Gisbert Jäkel
Gisbert Jäkel (born 1954 in Aachen ) is a German set designer who occasionally also works as a director . He works in drama and opera .
As a set designer
Jäkel studied stage design at the Cologne Art School with Rolf Glittenberg . He then worked as an assistant at the Schauspielhaus Köln , the Hamburg State Opera and the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels. Since 1984 he has worked continuously as a set designer, for the first thirteen years mainly in permanent engagements - first for two seasons at the Freiburg Theater , where he met the director Andrea Breth , with whom he was to work on numerous stages. From 1986 to 1990 he was head of equipment at the Schauspiel Frankfurt , where he worked with the directors Dietrich Hilsdorf , Benjamin Korn , Uwe Eric Laufenberg , Marco Bernardi and Michael Gruner . After all, from 1992 to 1997 he was engaged at the Schaubühne on Lehniner Platz in Berlin. Since then he has been working freelance. Uwe Eric Laufenberg brought him to the Hans Otto Theater in Potsdam from 2005 to 2007 as a director and set designer and since 2014 he has been working primarily for the Hessian State Theaters in Wiesbaden - again with von Laufenberg .
His work in drama extends to the entire German-speaking area, he was often a guest at the Vienna Burgtheater and the Schauspielhaus Zürich , occasionally at the Schauspielhaus Bochum , the Theater Basel and the Schauspielhaus Graz . In the field of music theater he worked at the Deutsche Oper and the Komische Oper in Berlin, at the Semperoper Dresden and the Staatstheater Stuttgart , at the Bayreuth and Schwetzinger Festivals , at the Bregenz and Salzburg Festivals , at the Vienna State Opera , and the Graz Opera and at the Musiktheater Linz , the Theater Basel, the Opéra Bastille in Paris and the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels.
Andrea Breth
The longstanding cooperation between Breth and Jäkel is characterized by a high level of mutual respect - and by extraordinary successes. Andrea Breth productions were invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen nine times , six of them in Gisbert Jäkel sets. The collaboration began in Freiburg, with Friedrich von Schiller and with Federico García Lorca . First Cabal and Love :
“No pair of lovers in world literature, for example, talk so much about love as Schiller's Ferdinand and Luise, [...] none of them talk about love like that, [...]. The two never meet - except in words. Her eroticism is almost identical to her grammar. But then they entered the stage of the Freiburg City Theater in December 1984, took each other's hands, joined in double Rittbergers, death spirals, infinitely slowly savored forwards and backwards swings and glided like figure skaters through a high, apparently empty stage set by Gisbert Jäkels, the walls of which started to move and formed labyrinthine niches here and there. "
The lovers were accompanied by Mozart's Jupiter symphony , the slow movement - if they weren't just stepping through a bare window "into an ice-cold winter landscape". The pictures of Gisbert Jäkel and Andrea Breth at the beginning of their careers caused a sensation, also in the case of Bernarda Alba's house , also in Freiburg, invited to the 1985 Theatertreffen.
The Schauspielhaus Bochum followed, Julien Green followed . The piece was called south . Geta Bahrmann , Andrea Clausen , Ivo Dolder , Nicole Heesters , Robert Owens , Annelore Sarbach , Rolf Schult , Jochen Tovote , Katharina Tüschen , Stephan Ullrich and others played and danced . On the eve of the American Civil War, a fine company awaits the Last Judgment in the house of the plantation owner Broderick. It is discussed lavishly, but deliberately withholding what it is actually about, the inherent racism, the suppressed feelings, the deforming conventions. The production was invited to the Theatertreffen 1987. This was followed - again in Bochum - the last of Maxim Gorki invited to the Theatertreffen 1990th
Burgtheater Vienna, December 1990. Traugott Buhre the village judge Adam, Kirsten Dene the Marthe Rull, Andrea Clausen the Eve and Tobias Langhoff played an unknown role. Regine Müller wrote in 2009 about this long ago performance of the Broken Krug , Andrea Breth loaded "Kleist's comedy with metaphysical dimensions and showed a world judgment that literally began with the first fall and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise." Benjamin Henrichs wrote : “The earth, as we now know, is a sphere. Paradise, built by Gisbert Jäkel, is a circular disk that hangs crookedly in the huge Burgtheater stage. At the ramp it hits the ground, at the furthest point it towers high into the theater sky. Up there sits [...] Traugott Buhre. [...] A blue river meanders steeply down the middle of the Paradiesscheibe - a black snake crawls on its right bank. ”But it was not this extraordinary production that was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen, but the next Andrea Breth production at the Vienna Burgtheater, Das End of the beginning of Sean O'Casey , 1992, again in the sets by Gisbert Jäkel.
