8/7/10, Barbican
4 hrs. I thought myself very stupid when, weeks after buying tickets for this concert performance with the intention of comparing and contrasting with the Paris production we saw at the weekend, we discovered it was exactly the same cast and crew. Was this to be evidence that it is in fact possible to have too much of a good thing?
In the event, no. Perhaps the singers, without McVicar's staging and the costumes to help them, had to work harder and so projected and connected better. Perhaps we were just a better audience, for (most of) whom English was our first language. The Paris audience liked it a lot, to judge by the rhythmic handclapping and multiple curtain calls at the end, but their applause for individual arias was muted and sporadic and they only laughed once.
We were a much more enthusiastic bunch. Act 1 still dragged. The counter-tenor was no better and there are only three good arias in an hour or more of music, including one each for Semele and Ino (who got big applause) and, of course, Endless Pleasure, in which Claire Debono seemed a little nervous.
But Act 2 is a cracker, with Richard Croft in great form singing I Must with Speed Amuse Her and Where E'er You Walk and Vivica Genaux getting huge applause for Iris, Hence Away. Both left the stage immediately after they'd stopped singing, so weren't there to acknowledge the applause. But Croft's ovation was so loud and prolonged he decided to return to acknowledge it... but got his timing wrong. His return coincided with the applause dying away. We resumed briefly out of embarrassment.
The singers' entrances and exits struck me as pretty random. There were chairs for all of them on stage throughout, as for a conventional oratorio, and sometimes they sat in them when they weren't singing and sometimes they drifted off stage. Could have been tighter.
Act 3 has both Myself I Shall Adore and No, No I'll Take No Less, within a few minutes of each other. Danielle de Niese gave her all in both (much more vigorously I thought than in Paris); she seemed a bit wobbly once or twice and took some sips of water in between the two arias, so she may have been struggling, but heavens! what energy. Both arias are completely over the top, but quite thrilling. There may not be anything subtle about this kind of performance but it's as exciting to watch and listen to as top-flight sport. There was also some entertaining by-play with Christophe Rousset (conducting his Les Talents Lyriques), who at one point took the mirror away from her. De Niese can also act, as can Peter Rose, in a wonderfully old-fashioned way, telegraphing his characters' reactions at the audience: he got several laughs as Somnus.
De Niese was dressed for stardom, in a bright red backless, strapless, bra-less number held up by two bits of string crossed over at the shoulders and revealing 1) quite a lot of rather droopy cleavage and 2) that she's a bulkier lass than at first appears. But the star singer was Genaux, with a deep mezzo voice at once creamy and harsh. At the curtain call she and Croft held hands: are they perhaps attached? or were they just happy to have upstaged Danielle?
A note on acoustics. We were closer to the singers near the front of the circle at the Barbican than we were in the second circle at Champs Elysees. Yet the sound was better in Paris: in London it often seemed thin and echoey. They speak of the Barbican's poor acoustics and one sees what they mean. The best bit was when Semele went to the rear of the stage, behind the chorus, where she was surrounded on three sides by wood, to sing a lament and we could hear every note.
Showing posts with label barbican. Show all posts
Showing posts with label barbican. Show all posts
Saturday, 10 July 2010
Thursday, 1 July 2010
DEBORAH COLKER
30/6/10, Barbican
Brazilian dance. Missed it: had to work. D said it was a cracker: the best and most exciting modern dance she'd seen for a long time, with accessible music (Barber, Handel, modern techno), sensible costumes, never fewer than three dancers on time at any one time, very fast-paced, clever use of props (especially a long trestle table). It was called Cruel and there was a threesome with knives which had enormous impact.
Tuesday, 13 April 2010
MACBETH
9/4/10, Barbican (Silk Street Theatre)
2hrs no interval. Cheek by Jowl. Will Keen (very impressive in Cheek by Jowl's The Changeling and in The Duchess of Malfi at the National) as Macbeth and Anastasia Hille as his Lady.
Missed it. Had to go to the Isle of Man. D liked it, and so did Kim, who took some spare tickets we had; Janet, who took my ticket, disliked it; S fell asleep and subsequently complained that Macbeth was underpowered and sometimes inaudible and that if you didn't know the play you might not have followed what was going on. D reported a very spare production and a violent one, no props, taken at a tremendous lick.
Sunday, 28 March 2010
4.48 PSYCHOSIS
23/3/10, Barbican
In Polish. The last play Sarah Kane wrote before her suicide, translated and apparently reimagined by a Polish company, TR Warszawa. Well-reviewed at Edinburgh a couple of years ago.
We never saw the original in English, so it's hard to tell how true this version is. Here's an illuminating review on The Arts Desk, from which I gather that the original is potentially a much richer text, in which every line can be spoken by any of the characters, and that this version limited the play's potential by turning it into a detailed investigation of female breakdown.
http://www.theartsdesk.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1235:448-psychosis-theatre-review&Itemid=27
Here's what I wrote before reading the Arts Desk review.
It's a cry of anguish, a suicide note, a near-monologue, a glimpse into the ghastliness of mental illness and of a rational (indeed, highly talented) mind plunged into the perpetual nightmare of deep, deep depression.
The first words are "I am sad". The last words are "Watch me vanish".
