Transart26 - Lieder ohne Worte

The latest music theatre experiment by Swiss director and set designer Thom Luz unfolds in the half-light of a forest clearing, among the smoking wreckage of a destroyed car. A dying radio plays the music of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, as five masters of sound and illusion build a meticulous montage that, over the course of the performance, reassembles every fragment and every resonance into a sonic sculpture of the crash.

In dialogue with this slowly recomposing heap of scrap metal, an electroacoustic chamber music trio expands Mendelssohn's piano cycle Lieder ohne Worte, exploring new dimensions of reverb and soundscapes. The end of a road movie becomes the opening of a work that speaks of shock and aphasia, of shifts in perspective, destruction and the future — and of the necessary reconstruction of the present.

Where words fall short, sounds reorganise themselves: from the dialogue between catastrophic images and musical overlaps emerges a subtle spatial composition, the result of meticulous reflection.

The performance contains few dialogues in German, English and French, with subtitles.