In an inventive exploration of classical music, I Fagiolini and director John La Bouchardière present Betrayal: A Polyphonic Crime Drama, commissioned by the Barbican Centre.
This new piece of immersive music theatre – essentially a murder mystery with really good soundtrack – is the follow-up to 2005’s The Full Monteverdi, which The Times described as ‘one of the most surprising music-theatre hits of the decade’. Set to the unsettling music of Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, it fuses unaccompanied singing with contemporary dance in hidden corners of real-life urban locations. Betrayal comes to Cambridge Junction as part of Cambridge Early Music’s Festival of the Voice (20 to 22 May), following its world première at Village Underground in Shoreditch on 13 May.
Huw Humphreys, Barbican’s head of music, explains: “The Barbican and I Fagiolini share a commitment to exploring adventurous ways of presenting classical music to new audiences. We’re delighted to build on the success of projects like How like an Angel in pioneering the innovative presentation of early music in radical, new and cross-artform ways. The warehouse environment of Village Underground is perfect for this site-specific re-imagining of Gesualdo’s music as a gritty crime drama.”
Director John La Bouchardière adds: “We’re approaching Gesualdo’s strange and agonizing harmonies through the kind of thinking that seems to have plagued his life. I’ve taken some of his darkest and most extreme madrigals, and punctuated them with motets and the shadowy ‘Tenebrae’ for Holy Week to form the structure of a contemporary crime drama. As in The Full Monteverdi, the audience will be immersed in the music and action, but this time they’ll be in murky warehouses and car parks, and be able to follow the performers around. The details of the stories will be devised in rehearsals. As the singers and dancers uncover terrible truths, they’ll draw the audience into their harrowing conflicts and, we hope, reveal a disturbing logic to Gesualdo’s music.”
See Betrayal at Cambridge Junction 20 to 22 May, tickets £26. Check online for timings.
