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Music Review

A Battered Spirit Seeking Clues Amid a Multimedia Landscape

“Winterreise” is a collaboration between the South African artist William Kentridge and the German baritone Matthias Goerne, seen here.Credit...Patrick Berger/ArtComArt

AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — One of the most anticipated premieres at this year’s Aix-en-Provence Festival was “Winterreise,” a multimedia collaboration between the South African artist William Kentridge and the German baritone Matthias Goerne, which opened to stormy applause at the Darius Milhaud Conservatory here on Friday.

It was billed as something of a sequel to Mr. Kentridge’s zany and brilliant production of Shostakovich’s “The Nose,” co-commissioned by the Aix festival. There was an over-the-top quality to that hyperkinetic production and to Mr. Kentridge’s video-animated sets that perfectly fit the surreal nature of Gogol’s short story, and it became one of the season’s highlights at the Metropolitan Opera, when it moved there in 2010. “Winterreise” is a different creature. Mr. Kentridge’s 24 stop-action films — made up of animated ink drawings and collages — offer a visually mesmerizing and thought-provoking commentary on Schubert’s song cycle. Some audience members may welcome that: Schubert’s hourlong meditation on longing, loneliness and alienation, based on sparse poems by Wilhelm Müller, can feel as inhospitable as the winter landscape through which the protagonist wanders.

But the films were also a distraction from the superb performance by Mr. Goerne, one of the leading interpreters of the German lied tradition today. Accompanied by the Austrian pianist Markus Hinterhäuser, Mr. Goerne’s singing was so rich in emotional shadings and dramatic expression that I often found Mr. Kentridge’s video art intrusive. It might seem a strength that Mr. Kentridge’s art is highly musical. Yet, paradoxically, that is part of the problem. Because for all its fluidity and skillfully charted sense of rhythm, the films follow their own course, sometimes in opposition to Schubert’s.

In an interview printed in the program, Mr. Kentridge recalls how he developed the moving images. Much of it harks back to his childhood in Johannesburg, watching his father listen to a recording of “Winterreise” by the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and the English pianist Gerald Moore. To Mr. Kentridge, who does not speak German, Müller’s texts appeared “like prayers,” eluding comprehension but setting off an emotional response.

The resulting films have a raw honesty and sense of magic that I admired a great deal. But I found myself wishing that they had been grafted onto that Fischer-Dieskau recording — perhaps as part of a museum installation I might revisit, better to study the images — rather than have them compete with Mr. Goerne’s absorbing performance. Mr. Kentridge is too accomplished an artist merely to illustrate Müller’s poems, though he mines them for a visual vocabulary drawing on the very specific birds and trees of his native South Africa. His crow is an ibis; his wide-canopied trees are those of Johannesburg.

But Müller’s texts conjure a metaphorical winter landscape more concerned with the universal idea of a stream or tree rather than a geographical or botanical reality.

Even the paper Mr. Kentridge draws on teems with information: old maps, newspapers in Afrikaans and English, the ledger of a mining company covered in spidery handwriting. Through the layering of image, text and material, his “Winterreise” becomes a journey of memory, both personal and political. In the film accompanying the song “Rast” (“Rest”), a self-portrait of Mr. Kentridge is seen sliding into an M.R.I. machine. In another startling series of images, slender corpses are strung from the branches of a tree like tendrils of a weeping willow.

A few effective sequences featured charred scraps of paper seemingly blown about on a surface, forming a fleeting image of a woman’s head before scattering back into abstraction. Such moments echo the way Müller’s wanderer obsessively scans his environment for clues, reading messages in the weather vane on his sweetheart’s house or the crow that follows him as he walks. “Winterreise,” this production makes clear, reveals the human need for interpretation, for making sense of the outside world through the lens of our emotions.

But then again, all that came through in Mr. Goerne’s singing itself. There is an unusual robustness to his wanderer, infused by the virile beauty of his powerful baritone. In “Der greise Kopf,” the wanderer, mistaking frost on his head for gray hairs, notes with bitterness the contrast between his bruised and battered spirit and his body, which seems to mock him with its health. In his muscular fortes, he brings out the pride the protagonist takes in his suffering and his rejection of the anesthetizing company of others.

At the piano, Mr. Hinterhäuser emphasized clarity and simplicity over richness of color. In the triangle of image, voice and piano, his was the most constant coordinate. In the final “Leiermann” (“Organ grinder”), silhouetted figures danced and marched along a city wall, their movements obeying a different rhythm than Schubert’s, but possessing something of the same exotic seductiveness as Mr. Hinterhäuser’s hypnotic piano part. Mr. Goerne barely moved as he sang, as if frozen in the grips of a vision.

William Kentridge’s production of “Winterreise” with Matthias Goerne will be performed on Nov. 11 at Alice Tully Hall as part of the White Light Festival; whitelightfestival.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Battered Spirit Seeking Clues Amid a Multimedia Landscape. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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