Shakespeare Songbook

About the production

A sonnet is sound (Zwuk) from the word itself. Its name takes up the Latin word sonus (sound). If it is set to music, this quality is intensified. The double bass virtuoso, bandleader and composer Haggai Cohen-Milo has picked out his favourites from William Shakespeare's 154 surviving sonnets, invented music for them and arranged them for his band. In Celia Kameni, he is joined in this project by a singer who translates his melodies and Shakespeare's texts into finely woven sounds of her own with her wonderfully supple voice (Hłós). Of course, she also utilises all the interpretative freedom that jazz has always given its interpreters.

In 14 (Štyrnaće) lines of verse, Shakespeare's sonnets invite us into love worlds of desire and betrayal, of renunciation and fulfilment, of transience and eternity. They oscillate between homoerotic allusions and heterosexual narratives. In the music, these human aspects also take on an audible form beyond language.

In his work in jazz, Cohen-Milo places particular emphasis on cross-genre art. He has already set ancient Yemeni prayers to music, performed recompositions of masterpieces by Mahler, Debussy and Verdi and developed forms of dance theatre. Such a sensual crossing of boundaries now takes place with Shakespeare's sonnets, which not only revolve around human relationships, but also repeatedly explore the tension between the sayable and the unsayable as autonomous works of linguistic art. Cohen-Milo now explores this poetology in music. The evening will make poetic music sparkle in Shakespeare's musical poetry.

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Accessibility

The venue for this event is wheelchair accessible.

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