The central character, presumably a Kane self-portrait, has a desperate craving for love, and an irresistible urge to attack and vilvify those who offer it. There is a contempt for doctors and their patronising, incomprehending comprehension; a series of tirades aimed at anyone who tries to offer compassion or help (the doctors are pretty dry sticks and may deserve it, but the fellow-inmate who says "I want to be your friend", the lesbian lover scarcely seem to though they are in their ways as needy as the central figure).
Not very dramatic, then, and D went to sleep. The text is clearly a gift to a certain sort of East European theatre director. I thought ti was moving and absorbing, but that was down to the staging and the central performance, not to the disjointed, collage-like text.
There was a large cast, though most had nothing to do but walk on for a few minutes and a few lines, while the central character railed at them. There were long silences.
The set represented some kind of institution, a hospital clearly, with a row of basins and a lavatory against the back wall. There was a table, brought on and off as needed, and some chairs. From time to time a portenouts male voice-over intoned numbers, counting down from 100 to near zero, which were also projected against the back wall of the set. And at one climactic moment loads of numbers were projected onto the back wall, falling in cascades, as two doctors prescribed what seemed like random doses of drugs to which the numbers related. The heroine, if we can call her that, was caught in the projections too and there was loud music (what?). The 4.48 of the title refers, apparently, to the time of day when suicides are most vulnerable.
There were downright mysterious elements to the staging -- like a wall, vertical to the audience, which moved in stages across the stage from stage left to right, and through which characters occasionally walked.
Pills were a constant motif: held in the hands, scattered (bouncing across the stage), being crunched by the actors. There were frequent blackouts: a theatrical technique of course, but also a psychological condition (I wonder if the term has the same double meanings in Polish?).
The coup de theatre came near the end when our heroine, who has progressively disrobed during the performance, is seen with her back to us against the rear wall, looking into a mirror and speaking (clearly amplified). Blackout. The lights come up and she is still there but curiously changed: old, bent, wrinkled. She turns and sits on the loo, sideways to the audience, chin resting on her hand in a pose like Rodin's Thinker; a light comes on downstage to reveal our heroine on a chair in a similar pose, sideways to the audience.
In Polish. The last play Sarah Kane wrote before her suicide, translated and apparently reimagined by a Polish company, TR Warszawa. Well-reviewed at Edinburgh a couple of years ago.
We never saw the original in English, so it's hard to tell how true this version is. Here's an illuminating review on The Arts Desk, from which I gather that the original is potentially a much richer text, in which every line can be spoken by any of the characters, and that this version limited the play's potential by turning it into a detailed investigation of female breakdown.
http://www.theartsdesk.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1235:448-psychosis-theatre-review&Itemid=27
Here's what I wrote before reading the Arts Desk review.
It's a cry of anguish, a suicide note, a near-monologue, a glimpse into the ghastliness of mental illness and of a rational (indeed, highly talented) mind plunged into the perpetual nightmare of deep, deep depression.
The first words are "I am sad". The last words are "Watch me vanish".
The central character, presumably a Kane self-portrait, has a desperate craving for love, and an irresistible urge to attack and vilvify those who offer it. There is a contempt for doctors and their patronising, incomprehending comprehension; a series of tirades aimed at anyone who tries to offer compassion or help (the doctors are pretty dry sticks and may deserve it, but the fellow-inmate who says "I want to be your friend", the lesbian lover scarcely seem to though they are in their ways as needy as the central figure).
Not very dramatic, then, and D went to sleep. The text is clearly a gift to a certain sort of East European theatre director. I thought ti was moving and absorbing, but that was down to the staging and the central performance, not to the disjointed, collage-like text.
There was a large cast, though most had nothing to do but walk on for a few minutes and a few lines, while the central character railed at them. There were long silences.
The set represented some kind of institution, a hospital clearly, with a row of basins and a lavatory against the back wall. There was a table, brought on and off as needed, and some chairs. From time to time a portenouts male voice-over intoned numbers, counting down from 100 to near zero, which were also projected against the back wall of the set. And at one climactic moment loads of numbers were projected onto the back wall, falling in cascades, as two doctors prescribed what seemed like random doses of drugs to which the numbers related. The heroine, if we can call her that, was caught in the projections too and there was loud music (what?). The 4.48 of the title refers, apparently, to the time of day when suicides are most vulnerable.
There were downright mysterious elements to the staging -- like a wall, vertical to the audience, which moved in stages across the stage from stage left to right, and through which characters occasionally walked.
Pills were a constant motif: held in the hands, scattered (bouncing across the stage), being crunched by the actors. There were frequent blackouts: a theatrical technique of course, but also a psychological condition (I wonder if the term has the same double meanings in Polish?).
The coup de theatre came near the end when our heroine, who has progressively disrobed during the performance, is seen with her back to us against the rear wall, looking into a mirror and speaking (clearly amplified). Blackout. The lights come up and she is still there but curiously changed: old, bent, wrinkled. She turns and sits on the loo, sideways to the audience, chin resting on her hand in a pose like Rodin's Thinker; a light comes on downstage to reveal our heroine on a chair in a similar pose, sideways to the audience.
Sunday, 24 January 2010
TRILOGY
22/1/10, Barbican
2 hrs 30 mins. Radical feminism revisited. This the one in which a bunch of female volunteers all take their clothes off and dance around the stage, while at the end female volunteers from the audience are encouraged to strip off and belt out Jerusalem. Two coups de theatre with undoubted impact, though the rest of this three-part exercise was a baffling mess.
