were also part of the Platel production Nicht schla- fen. However, the voices do not always sing together and therefore cannot always seek support from one another. For Cassol, this is an extension of the idea of the fugue, which makes the mu- sic more joyful. Mozart’s score does not include an end for the Requiem. Generally, the end goes back to the be- ginning (Dies Irae), but for what Platel had in mind this would prove impossible. That’s why Cassol gradually allows the Requiem to merge into the Mass in C. The Requiem is in D, which for Cassol means the most open, radiant tonality: joy that slowly slides into the heavier, darker and more dramatic C. Cassol regards himself as the architect of this music. But let us not forget that the work is also informed by the input of the musicians during rehearsals. Thus the Latin texts of the Requiem or the Mass in C have their counterparts in Lingala or Swahili, with here and there a touch of Tshi- luba or Kikongo. Russell Tshiebua often acts as a translator and text producer. Massamba recites in his mother tongue, Kilari from Brazzaville. Sometimes the translation comes first and the mu- sic second; sometimes there are first notes and only then the language that best suits them. However, the translations never differ fundamentally from the Latin texts. The most difficult are the often-abrasive harmonies that are stacked up against one another in such an idiosyncratic way. This is most unlike the Congolese’ or Africans’ usual way of doing things and it requires a different cultural response; pretty complicated if you have to learn every- thing by ear, for in many places the score goes against what musicians are familiar with. It only falls into place when all the voices are filled in, which is why the musical rehearsals took so long (the first rehearsals date back to April 2017). It is not only a formidable challenge to bring to- gether musicians with these different backgrounds; it is also important that these musicians are able to express their way of life in the music.