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YOUKALI (Weill) Perm 2023 Teodor Currentzis
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: YOUKALI
- Composer: Weill Kurt
- Libretto: various Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Perm, Russia
- Recorded: December 24, 2023
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: musicAeterna Choir soloists
- Conductor: Teodor Currentzis
- Orchestra: musicAeterna Orchestra
- Chorus: musicAeterna Choir
- Ballet: musicAeterna Dance
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Format: DVD
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
YOUKALI continues a series of special projects – musical and theatrical homages to poets and musicians of the past, major figures who influenced world culture. After projects in honor of Paul Celan and Charles Baudelaire, the Diaghilev Festival presents the dance performance-concert YOUKALI.
As part of the experimental project, Teodor Currentzis, Vangelino Currentzis, Andreas Moustoukis, Alexey Retinsky, Alexey Syumak and FM Einheit created their own versions of Kurt Weill’s songs with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht and other authors. Weil’s zongs from the musicals of the 1920s and ’30s and The Threepenny Opera, miniatures in their own right that became widespread jazz standards or remained gems of the cabaret repertoire of the 1930s, have changed with varying degrees of recognition. Arrangements close to the original or radically new author’s interpretations of songs are designed for the performing and creative forces of musicAeterna (soloists of the choir and orchestra, choir), many use non-academic instruments – from electronics to theremin, from prepared piano to banjo.
A collection of homage songs forms the basis of a dance performance with the participation of the House of Radio troupe – musicAeterna Dance. Director Anna Guseva and choreographer Anastasia Peshkova created a large-scale production with the participation of about 50 artists (musicians, performers and extras) in the genre of surreal cabaret. The play does not have a cross-cutting plot, but there is a strong semantic thread that connects all the sketch numbers and an open ending.
The title of the production YOUKALI repeats the name of the song by Kurt Weill, which was first performed as the instrumental “Tango Habanera” in 1934 and became popular after Roger Fernet wrote dreamy and melancholic poems for this music in 1935: “Yukali is the land of my desires, / Yukali is only happiness and pleasant dreams, / But there is a dream, and there is no love, / Just like there is no Yukali in the world!” The lyrical and tragicomic, realistic and chimerical characters of the play are anxiously awaiting the train that will take them to the land of unrealistic happiness. The waiting room – a liminal, transitional space – highlights not only the fears and anxieties of each passenger, but also the nature of the non-existent country of Yukali: the edge of true happiness lies in each of us here and now. The train to Yukali station will still arrive at the station. But who will wait for it to depart and who has a ticket?