I missed the start (work, traffic) and arrived 15 minutes in. Two actresses (performance artist Nic Green and her mate, Laura) were dancing vigorously on stage to loud music in the nude. I arrived just in time for coup no 1: the arrival of the volunteer naked dancers. I'd read somewhere that there were around 30 of them. And to begin with just a couple of dozen appeared. But then more joined them. And more. And yet more, all shapes and sizes and ages, all grinning broadly and clearly having a whale of a time. I estimate 200 or more. End of Part 1. I missed, I gather, the arrival of our two actresses (clothed), some video filmed in a supermarket and some other stuff which clearly hadn't made much sense to D and S and A and Dr T.
Part 2 was long and didn't make much sense either. Five dancers (four women, our two heroines, a tall well-built one and a fat one, and one man) moved rhythmically, chanted and, after a while, took their clothes off. A screen at the back showed two chunky extracts from Town Bloody Hall, the D A Pennebaker documentary film about a women's liberation meeting in New York in 1973 (?), chaired by Norman Mailer, at which the panellists included Germaine Greer. In the first extract the radical lesbian Jill Johnston delivered a sub Gertrude Stein monologue (poem?) full of wordplay and jokes until Mailer in brutal male chauvinist mode told her to stop because she'd exceeded her allotted time. The funniest joke in her tirade had apparently been censored, because the quality audio from the microphone suddenly dropped out, to be replaced by sound from an effects mic near the camera; needless to say, I couldn't catch it! In the second extract Germaine Greer gave a wry talk about the offensive idea of the make artist (plenty of cut aways of Mailer, at one point actually looking sheepish, or perhaps just smiling wrily). The act ended with the credits sequence from the film and our five actors sitting naked on stools with their backs to us, turning to make trivial observations about what we were watching: "Norman Mailer has just scratched his nose"; "the woman in the black dress is very excited", which pretty much summed up the style of the whole thing. At one point (after the actors had told us their ages -- they were all born in 1982 or 1983) we were told they wanted five volunteers from the audience, older, four women and one man. It occurred to me that our party fitted that bill, but mercifully no-one volunteered. Those who did volunteer, we thought, were plants who seemed to have rehearsed (they were asked to rotate one arm slowly backwards and then take 15 slow steps backwards across the stage).
Part 3 consisted of a "lecture" on Herstory by our Nic and Laura who (wouldn't you just know it) took their clothes off after a while. And at the end they invited women from the audience to come up for the Jerusalem sing-song, and loads (mainly young) did so. They went behind the curtain, disrobed, lined up and when the curtains opened sang to the accompaniment of an organ at the back of the stage! They looked to be having a wonderful time too.
So, what was it all about? Nic and Laura clearly think today's women have forgotten what their mothers and grandmothers struggled for, and that the women's movement needs to rediscover a radical edge. Clearly they also think the naked female body needs to be desexualised and freed from all the body fascism and unrealistic expectations that bedevil many younger women: hence the massed nudity, which certainly seemed to free the women taking part of embarrassment and self-consciousness about their bodies. But how did the rest of the evening contribute to the overall theme? Frankly, that one has me stymied.
2 hrs 30 mins. Radical feminism revisited. This the one in which a bunch of female volunteers all take their clothes off and dance around the stage, while at the end female volunteers from the audience are encouraged to strip off and belt out Jerusalem. Two coups de theatre with undoubted impact, though the rest of this three-part exercise was a baffling mess.
I missed the start (work, traffic) and arrived 15 minutes in. Two actresses (performance artist Nic Green and her mate, Laura) were dancing vigorously on stage to loud music in the nude. I arrived just in time for coup no 1: the arrival of the volunteer naked dancers. I'd read somewhere that there were around 30 of them. And to begin with just a couple of dozen appeared. But then more joined them. And more. And yet more, all shapes and sizes and ages, all grinning broadly and clearly having a whale of a time. I estimate 200 or more. End of Part 1. I missed, I gather, the arrival of our two actresses (clothed), some video filmed in a supermarket and some other stuff which clearly hadn't made much sense to D and S and A and Dr T.
Part 2 was long and didn't make much sense either. Five dancers (four women, our two heroines, a tall well-built one and a fat one, and one man) moved rhythmically, chanted and, after a while, took their clothes off. A screen at the back showed two chunky extracts from Town Bloody Hall, the D A Pennebaker documentary film about a women's liberation meeting in New York in 1973 (?), chaired by Norman Mailer, at which the panellists included Germaine Greer. In the first extract the radical lesbian Jill Johnston delivered a sub Gertrude Stein monologue (poem?) full of wordplay and jokes until Mailer in brutal male chauvinist mode told her to stop because she'd exceeded her allotted time. The funniest joke in her tirade had apparently been censored, because the quality audio from the microphone suddenly dropped out, to be replaced by sound from an effects mic near the camera; needless to say, I couldn't catch it! In the second extract Germaine Greer gave a wry talk about the offensive idea of the make artist (plenty of cut aways of Mailer, at one point actually looking sheepish, or perhaps just smiling wrily). The act ended with the credits sequence from the film and our five actors sitting naked on stools with their backs to us, turning to make trivial observations about what we were watching: "Norman Mailer has just scratched his nose"; "the woman in the black dress is very excited", which pretty much summed up the style of the whole thing. At one point (after the actors had told us their ages -- they were all born in 1982 or 1983) we were told they wanted five volunteers from the audience, older, four women and one man. It occurred to me that our party fitted that bill, but mercifully no-one volunteered. Those who did volunteer, we thought, were plants who seemed to have rehearsed (they were asked to rotate one arm slowly backwards and then take 15 slow steps backwards across the stage).
