Beethoven Project ballet. Music by Beethoven (featuring elements from the Eroica Variations [piano and chamber music], the Creatures of Prometheus ballet, and Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica” or “Heroic”). Choreography by John Neumeier. Performed and recorded 2019 at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden. Stars Aleix Martinez (Ludwig van Beethoven); Edvin Revasov (Beethoven’s Ideal); Patricia Friza (Beethoven’s Mother); Borja Bermudez (Beethoven’s Nephew); Anna Laudere (Beethoven’s “Distant Beloved”); and soloist dancers Christopher Evans, Marc Jubete, Emilie Mazoń, Yun-Su Park, Madoka Sugai, Alexandr Trusch, Lizhong Wang, and Mayo Arii. Also features musicians Michał Białk (Piano); Ermir Abeshi (Violin); Teodor Rusu (Cello); Xiangzi Cao-Staemmler, Helmut Winkel, Benjamin Rivinius, and Mario Blaumer (String Quartet). Simon Hewett conducts the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern. Set design by Heinrich Tröger; lighting and costumes by John Neumeier. Directed for TV by Myriam Hoyer. Released 2020, disc has 5.0 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: B
The Beethoven Project is not one of Neumeier’s narrative works. It’s abstract dancing to Beethoven music with some allusions to facts about his life. The music is divided into 3 parts, and the music in each part contains a theme you will probably recognize:
Part 1—Piano and Chamber Music Fragments
Part 2 —Portions of the Creatures of Prometheus Ballet
Part 3—Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica” or “Heroic”)
The music in Parts 2 and 3 is played substantially in full.
This is a serious production, maybe too much so for newbie ballet fans. For seasoned dance warriors, the question is whether Neumeier and his troop have the horsepower to pull this off completely. The show premiered in Hamburg in 2018; the recording was made on the road (always high-risk) in Baden-Baden.
The show opens with solo piano (Michał Białk) and impressions from Aleix Martinez, who portrays Beethoven as an eternally agitated neurotic:
Edvin Revasov creates the role of Beethoven’s Ideal:
Martinez has a huge number of moves linked by fits of playing air piano:
Poor Ludwig had no luck at all with girls. My wife looked at a bunch of pictures of Ludwig and declared him average looking or better. Ludwig was one of the first music composers to be famous during his life, so what was his problem? My wife says it had to be an irritating personality:
Maybe Ludwig was too much in love with music to have a normal life—he lives now amoung the stars:
More dancers arrive to be inspired by chamber music fragments:
Beethoven and his mother, depicted by Patricia Friza (I think):
This is Friza for sure as The Mother:
How does one show on a dance stage the trauma to a musician of oncoming deafness? The images below below are probably about as good as this could be done:
After Part 1, Neumeier has to get the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern into the pit. In Hamburg, I think he just made his audience sit still for a few minutes. At some point he tried to improve on this with an extraordinary little interlude when dancer Patricia Friza—without actually breaking character— speaks through the 4th wall to the audience. She announces that the next dance will be to music by her son, Ludwig Beethoven, and discusses Prometheus a bit. She then reminds everyone to turn off their “handys” or mobile phones. At home we see this in gray-scale, and we even get to see the German audience in Baden-Baden! This was probably just as weird an experience for Friza as it is for us—we forgive her for reading her speech from a note card!
Now we move into Part 2, Beethoven’s only ballet music, The Creatures of Prometheus, in which Prometheus teaches mankind about the arts. Unfortunately, Prometheus never got around to teaching Neumeier about costume designing. For some reason, Neumeier (maybe because he’s a total control freak or maybe because of a tight budget) designs his own costumes. I have no idea who these characters seen next below are supposed to be, but their costumes are the ugliest I’ve seen in 12 years of watching ballet and opera videos. Neumeier might benefit from asking students at the University of Hamburg to make some costumes:
The next image below includes, on the left, Anna Laudere as Terpsichore and next to Anna, Borja Bermudez, maybe as the god of comedy. On the right is Revazov as Apollo. This makes for an interesting photo. But if I saw this in isolation and out of context, I would guess it is a bunch of comedians on a late-night TV show making fun of classical ballet. The costumes are that bad!
Neumeier finishes Part 2 with the longest quote about the art of dancing I’ve ever seen. Maybe Neumeier was trying to anesthetize his audience before presenting the rest of the show. C Major does translate all of this wisdom from Schiller into English with mandatory subtitles in English that you can’t turn off. (Schiller admired ballet dancers as models for all civilization since they do lots of stuff without ever knocking each other down.)
Neumeier also does his own lighting. Deep blue looks grotesque in the home theater and certain shades of yellow are also gauche:
Below are two poorly lit segments. On the left 8 dancers are lost in gloom and on the right the set has disappeared into darkness:
Below is a PR shot of the set with full lighting. Pretty impressive. But Neumeier’s gloom above all but wipes out the impact of Heinrich Tröger’s beautiful design:
Now we move into Part 3 of the show, the Eroica. Now Neumeier’s main concern is to give everybody in the company some time on stage. This results in a bunch of short numbers for many combinations of dancers. First below is a duet by (my best guess) Lizhong Wang and Mayo Arii:
Revazov as Apollo and Laudere as Terpsichore start to take on a zombie look:
More combinations as each dancer punches her ticket:
The only decent large-group I image I could get is this view 1/2 second before the lights go out:
Video resolution and SQ are fine.
Neumeier has had an amazing career elevating his Hamburg Ballet to international fame competing in some ways with even the big ballet companies (supported by entire nations) such as the Royal in London and the Paris Opéra Ballet. I think he is the world’s leading choreographer of original narrative ballet in modern dance style, and I have enjoyed all his work published in HDVD.
But 2 hours straight of abstract dance to Beethoven seems to have been a bit of a strain on the home team. Neumeier comes up with an amazing variety of moves. Still, his style lacks some of the elegance we take for granted in the on-point dancing of the big houses. I also get the feeling that there just wasn’t enough rehearsal time to completely polish all that was undertaken. This, together with the lackluster set, costumes, and lighting distresses me. I wonder if it isn’t time for John to start giving younger members of the company more responsibility and authority.
I reduce the grade from A+ to C+ for weaknesses noted. But I also make an upward adjustment for the fine video content in this title as directed for TV by Myriam Hoyer. We have always downgraded Neumeier’s videos made with Thomas Grimm for hyperactive video. I ran the numbers on Hoyer’s file: she has an average pace throughout of about 10.5 seconds per clip with about 70% of her clips showing the full bodies of dancers. This doesn’t get us into the sublime world of the Vincent Batallion videos, but it’s a huge step in the right direction for Neumeier. So I bump the grade up to B.
Here’s a clip from C Major:
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