Review of The Sea Beneath the Skin / Song of the Earth – Sea, sand and celebration where Mahler’s song cycle makes the waves | classical music

MAhler’s Das Lied von der Erde is indeed a cultural clash, with a German text inspired by Chinese poetry set to the music of early twentieth-century Viennese obstinacy. The Sea Under the Skin takes this entire ocean even further. The brainchild of Samoan director, artist and choreographer Lemmy Bonifacio, it is an unclassifiable piece of musical theatre, less a collision of worlds than a collusion between them.

It begins with a woman walking onto a dark, shiny-floored stage, on which two white poles extend to the roof to represent the trunks of giant kauri trees. Her richly toned, short-phrased song is eventually answered by another woman high up in the hall, and the duet grows in urgency and intensity. Later there would be four men in black dancing an elegant cyclical routine involving lots of body percussion, then a third woman confronting us with terrifyingly aggressive shouts, then a young man dressed in ceremonial Kiribati garb, pouring white sand onto the stage from a black plastic bucket. What does this mean? It’s not clear, but they all frame and connect the six movements of Mahler’s song cycle, in which the two singers appear on stage as characters in a kind of indefinite narrative.

Mahler’s early notes sounded ornate, exotic and almost jewel-encrusted in this new context, although Britten’s Sinfonia was playing a version by Ian Farrington that condensed Mahler’s massive orchestra, efficiently and imaginatively, to just 16 players. There were translations of the texts of Mahler’s songs but not the Pasifika cantatas, which reinforced the idea, perhaps inevitable in London, that the latter were the “exotic” ingredients – but you could argue that this allowed the imagination more leeway. Mahler’s actual texts seemed of secondary importance to the emotion put into their delivery by the tenor Sean Panikkar, who sounded particularly heroic in the first aria, and the velvety-toned mezzo-soprano Fleur Baron.

They and conductor Nuno Coelho were only partially visible, playing from behind a piece of gauze in the back. The gauze formed a screen for some largely monochromatic videos: flowers blooming, underwater explosions, people who might have been wading through floods. Blurry and broken up by tree trunks, they were often difficult to make out and did not appear to be designed to match the music with any precision. Which is why “Sea Under the Skin,” first seen in its current form in Luxembourg in 2024, still feels like a work in progress. However, if you place it alongside other works on the subject of climate change – the Barbican’s Fragile Earth series features several of them – you find it engaging and strikingly different: it is not a lecture but an appeal to the senses and the imagination.