Part 3 consisted of a "lecture" on Herstory by our Nic and Laura who (wouldn't you just know it) took their clothes off after a while. And at the end they invited women from the audience to come up for the Jerusalem sing-song, and loads (mainly young) did so. They went behind the curtain, disrobed, lined up and when the curtains opened sang to the accompaniment of an organ at the back of the stage! They looked to be having a wonderful time too.
So, what was it all about? Nic and Laura clearly think today's women have forgotten what their mothers and grandmothers struggled for, and that the women's movement needs to rediscover a radical edge. Clearly they also think the naked female body needs to be desexualised and freed from all the body fascism and unrealistic expectations that bedevil many younger women: hence the massed nudity, which certainly seemed to free the women taking part of embarrassment and self-consciousness about their bodies. But how did the rest of the evening contribute to the overall theme? Frankly, that one has me stymied.
Monday, 11 May 2009
KRONOS QUARTET and WU MAN
11/5/09, Barbican Hall
2 hrs. Tan Dun's Ghost Opera, written for the Kronos (at first glance a conventional string quartet, though playing amplified instruments) and Wu Man, who plays a Chinese instrument rather like a large mandolin, but with two sets of strings plucked with both hands, called the pipa. Preceded in the first half by the world premiere of a work by ??? and eight folk songs from South West China (where half the country's recognised ethnic minorities live and from which troupes of itinerant musicians and performers traditionally issued forth) arranged for the same forces.
Wu Man was a whizz, and I'm glad to have heard her. She produced sometimes astonishingly complex tunes, sometimes playing two melodies simultaneously.
A's friend Renee thought it pretentious. I thought it by turns baffling, intriguing, beautiful and silly.
At the start the band, dressed in black, came on, there was a blackout, a certain amount of scrabbling and then the lights came back up to reveal them wearing Chinese fright masks and making a "yaah" kind of noise. The masks soon came off (though I seem to recall they went back on once or twice) but the proceedings were punctutated by occasional shouts which either added to the atmosphere or sounded risible, according to taste.
At one point one of the band blew on a deep bass wind instrument the size of an alpenhorn. Renee complained that the audience tittered at what should have been a solemn moment. I wasnt clear that it was meant to be solemn, so reserve judgement.
I wonder if the music in the first half, given its "ethnic" character, sounded as exotic to many Chinese as it does to us. Who can tell? The problem with this kind of corss-cultural melange is that you have to be equally familiar with both cultural traditions to make sense of it. Otherwise one is little better than a tourist watching some folklorique performance. On that basis it was not uninteresting, though not an experience I plan to repeat.
The Tan Dun was a very complex piece, and no doubt I failed to appreciate many of its layers of complexity. As well as their instruments, played at scattered points around the stage and in the audience, the quartet and Ms Wu created sounds by banging water-filled bowls. The bowls and the playing positions were spitlit dynamically. Centre stage was a screen and behind it a platform on which Wu Man sat to play, illuminated from behind, like a shadow puppet, her silhouette thrown onto the screen.
Of the music itself I can, a couple of weeks later, remember absolutely nothing.
2 hrs. Tan Dun's Ghost Opera, written for the Kronos (at first glance a conventional string quartet, though playing amplified instruments) and Wu Man, who plays a Chinese instrument rather like a large mandolin, but with two sets of strings plucked with both hands, called the pipa. Preceded in the first half by the world premiere of a work by ??? and eight folk songs from South West China (where half the country's recognised ethnic minorities live and from which troupes of itinerant musicians and performers traditionally issued forth) arranged for the same forces.
Wu Man was a whizz, and I'm glad to have heard her. She produced sometimes astonishingly complex tunes, sometimes playing two melodies simultaneously.
A's friend Renee thought it pretentious. I thought it by turns baffling, intriguing, beautiful and silly.
At the start the band, dressed in black, came on, there was a blackout, a certain amount of scrabbling and then the lights came back up to reveal them wearing Chinese fright masks and making a "yaah" kind of noise. The masks soon came off (though I seem to recall they went back on once or twice) but the proceedings were punctutated by occasional shouts which either added to the atmosphere or sounded risible, according to taste.
At one point one of the band blew on a deep bass wind instrument the size of an alpenhorn. Renee complained that the audience tittered at what should have been a solemn moment. I wasnt clear that it was meant to be solemn, so reserve judgement.
I wonder if the music in the first half, given its "ethnic" character, sounded as exotic to many Chinese as it does to us. Who can tell? The problem with this kind of corss-cultural melange is that you have to be equally familiar with both cultural traditions to make sense of it. Otherwise one is little better than a tourist watching some folklorique performance. On that basis it was not uninteresting, though not an experience I plan to repeat.
The Tan Dun was a very complex piece, and no doubt I failed to appreciate many of its layers of complexity. As well as their instruments, played at scattered points around the stage and in the audience, the quartet and Ms Wu created sounds by banging water-filled bowls. The bowls and the playing positions were spitlit dynamically. Centre stage was a screen and behind it a platform on which Wu Man sat to play, illuminated from behind, like a shadow puppet, her silhouette thrown onto the screen.
Of the music itself I can, a couple of weeks later, remember absolutely nothing.
