Had I a Song
I. Gurney & C. Wagner

Set & Costume.........Daphne Kitschen
Light design.........Peter van Praet
Soundscape.........Aarich Jespers

première: 1 November 2000, Ypres, Belgium
company: Muziektheater Transparant

Reviews

Hear my songs
Strange electronic noises fill rehearsal rooms in Antwerp's docklands as three singers study the script of a new piece based on the work of Ivor Gurney --- Asked by the Festival of Flanders to create a work for the cloth hall in Ypres, Venezuelan-born opera director Carlos Wagner spent six months sifting out Gurney's forgotten songs and transcribing hand-written medical records. The result is a collage of music, poetry and fragments of letters which remains faithful to Gurney's original work. "There is not a single new word in the text," days Wagner. The Ypres production is a bare affair in a bleak sandbagged set. Karl Daymond, the Welsh singer who plays Gurney, shuffles around holding sheaves of crumpled paper or lies strapped to an antique hospital trolley. Flemish baritone Wilfried van den Brande provides a cynical foil to Gurney's crazed outbursts as the doctor, while English soprano Philippa Dames-Longworth offers a gentler presence as Marion Scott, a violinist who wrote to Gurney throughout his long incarceration. One scene alone is worth the journey to Ypres. It's when Scott brings Gurney an ordnance survey map of Gloucestershire. He spreads it out on the floor and traces the country lanes he knew as a child with trembling finger, while Dames-Longworth recites an elegiac war poem that compares them with the trenches. The eerie atmosphere is enhanced by two electronic sound-scapes by Aarich Jespers of Flemish art-rockers Zita Swoon. One evokes the ominous rattling gunfire of the trenches, while the other suggests banging doors and clattering footsteps of he asylum. The words and songs of this English composer sound haunting enough in the rehearsal space in Antwerp. Hearing them performed in Ypres' historic Cloth Hall should be an extraordinary experience.

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