Kentridge’s cine-musical creation, made to accompany Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, is a marvel of puppetry, dance and humour, exploring humanity, grief and idealism

The Baku international arts festival in Azerbaijan is showcasing an amazing cine-musical creation, perhaps the most amazing animation I have ever seen. Oh to Believe in Another World is an hour-long collage animation with live-action choreography by the 71-year-old South African artist and film-maker William Kentridge. It is shown with the live orchestral accompaniment of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, and this event is partly in honour of the 120th anniversary of Shostakovich’s birth this year, and partly to honour Shostakovich’s reportedly unrequited love (and lifelong friendship) for his student, Azerbaijani pianist and composer Elmira Nazirova.

The 10th symphony was inspired by Stalin and premiered shortly after his death, so it seems probable that Shostakovich had been at work on it for some time before this, long enough beforehand for at least some of the composition to have been conceived without any sense of Stalin’s death. Could part of it perhaps have been originally intended as an obediently dramatic tribute to Stalin? Yet the music arguably combines fear, awe, revulsion, and a hysterical reaction to the mad energy of Stalin’s genocidal tyranny, a darkly ambiguous respect for the great dictator whose victory in 1945 was a mainstay of the postwar dispensation; perhaps there is also a feeling in the music’s swirl that a great and terrible era has passed away, and with it a kind of grief at all that had been sacrificed to it.

We go behind the scenes at rehearsals for William Kentridge’s new staging of Monteverdi’s 1607 opera l’Orfeo

‘L’Orfeo is an opera about opera. It’s an opera about the power of music. It’s about the power of art to construct the world,” says director and artist William Kentridge. Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 work is, if not quite the first ever opera, the earliest opera still performed today, written when the form was in its very infancy.

Monteverdi called his work – composed for performance at the ducal court of Mantua, a “favola in musica – legend in music”. “Monteverdi was a genius,” says conductor Jonathan Cohen. “The piece is about the world’s most famous musician. He begins with a prologue where he has the allegorical character of La Musica [Music, here sung by Francesca Aspromonte, who also sings Eurydice in this production], who says ‘I am music, and I have the power to stop the birds singing, the power over nature.’ And of course Orfeo, the musician, has the power to control even the rocks, the trees, the animals and effect human emotions.”

William Kentridge (centre) during rehearsals, above, and, below, Kentridge talks with Francesca Aspromonte (La Musica/Euridice) and Roseline Wilkens (Euridice). Photograph by David Levene