Friday, 8 May 2009
PANIC
8/5/09, Barbican (Pit)
1 hr 30 mins. A disappointing dud. The latest devised piece by Improbable, who have been going for aeons (well, since 1996) but whose work I don't think we've ever seen*. A series of ruminations on the god Pan, in mythology and in real life.
There was a great deal of brown paper, used to create both props and set: wide vertical strips, forming a curtain at the front that could be raised and lowered and doubled at one stage as the sails of a ship; horizontal strips ditto which doubled as a vertical bed, the actors' heads popping up between two sheets and "lying" as on a pillow in a rectangle of light.
There was a rather fetching puppet (also brown paper) of Pan. There were a number of monologues about the (supposed) real lives of the cast: one actress described behaving outrageously with her girlfriend in the gardens at Blenheim Palace on Family Day; another explained she was a former aerialist who wanted to be a proper actress (though that didn't stop her doing a little light aerial work in this piece); Phelim McDermott, playing both Pan and a modern man (lecherous, lonely, inadequate), told us a shaggy dog story about sleeping with 147 people and tracking down the 148th, a girl from his schooldays, in Australia. And so on.
Like a lot of devised pieces it lacked narrative or anything remotely resembling a structure. There were some nice touches. They included Phelim charging about as Pan with a pair of brown paper horns, a brown paper Mr Punch chin and a vast wicker phallus far too heavy for him; a rather amusing sequence in which he produced scores of self-help books from brown paper carrier bags, reading out their (absurd) titles as he did so; another sequence in which the three "nymphs" sat and stood with brown paper bags on their heads onto which video images of their faces were projected while Phelim... did what? Can't remember, though I can remember the visuals, and that he asked them afterwards what they'd seen inside their bags.
The projections generally were a high point. There were some nice forest effects. At one point the vertical strips representing a front curtain were pulled up backwards, to reveal a video projection on the back wall of a curtain which was likewise pulled up, and then another curtain behind that, and so on. There was a shadow puppet sequence, with a giant Pan and tiny naked figures cavorting and copulating above him.
Top marks for the visuals, then; two out of ten for content.
* Wrong. We saw Theatre of Blood at the National, which I seem to recall had a lot more going for it but was still a bit flimsy.
1 hr 30 mins. A disappointing dud. The latest devised piece by Improbable, who have been going for aeons (well, since 1996) but whose work I don't think we've ever seen*. A series of ruminations on the god Pan, in mythology and in real life.
There was a great deal of brown paper, used to create both props and set: wide vertical strips, forming a curtain at the front that could be raised and lowered and doubled at one stage as the sails of a ship; horizontal strips ditto which doubled as a vertical bed, the actors' heads popping up between two sheets and "lying" as on a pillow in a rectangle of light.
There was a rather fetching puppet (also brown paper) of Pan. There were a number of monologues about the (supposed) real lives of the cast: one actress described behaving outrageously with her girlfriend in the gardens at Blenheim Palace on Family Day; another explained she was a former aerialist who wanted to be a proper actress (though that didn't stop her doing a little light aerial work in this piece); Phelim McDermott, playing both Pan and a modern man (lecherous, lonely, inadequate), told us a shaggy dog story about sleeping with 147 people and tracking down the 148th, a girl from his schooldays, in Australia. And so on.
Like a lot of devised pieces it lacked narrative or anything remotely resembling a structure. There were some nice touches. They included Phelim charging about as Pan with a pair of brown paper horns, a brown paper Mr Punch chin and a vast wicker phallus far too heavy for him; a rather amusing sequence in which he produced scores of self-help books from brown paper carrier bags, reading out their (absurd) titles as he did so; another sequence in which the three "nymphs" sat and stood with brown paper bags on their heads onto which video images of their faces were projected while Phelim... did what? Can't remember, though I can remember the visuals, and that he asked them afterwards what they'd seen inside their bags.
The projections generally were a high point. There were some nice forest effects. At one point the vertical strips representing a front curtain were pulled up backwards, to reveal a video projection on the back wall of a curtain which was likewise pulled up, and then another curtain behind that, and so on. There was a shadow puppet sequence, with a giant Pan and tiny naked figures cavorting and copulating above him.
Top marks for the visuals, then; two out of ten for content.
* Wrong. We saw Theatre of Blood at the National, which I seem to recall had a lot more going for it but was still a bit flimsy.
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
ANDROMAQUE
28/4/09, Silk Street Theatre (Barbican)
3 hrs. Racine in the original, directed by Declan Donnellan and designed by Nick Ormerod. Though quite what O contributed isn't clear: the Silk Street theatre, the Guildhall School's performance space, was bare to the back wall and the only props were a handful of metal chairs. Only the costumes were evidently "designed": mostly black 1940s suits and skirts, which D cleverly suggested were meant to remind us of Vichy, appropriate for a play about an imprisoned woman being pressurised into collaborating with her victorious captor.
Surtitles meant it was easy enough to follow, but unsatisfying. You get the impression that half the pleasure of Racine for a French audience is the verse, which we could not appreciate. There is of course very little action. Perhaps to cover this, the actors cannoned around the stage like snooker balls. Their motivation seemed similarly wayward, changeable, unpredictable: positions would change mid-scene, violently and completely and almost arbitrarily. One moment Pyrrhus is a loving substitute father to Astyanax, hoping thereby the win Andromaque's hand in marriage; the next she rejects him and he is not merely disappointed but actively vowing death and destruction upon her and the child. A few scenes later he's planning to marry her again.
