Reiko Füting Mechthild Olivia Stahn, Bernadette Beckermann, Jonas Finger, Hanna Herfurtner; AuditivVokal Dresden; Ensemble Adapter/Olaf Katzer New Focus Recordings FCR369 73:15 mins
Mechthild von Magdeburg was a 13th-century mystic whose writing was the first to favour vernacular German over Latin, underlining the relevance to ordinary people of her ecstatic spiritual vision. For theologian-librettist Christian Lehnert, that relevance extends to modern times. Adapting texts from her volume The Flowing Light of the Divinity, he and composer Reiko Füting bring her life and struggle vividly into the present, questioning our capacity today to undergo such truth-seeking.
Sound, language, memory – and spaces internal and external, structural and philosophical: Mechthild explores these themes and more through three acts highlighting different stages of her journey. Each is intense, combining to extraordinary, often radiant, effect fragments of material by Perotin, Machaut, JS Bach and others with a post-modern, softly percussive dissonance.
Füting rises astutely to the challenge of stripping yet enlarging language in order to interrogate meaning – without compromising ritualistic eloquence or directness of expression. Indeed there are passages of breathtaking beauty, the whole elegantly rendered in fractured vocal utterances and sung sounds interwoven with softly breathy instrumental clacks and shuffles, thumps, chords and melodic motifs.
Most potent are Act I ‘Verwunden, vereint’ (Wound, United) and Act II ‘Die Gottesfremde’ (The Alienated), in which Mechthild fends off illness, lust and demonic accusers – while Act III ‘Nacht Gott’ (After God) sees her embracing the paradox of ‘The God who does not exist’.
With an excellent cast including Olivia Stahn and Hanna Herfurtner as Mechthild’s body and soul respectively, AuditivVokal Dresden and Ensemble Adapter prove eloquent collaborators under conductor Olaf Katzer.
Steph Power