Review: Amy Seiwert's WANDERING at the Joyce Theater, July 27, 2017

Franz Schubert's Winterreise is one of music's supreme compositions of all time. A desolate song cycle depicting a traveler on a savage winter journey through a fierce snowy environment and an anguished mental state, it has long been a favored recital offering by both men, and sometimes women, singers. It's up to them, and the accompanist-whose importance is vital--to guide us through this turmoil, shading and intensifying words so as to allow our imaginations to comprehend and endure this tumultuous voyage that produces only anguish and despair, never letting go and never achieving tranquility.

Schubert's death at age 32 left us with a cornucopia of musical accomplishments that were barely acknowledged in his lifetime: symphonies, chamber music, operas and song cycles. Before Schubert, the only composer to have attempted this was Beethoven, but his cycle, An die ferne Gelibete, is a short 15minutes. It was Schubert who lifted the song cycle, not only in Winterreise, but in Die schöne Müllerin,to new levels of musical expressiveness, allowing singers, both male, and sometimes female, to perform a tour de force of such rich musical candor and profundity that it has become one of the supreme challenges of the concert hall and the recorded voice. There are over 100 recordings available now of Winterreise, and there will be more in the future. That's a challenge even for music lovers!

Taking on Winterreise as a ballet was a huge undertaking, since it does not provide much opportunity to open up dance to anything other than tight and lonely emotions. The opportunity for virtuosity is nil, since the musical landscape is expressed through the singer's and the piano's emotive force. Usually at Winterreise we sit and listen. Here we sit and listen and watch. For this song cycle, it can be difficult.

Amy Seiwert, in her ballet Wandering, has made a brave attempt to choreograph Winterreise. She has found, within a very narrow dance vocabulary, a way to express the shadows and waves that pervade the songs. However, even as she attempts to think along the music's poetry, she is unable to provide those choreographic lines which could be riveting on the stage. One dance becomes very much like another. Since I was seeing this for the first time, there is more I could possibly-and will-glean at a second or even third visit. But when I think of Antony Tudor's Dark Elegies, set to Mahler's song cycle Kindertotenlieder, and what he achieved in his depiction of sorrow and angst, allowing even the dancers' small glimmers of hope in posture nuance. While Seiwert was able to find some variance in steps, she was unable to offer a variety of moods which her dancers could grasp.

I would hate to say that I blame the music-how can you do that to music of such beauty-but it would seem to me that Schubert's Winterreise really gains nothing from dance. It is such an immense achievement on its own that it does not gain an iota from dance. And the fact that it is sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, accompanied by Gerald Moore on the piano (although they made three recordings of the song cycle together, in 1955, 1962 and 1971 it is never stated in the notes which version they used), even adds more depth to the sung version, since these great artists are no longer with us.

Credit is due to the wonderful dancers who gave so much of themselves to the performance: Anthony Cannarella, Alysia Chang, James Gilmer, Tina LaForgia Morse, Jackie Nash, Ben Needham Wood, Gabriel Smith and Shania Rasmussen. As much as I was impressed by the costumes by Susan Roemer and the lighting by Brian Jones, I still felt that the music's poignancy was elusive.

When I returned home that evening I put on the 1962 recording of Winterreise. There was nothing more I needed to do than just sit and listen. Perhaps that's the key to this music. Just sit, listen, think, and listen again. That's the way I thought about the ballet. Listen to a good recording, that's all you need.

Photo: Chris Hardy

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