Apropos surtitles: we arrived to find Marcus and Daniel in the seats next to us (spooky, or what?). They are regular (dedicated) opera-goers. We agreed two things: 1 surtitles are a lot easier to handle in opera where there are far fewer of them, because fewer words; 2 this kind of classical tragedy needs music. M said in the second half he kept counting the arias, or rather the places where there should have been arias. My view: 18th century opera seria is a notoriously arid and austere form, but it make perfect sense when you realise the alternative is Racine.
It's easy (and probably rather crass, but I'll do it anyway) to marshal objections to Racine's procedures. A helpful essay by Lytton Strachey reprinted in the programme argues that the active premise of his work is that characters and events converge at the moment of most extreme crisis, whence arises the drama. The whole point is the concentration of emotion and conflict. But I kept thinking how much more straightforward things would be if the characters took a more moderate approach: deployed a little sensible English pragmatism, if you will.
Compare Shakespeare, whose tragedies manage to work up to moments of extreme catharsis more gradually and more plausibly and psychologically more convincingly. Macbeth is tempted by Lady M. Lear gradually comes to realise his folly. Othello is tempted by Iago into irrational jealousy. Hamlet (famously) agonises. Racine seems to dispense with all that psychological underpinning: he's not interested in winding his characters up, only in what happens once the spring is taut and the catch released.
In that respect his plays resemble classical Greek tragedies. But in fact he has more in common with Shakespeare. Greek tragedies are all the gods' fault; the human characters are merely their victims, who respond with greater or lesser dignity to their predicament. In Racine, as in Shakespeare, the characters all have choices and we see them exercising their freedom to choose (unwisely, so bringing tragic events upon themselves) while in the grip of passions like love (in the case of Oreste and Pyrrhus) which looks a lot like obsession; or because they've been seized by noble but excessive sentiments (Andromaque's reverence for her dead husband Hector, which leads her to court destruction both for herself and for her son); or because they're spoiled children who have inherited their parents' devastating combination of beauty, greed, stupidity and arrogance (Hermione, daughter of Helen and Menelaus, and hoping to marry Pyrrhus).
So an illuminating evening, and thought-provoking, but long and a touch tedious and not one (I told everyone) I was keen to repeat any time soon. And then someone pointed out that we have tickets for Helen Mirren as Phedre at the National in July.
3 hrs. Racine in the original, directed by Declan Donnellan and designed by Nick Ormerod. Though quite what O contributed isn't clear: the Silk Street theatre, the Guildhall School's performance space, was bare to the back wall and the only props were a handful of metal chairs. Only the costumes were evidently "designed": mostly black 1940s suits and skirts, which D cleverly suggested were meant to remind us of Vichy, appropriate for a play about an imprisoned woman being pressurised into collaborating with her victorious captor.
Surtitles meant it was easy enough to follow, but unsatisfying. You get the impression that half the pleasure of Racine for a French audience is the verse, which we could not appreciate. There is of course very little action. Perhaps to cover this, the actors cannoned around the stage like snooker balls. Their motivation seemed similarly wayward, changeable, unpredictable: positions would change mid-scene, violently and completely and almost arbitrarily. One moment Pyrrhus is a loving substitute father to Astyanax, hoping thereby the win Andromaque's hand in marriage; the next she rejects him and he is not merely disappointed but actively vowing death and destruction upon her and the child. A few scenes later he's planning to marry her again.
Apropos surtitles: we arrived to find Marcus and Daniel in the seats next to us (spooky, or what?). They are regular (dedicated) opera-goers. We agreed two things: 1 surtitles are a lot easier to handle in opera where there are far fewer of them, because fewer words; 2 this kind of classical tragedy needs music. M said in the second half he kept counting the arias, or rather the places where there should have been arias. My view: 18th century opera seria is a notoriously arid and austere form, but it make perfect sense when you realise the alternative is Racine.
It's easy (and probably rather crass, but I'll do it anyway) to marshal objections to Racine's procedures. A helpful essay by Lytton Strachey reprinted in the programme argues that the active premise of his work is that characters and events converge at the moment of most extreme crisis, whence arises the drama. The whole point is the concentration of emotion and conflict. But I kept thinking how much more straightforward things would be if the characters took a more moderate approach: deployed a little sensible English pragmatism, if you will.
Compare Shakespeare, whose tragedies manage to work up to moments of extreme catharsis more gradually and more plausibly and psychologically more convincingly. Macbeth is tempted by Lady M. Lear gradually comes to realise his folly. Othello is tempted by Iago into irrational jealousy. Hamlet (famously) agonises. Racine seems to dispense with all that psychological underpinning: he's not interested in winding his characters up, only in what happens once the spring is taut and the catch released.
In that respect his plays resemble classical Greek tragedies. But in fact he has more in common with Shakespeare. Greek tragedies are all the gods' fault; the human characters are merely their victims, who respond with greater or lesser dignity to their predicament. In Racine, as in Shakespeare, the characters all have choices and we see them exercising their freedom to choose (unwisely, so bringing tragic events upon themselves) while in the grip of passions like love (in the case of Oreste and Pyrrhus) which looks a lot like obsession; or because they've been seized by noble but excessive sentiments (Andromaque's reverence for her dead husband Hector, which leads her to court destruction both for herself and for her son); or because they're spoiled children who have inherited their parents' devastating combination of beauty, greed, stupidity and arrogance (Hermione, daughter of Helen and Menelaus, and hoping to marry Pyrrhus).
