Press

Carmen

Bizet’s music – every single number an earworm – often sounds quite different in Jens Dohle’s arrangements for a three-piece ensemble: sometimes with Latin rhythms, sometimes like a chanson or a Schlager. And that does the piece a lot of good: you listen afresh and are surprised by how resilient the composition remains, even when it’s infused with Kurt Weill drive and Broadway musical sweetness. Jens Dohle, together with Steffen Illner and Dejan Jovanović (what an accordion sound!), really makes it blossom.

Dreigroschenoper

Among the plus points of the performance is the orchestra in the original lineup from the premiere, with Theo Mackeben, conducted by the (costumed) Jens Dohle from the drums. That’s more than just a minor detail. In The Threepenny Opera, the music—and its instrumentation—is far more significant than in any other play for the spoken stage. The title is more than merely ironic.

Alles Schwindel

(Jens Dohle handling the musical direction and arrangements (reconstructing the lost score)

At least the music provides entertainment and diversion. Three men with melancholy expressions, wearing bowlers or top hats respectively, man the two orchestra pits on stage, playing bass, drums, vibraphone, and piano – Jens Dohle and his fellow musicians Falk Effenberger and Steffen Illner. Since Spoliansky’s original score was destroyed in the war, they have made his songs their own based on the piano reduction. A touch of cool jazz wafts through the arrangements, then the synthesizer melts in painfully sugary sweetness again. The instrumentation creates comedy or illustration: recorders accompany the comical dance of the roadside trees around the accident couple; in the “ghastly bourgeois” Pinke cellar with its demi-monde staff, a smoky-wild saxophone solo is played in; the organ booms during the prim-and-proper hypocritical engagement party, where Evelyne and Tonio want to hawk a pearl necklace that has “accidentally” fallen into their hands.