After staging a German comedy in Vienna, Andrea Breth went to Berlin to stage Austrian tragedy at the Schaubühne on Lehniner Platz : Arthur Schnitzler's lonely path (September 1991), followed by Gorky's night asylum (June 1992), last summer in Tschulimsk by Alexander Wampilow (December 1992) and From morning to midnight by Georg Kaiser (May 1993). Gisbert Jäkel and Susanne Raschig (costumes) were always responsible for the equipment . Jäkel equips other Breth productions in Berlin, Hedda Gabler in 1994 , Die Möwe in 1995 and The Schroffenstein Family in 1997 . The Wampilow play and Hedda Gabler were invited to the Theatertreffen.
Years later, in early 2005, again a collaboration at the Burgtheater: The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov . The Furche wrote of a "comedy without serenity", the world of "Polaroids of dying".
Uwe Eric Laufenberg
The stage designer has an intensive collaboration with actor and director Uwe Eric Laufenberg, which dates back to the artists' early years in Frankfurt and continues to this day. During Laufenberg's directorship in Potsdam (2004–2009), Jäkel was engaged as a set designer and director. Jäkel created the sets for Ernst Krenek's Karl V at the Bregenz Festival in 2008 and for Mozart's Don Giovanni in 2010 at the Cologne Opera . Laufenberg and Jäkel developed the Ring des Nibelungen at the Musiktheater Linz (2013-14) and the Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival 2016.
Laufenberg has been the artistic director of the Hessian State Theaters in Wiesbaden since autumn 2014 and Jäkel has been permanently employed there as a set designer for theater and opera. Numerous opera productions were made in quick succession: in 2014 the opening premiere of Die Frau ohne Schatten by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss , 2015 Verdi's Otello , 2016 and 2017 the revision of the Linzer Ring des Nibelungen , 2018 Arabella von Hofmannsthal / Strauss, 2019 Verdi's Rigoletto and Bizet's Carmen . The new production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde planned for May 2020 had to be canceled due to COVID-19 .
Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and Puccini's Trittico have been announced as joint projects for the 2020–21 season .
Krämer, Neuenfels, Gürbaca, Kerkhof
Since the Salzburg premiere of Richard Strauss's Liebe der Danae in the Kleiner Festspielhaus in the summer of 2002, there has been a short but close collaboration with the director Günter Krämer . It was played by the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden , conducted by Fabio Luisi , the costumes were designed by Falk Bauer , and the lighting designer was Reinhard Traub . The production caused violent reactions from the Salzburg audience. A new production of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde followed on May 25, 2003 at the Vienna State Opera with Christian Thielemann on the podium. In this case too, the audience reacted quite angrily. For the Semperoper in Dresden he designed the sets for Günter Krämer's staging of the bat .