So an illuminating evening, and thought-provoking, but long and a touch tedious and not one (I told everyone) I was keen to repeat any time soon. And then someone pointed out that we have tickets for Helen Mirren as Phedre at the National in July.
Monday, 13 April 2009
PURGATORIO
8/04/09, Barbican
I agree with Lyn Gardner:
Oddly, the same print edition of the paper, on a news page, ran a picture from the production, clearly a space filler, with the most minimal caption (above).
To begin with it felt like watching a film, one of those incredibly slow-moving continental films of the 1970s, an impression reinforced by the amplified dialogue and naturalistic set and inadequate lighting. It was a distancing device, like the captions in a later scene projected onto a front gauze, telling us what the characters are about to do. And the elaborate set-changes: after the first (brief) scene shadowy figures come on and reconfigure the set completely, transforming it from the living room of an affluent middle-class Italian household to a child's bedroom; after the second scene the entire set is hoisted into the flies, revealing the downstairs living room in darkness with a gigantic robot toy, which the child comes downstairs and addresses; and so on.
I was bored and impatient and puzzled. Then, just as we're all completely alienated, coughing and shuffling, the purpose becomes clear. It is all a preliminary to the main event. He forces us to listen to the amplified sounds of a child being raped, off stage. The theatre falls completely silent. (Or so I thought: D said a few people left, though I didn't hear them; I did notice two who left in the scene change that immediately followed. I might have done the same if we weren't slap bang in the middle of a row.) It is breathtakingly audacious, reveals a staggering command of theatrical technique (not to mention a huge budget) and is utterly repellant.
After that... there is more, though I struggle to recall it. The man comes downstairs and sits, exhausted. The little boy comes downstairs and sits on his knee and cuddles him. Then, though I can't quite remember how, the man and the room disappear leaving the little boy in front of a dark curtain with a huge circular window against which he stands silhouetted as huge brightly lit flowers pass across in a fantastical pageant. Visually stunning, and apparently meaningless.
Then the boy leaves, the curtain rises and we find the boy, now played by a grown man in short trousers, and an actor with cerebral palsy playing the father; he writhes and twitches on the floor. As D remarked, "You never know when people are acting." He wasn't. Roles have been reversed somehow, but to what end or for what purpose I could not grasp.
Part of me fears that failure to appreciate Castellucci is a sign of terminal philistinism. He exhibits theatrical skill and imagination of a high order. But part of me thinks such skill and imagination need harnessing to some kind of narrative or argument to have real impact... and that Castellucci's principal aim seems to be to shock and revolt. An old-fashioned example of self-indulgent avant-gardeism with few redeeming features.
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
INFERNO, PARADISO
2/4/09, Barbican
First two parts of a trilogy by the (allegedly) famous and revered Italian director/installation artist/impresario, Romeo Castellucci, loosely (very loosely) derived from Dante's Divine Comedy. We have Purgatorio still to come. Alas.
Paradiso a walk-through installation in the Barbican's "Silk Street Theatre", in reality the main performance space in the Guildhall School next door. When configured as a conventional theatre it fills the gap between the Barbican's main 1,000-plus seater theatre and the Pit, which only holds a few hundred. It's been brought into commission for the SPILL festival of performance and for BITE. We are going to see Andromaque there later this month.
For Paradiso it was filled with a huge white box, entered at one corner. Inside, an ante-room, then a short cylindrical tunnel, then a big dark space. In front of you, as your eyes adjust to the darkness, you become aware of a naked man, apparently buried to the waist near the top of the wall and struggling silently to escape. Water cascades noisily to the floor below him. And that was it. Not very paradisaical, really. As we left we were handed a sheet with a pretentious interpretation and review by some Italian critic. I thought the whole thing nonsense. D's view: "Bollocks!"
It didn't help that we'd had to wait, and it wasn't worth it. We had timed tickets for 19.00, and turned up at 18.50, but didn't get in until 19.30 (worrying about getting out in time for Inferno, which started at 19.45). The installation could hold only a few at a time and someone had evidently miscalculated how long people would want to remain (baffling that they should want to remain, but there we are). The front of house woman told me they'd also had someone in a wheelchair, though how a wheelchair-user coped with the cylindrical tunnel (which you had to step up to enter) god alone knows.
Inferno a very different and altogether more formidable proposition. 1hr 10 mins in the main theatre, hugely ambitious and intermittently spectacular.
I knew broadly what to expect because I'd seen some of it on You Tube (where it says of Castellucci: "He himself says that he creates meaningless theatre which has an immediate impact on the spectator").
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOv3QsyJG2I
Individual bits are breathtaking, especially some of the early sections, but "meaningless" is the word (it certainly bears precious little relation to Dante, to judge from the reading of Inferno which I undertook, 30 years too late, as perhaps over-zealous preparation).
The critics were clearly puzzled:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/dominiccavendish/5114646/Inferno-and-Paradiso-review.html
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article6040628.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/apr/04/review-inferno-paradiso
And Castellucci has form. This is from the Observer in 2004:
"In 1999 he divided critics with his extraordinary Cesare, featuring an emaciated Caesar, an obese Cicero and a laryngotomised Mark Antony. In 2001's Genesi he matched a contortionist Adam with a middle-aged, mastectomised Eve.
