Lyon Opera Ballet: Trois Grandes Fugues review – breathtaking battles with Beethoven

A confusion of Babel, the indecipherable uncorrected horror.” When critics first heard Beethoven’s 1825 Grosse Fuge, many were bewildered by the barbed-wire intensity of its contrapuntal writing, its uncategorisable form. Now it is considered a masterpiece, and it is a testament to the music’s emotional and intellectual power that Lyon Opera Ballet has dedicated an entire programme to it. In Trois Grandes Fugues, the company brings together a magisterial trio of choreographers – Lucinda Childs, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Maguy Marin – and with each of their highly individual settings we hear, see and feel Beethoven’s fugue in fabulously different ways.

The opening version is by Childs, and true to form she opts for a comparatively restrained recording (no musical credits are given), using her 12 dancers to map the formal structures of music with characteristically lucid precision. Childs is at her most elegantly classical, deploying a barefoot-ballet lexicon of low arabesques, skimming jumps, and gliding turns to drive the kaleidoscopic patterning of her choreography. But there are moments when you hold your breath in disbelief as the dance rides out the most tempestuous passages of the score, and there’s a quietly affecting sense of grace under pressure as the cast unite to sustain order within that storm.

De Keersmaeker uses a far grittier recording, and her dancers’ balled-up fists and bunched-up falls, their helter-skelter runs and leaps engage the choreography in a far more dynamic tussle with Beethoven. There are only two women in the cast of eight – dressed like the men in dark suits – and the brilliance of the performers and the choreographer is to foreground the logic of the music with forensically thrilling clarity, even in the boisterous visceral clamour of the dancing.

Of the three, Marin’s setting is the sparest and most nakedly emotional. From the outset, the music feels like a deadly force of nature against which four female dancers are locked in a desperate battle. As the women shiver and shield their eyes, are felled to the floor and stagger back to their feet, it’s a harrowing but beautiful dance for survival. It also forms the perfect conclusion to one of the most exhilarating, uncompromising evenings of dance I’ve seen in ages. Marin – a devotee of Beckett – gets to the very essence of struggle in Beethoven’s Fugue. “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”