Star rating: *****
Any sensible person with £17 to spend should seek the privilege of sitting among Philippe Herreweghe's Collegium Vocale Gent to hear them sing Schubert.
As the 12-piece choir emerge, in their own casual clothes, from among the randomly-seated audience, to stand on their chairs and perform - unaccompanied - the part-songs, there is a sense of already being part of an important event. What happens next is almost a bonus.
Among Schubert's settings of Schiller and others are the testimonies of Dutch collaborators with the Axis during the Second World War. These monologues by those who joined the SS are performed by Carly Wijs and Dirk Roofthooft, also appearing from our midst. Her received pronunciation is at first alienating and then entirely appropriate as her story unfolds; his justification of his attraction to the fascist ideals of the Nazis is unnervingly modern.
It is a combination of a pinnacle in German culture and the seductive qualities of the nation's nadir that needs no gloss. Few choirs could stand the scrutiny of this intimacy and few performances match those of the actors, in this Muziektheater Transparant production, with Roofthooft's in particular a highlight. He prowls among the chairs, treating his public like pupils in an economics class, in an interactive tour de force that sets the bar for other examples of verbatim theatre to be found in Edinburgh this August.
At the end, Schubert gives way to a new composition by Annelies van Parys and an astonishingly simple but effective piece of cinematography. Rarely do artforms come together so eloquently.
Supported by The Bacher Trust.
From yesterday's later editions.
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