Klara Festival puts spiritual passions centre stage

After exploring love and passion last year, the Klara Festival in Brussels this year turns to passion in the religious and spiritual sense. “The festival is conceived as a collage, a combination of universal stories about passion and compassion,” explains Klara artistic director Hendrik Storme.

The festival has its roots in Western classical music, so interpretations of the Passion – the suffering and death of Christ – naturally come to the fore. “It’s obvious that the link between Christianity and passion is very strong,” says Storme, “but on the other hand I think that passion is a universal subject, which is not limited to Christianity. All the world religions have dealt with this subject.”

So the festival includes a number of projects by artists from other traditions as well as artists who take an innovative approach to the Christian Passion. The most ambitious is And You Must Suffer, a music theatre presentation of Bach’s St John Passion that will have its world premiere at the festival.

The oratorio will be performed in full, bracketed by new pieces from Flemish composer Annelies Van Parys. Then at the heart of Bach’s Passion – an intentional piece of symbolism – there will be a new composition by the avant-garde Palestinian-Israeli composer Samir Odeh-Tamimi. This takes its text from The Arab Apocalypse, by Lebanese poet Etel Adnan, which reflects on the suffering of people caught up in the Lebanese civil war during the 1980s.

Passion and compassion

The semi-staged performance by the Flemish baroque orchestra B’Rock and the Wroclaw Philharmonic Choir will also feature a video installation by Mirjam Devriendt, inspired by Flemish religious painting and Wim Delvoye’s striking interpretation of the 14 Stations of the Cross. This tells the story of the crucifixion with rats, their bodies posed and X-rayed to produce shadowy, strangely transcendent images.

“By using X-rays, he is showing things that normally you cannot see,” says Storme. “He is externalising very internal things and that is a nice metaphor for what we aim to do in this production. The idea was to reflect on the heart, the inside, of a Passion. It’s a reflection on religion, but it’s also a reflection on the meaning of art and music, and of Passions in our society and the way we have to present them to a contemporary audience.”

The festival includes two other Bach Passions. One is a more traditional interpretation of the St Matthew Passion, with John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists. The festival’s title this year – Erbarme dich – comes from a line in this Passion: “Have mercy, my God, for the sake of my tears”.

The other comes from Chinese conductor and composer Tan Dun (pictured), whose Water Passion will be performed by the Flemish Radio Choir and the Brussels Philharmonic Soloists. “This uses the St Matthew Passion as a point of departure, but he has added other texts, from different religions, telling different stories,” Storme explains. Dun has also added water, both as a musical element in the performance and to create its visual identity.

Other visual treats in the festival include the installation of Bill Viola’s Martyrs in the St Michael and St Gudule Cathedral in Brussels. These four video works, originally commissioned by St Paul’s Cathedral in London, show striking, stylised deaths by earth, air, water and fire. “The installation is about suffering and passion, but it is also about compassion. So I thought it would be the ideal project to present in Brussels,” Storme says.

Surprise singing

The festival will also screen the whole of the Dekalog, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s series of films inspired by the Ten Commandments. This leads up to a concert in which Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner will conduct his score for the films, performed by the Wroclaw Philharmonic and Choir. “It is quite rare that he tours with this music,” says Storme.

Other performances exploring the festival theme include Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Mahler’s Third Symphony and song cycle Das Lied von der Erde, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden and Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. You can also compare Schubert and Pergolesi on the Stabat Mater, and Hayden and Pergolesi on Christ’s final words from the Cross.

Some of these performances will be conventional concerts, while others are more innovative. The Human Requiem, for example, is a presentation of Brahms’ German Requiem in the Halles de Schaerbeek, more usually a home to contemporary dance or circus performances.

“The audience will be surrounded by members of the choir, and at a certain moment the choir will start to sing,” Storme explains. “This will feel a bit different, because you will not know that you are standing right next to a singer. So, there will be a dialogue between the singers and the audience. That makes it a very powerful production.”

March 9-24 across Brussels and Flanders. Photo courtesy Klara Festival