A cinematic evening in which the gut feeling is fed with an orchestra as well as color, light and shadow play.
Once more with orchestra: Zaho de Sagazan has reinterpreted her debut work LA SYMPHONIE DES ÉCLAIRS with the help of a symphony orchestra. But what the singer-songwriter sees as a kind of freshening up of her songs from 2023 seems completely unimpressed by any time stamp in the Berlin Philharmonic.
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Filmy
The reason for this is a film-like production in which the twenty-something woman leads through all the big emotions and yet doesn’t leave out the small moments in between. She sings about the last cigarette with just as much emphasis as a person’s last journey. It is precisely these stories that seem timeless – that draw you in with all the theatricality presented in combination with string, wood, brass and percussion instruments and get stuck in your head like a movie for later.
No electro, but passion
Zaho de Sagazan’s style of performance – sometimes graceful in close dance, sometimes highly dramatic in a staged physical confrontation with the conductor or even clown-like shrugging of the shoulders – does not allow for any neutrality to the action. Please feel everything, preferably completely oversized. To do this, the Frenchwoman with an overvoice and a Millennium Falcon memorial hairstyle sometimes walks from her steps, which are reminiscent of the way to the microphone on the Oscar stage, into the audience. Although the electronic part of her other live shows is strictly neglected here, she swears with even more fervor in German (“shit, shit”) and sometimes delays the beginning of a chanson until everything from laughter to noticeable irritation and tension has been teased out in the audience.
Double “dreamness”
With all the acting and the appropriate mood lighting, there is a bit of room for the vocals and sound to break out – for the fraying. The orchestra stays within the framework just as well as the performance corresponds to the precisely planned choreography. The encore is therefore not a track addition, but rather a repetition of what has already been seen. Because only what was rehearsed during their “Symphonic Concert” tour can be brought to the stage. After all, she asks the audience – breaking out of her artificial role for once – what they want. The crowd calls for “Tristesse”.
And Zaho de Sagazan couldn’t wish for better fellow musicians, as she herself previously emphasized in interviews and now repeats again on stage. She finally thanks each and every person – and in contrast to the Academy Awards, here she is not drowned out by a bouncer tune. An Oscar-worthy performance in which the audience is treated to really big shadow moments simply through the use of light spots.