Atthis, Linbury Theatre, review: Sappho brought brilliantly to life

‘I sleep alone/ You have forgotten me/ I stare into midnight/ Neither honey nor bee’: Sappho’s fragmentary poems of love and loss continue to reverberate through the millennia, and are currently doing so with pristine force in a brilliantly-staged song-cycle by the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas at the Linbury. We have seen the soprano Claire Booth directed by that lighting-magician Netia Jones before, and here they were joined by dancers Laure Bachelot and Rachel Maybank, but never has their creative chemistry worked so effectively.

First - to attune our eyes and ears – we heard the London Sinfonietta under Pierre-Andre Valade’s direction play Haas’s intense and intricate Second String Quartet, while the dancers performed some gently homoerotic choreography beneath a giant silver disc in the middle of which was suspended a sleeping female form.

Then the form awoke, to sing in a combination of ancient Greek and modern German. And what transpired was an extraordinary meld of sound and image, as Haas’s tendril-like melodic lines intertwined with the singer’s swooping and glissandoing lament, while surreal imagery was projected in slow-motion onto the disc. Speaking to the heart not the head, this production had that beauty which can occasionally result when fine artists uncompromisingly pursue a shared vision: a dream of love, chaste and exquisite.