Director Hans Neuenfels engaged Jäkel for three operas of the 20th century and for one world premiere. In 2004 Věc Makropulos by Leoš Janáček was composed at the Stuttgart State Opera and Lady Macbeth from Mzensk by Dimitri Shostakovich at the Komische Oper Berlin . At the Schwetzingen Festival 2009, the conductor Jonathan Stockhammer , Hans Neuenfels, Gisbert Jäkel and the costume designer Elina Schnizler presented a world premiere by Wolfgang Rihm : Proserpina , a monodrama for soprano, women's choir and orchestra. Mojca Erdmann sang the title role . The production was voted the premiere of the year in the critics' survey by the magazine opernwelt , and in 2010 it was also taken over by the Wuppertal Opera House . In September 2011, Jäkel designed the set for the Hans Neuenfels production of Penthesilea by Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck at the Frankfurt Opera .
In 2008 he created the set for Wagner's Fliegende Holländer at the Deutsche Oper Berlin , staged by Tatjana Gürbaca and conducted by Jacques Lacombe . In 2011, a new production of Wozzeck by Alban Berg was created in Cologne , staged by Ingo Kerkhof and conducted by Markus Stenz . In Wiesbaden he also worked with Manfred Karge (in drama) and again with Ingo Kerkhof (in opera) - for Antigone in Brecht's version from 1948, for Orpheus and Eurydice by Christoph Willibald Gluck and for Jenůfa by Leoš Janáček .
As a director
In 1998 he was invited by the Graz Opera to take on the overall artistic conception for stage and direction of Verdi's Rigoletto . Marco de Prosperis conducted it. Jäkel chose a psychoanalytic approach and showed an exciting world of dysfunctional characters, according to the criticism: The Duke of Boiko Zwetanow shone as an unscrupulous Narcissus, Jacek Strauch gave the court jester as an emotionally injured father and his daughter, Martina Unden as Gilda, played the naive and all-round dominated girls. The scenery became more and more abstract from picture to picture, Rigoletto's house could also be read as Gilda's prison. The performance was very well received by the audience and the press. Jäkel was then immediately entrusted with the new production of the Ring des Nibelungen , which was released at the Graz Opera in 1999 and 2000. He also took on the design of the sets, Anna Eiermann was responsible for the costumes and Wolfgang Bosić conducted it .
In September 2001 the Bremen Theater showed its production of the Magic Flute . In the preliminary interview he stated: "It takes artistic setting and assertion if you don't want to reel off the play as a fairy tale and number theater."
During his engagement at the Hans-Otto-Theater in Potsdam, Jäkel was also at the director's desk, this time mainly in the drama. In Potsdam, he staged Tolstoy's War and Peace (2005) with Johannes Suhm as Napoleon, Brecht / Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins and Schiller's Cabal and Love (2006) with Moritz Führmann and Adina Vetter as lovers. Désirée Nick was the leading actress in his production of the play Am Ziel by Thomas Bernhard . Another directorial work by Jäkel in Potsdam was Il combattimento by Claudio Monteverdi .
See also
Short biographies
Web links
- OperaBase , directory of some productions
Individual evidence
- ↑ Berliner Theatertreffen : Advanced search Gisbert Jäkel , accessed on June 18, 2020
- ↑ Nachtkritik.de : Saustall der Sinsfall , criticism by Regine Müller, Essen, September 25, 2009
- ^ Die Zeit (Hamburg): Hell fall of the damned , criticism by Benjamin Henrichs, February 15, 1991
- ↑ The Furche: Comedy Without Merriment , May 3, 2005
- ↑ Die Welt (Berlin): Polaroids from Dying , May 2, 2005
- ^ Opera in Vienna: Close your eyes, open your ears! , accessed on June 17, 2020
- ↑ Uwe Schweikert : Beauty drunk against the wall. Review of the premiere. In: Opernwelt , July 2009, p. 8.
- ^ Bettina Maani: Psycho-Rigoletto , on ConcertoNet.com (English review), December 12, 1998
- ^ Taz (Berlin) : "Mozart takes the side for women" , September 26, 2001
- ↑ Communications on "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy , French Reformed Community Potsdam, October 30, 2005
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Jäkel, Gisbert |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German set designer and director |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1954 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Aachen |