Castellucci favours disabled or different-looking actors in his performances. His children and other members of his family often find they're written in too. Then there are the animals. A horse turned up in Cesare, and mongrel dogs scooted around in Genesi. (Castellucci's biggest failure to date on this score seems to have been with a cow, which objected strongly when he tried to milk it on stage.)
Targets? The tyranny of the text, naturellement . 'On its own,' he claims, 'text is pure inertia.' The answer is not to write better text but to abandon it in favour of sound, music, randomised and not-so-randomised animatronic and animal interventions and sumptuous, sensuous, visuals."
So what did we get on this occasion?
Castellucci himself is savaged by guard dogs at the start. He dons a special protective suit. They are evidently trained to bite clothing since they leave his exposed hands and face alone. There are three: they run on from the wings and are called off by a whistle. They're watched by half a dozen others, led on by burly handlers and left chained at the front of the stage. My memory is that the the six remained silent while the three attacked; D remembers them as quite agitated.
So that's a startling opening. And then a large black-draped cube is wheeled on and the drapes lifted off to reveal a bunch of toddlers inside, playing with toys. One little boy discovers that if he jumps up he makes a noisy metallic clatter when he lands; another little boy follows suit, a little girl half-heartedly tries it. Another little girl just sits. You worry if they're alright, by themselves. D reckons the oversized teddy bear sitting in one corner was actually an adult, on hand for emergencies. The inside of the (perspex) cube is brightly lit and amplified. As the kids play a vast black sheet billows above them. And then the drapes are replaced and the cube wheeled off. And your point is...?
There's a large cast of professionals and locally-recruited volunteers, dressed in "bright pastels" Benetton-style, who much of the time move silently in a group on and off the stage. At one point they all lie down and roll very slowly towards the back, individuals getting up and walking off. But, perhaps significantly, my memory of the stage pictures becomes much more fragmentary. Is this deliberate? "These fragments I have shored against my ruin", an Eliot-like commentary on the collapse of traditional culture?
Here's a few fragments, in no particular order.
A skull, placed beneath the back wall which has been raised like a paper guillotine. As the weight of the wall bears down on it the skull shatters.
A white horse is led on and its hindquarters splashed with red paint.
There's an old man, and an old woman, and a little girl, and a teenage boy in long shorts who bounces a basketball: each bounce produces an ear-shattering, earth-shattering explosion. They seem to spend a lot of their time standing at the front of the stage, looking out at the audience.
A grand piano is wheeled on and set alight.
Andy Warhol appears and takes polaroid photos of the audience. He is presumably a Virgil-like guide. At the end a ruined car is brought on and he sits in it.
Um, that's it.
First two parts of a trilogy by the (allegedly) famous and revered Italian director/installation artist/impresario, Romeo Castellucci, loosely (very loosely) derived from Dante's Divine Comedy. We have Purgatorio still to come. Alas.
Paradiso a walk-through installation in the Barbican's "Silk Street Theatre", in reality the main performance space in the Guildhall School next door. When configured as a conventional theatre it fills the gap between the Barbican's main 1,000-plus seater theatre and the Pit, which only holds a few hundred. It's been brought into commission for the SPILL festival of performance and for BITE. We are going to see Andromaque there later this month.
For Paradiso it was filled with a huge white box, entered at one corner. Inside, an ante-room, then a short cylindrical tunnel, then a big dark space. In front of you, as your eyes adjust to the darkness, you become aware of a naked man, apparently buried to the waist near the top of the wall and struggling silently to escape. Water cascades noisily to the floor below him. And that was it. Not very paradisaical, really. As we left we were handed a sheet with a pretentious interpretation and review by some Italian critic. I thought the whole thing nonsense. D's view: "Bollocks!"
It didn't help that we'd had to wait, and it wasn't worth it. We had timed tickets for 19.00, and turned up at 18.50, but didn't get in until 19.30 (worrying about getting out in time for Inferno, which started at 19.45). The installation could hold only a few at a time and someone had evidently miscalculated how long people would want to remain (baffling that they should want to remain, but there we are). The front of house woman told me they'd also had someone in a wheelchair, though how a wheelchair-user coped with the cylindrical tunnel (which you had to step up to enter) god alone knows.
Inferno a very different and altogether more formidable proposition. 1hr 10 mins in the main theatre, hugely ambitious and intermittently spectacular.
I knew broadly what to expect because I'd seen some of it on You Tube (where it says of Castellucci: "He himself says that he creates meaningless theatre which has an immediate impact on the spectator").
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOv3QsyJG2I
Individual bits are breathtaking, especially some of the early sections, but "meaningless" is the word (it certainly bears precious little relation to Dante, to judge from the reading of Inferno which I undertook, 30 years too late, as perhaps over-zealous preparation).
The critics were clearly puzzled:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/dominiccavendish/5114646/Inferno-and-Paradiso-review.html
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article6040628.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/apr/04/review-inferno-paradiso
And Castellucci has form. This is from the Observer in 2004:
"In 1999 he divided critics with his extraordinary Cesare, featuring an emaciated Caesar, an obese Cicero and a laryngotomised Mark Antony. In 2001's Genesi he matched a contortionist Adam with a middle-aged, mastectomised Eve.
Castellucci favours disabled or different-looking actors in his performances. His children and other members of his family often find they're written in too. Then there are the animals. A horse turned up in Cesare, and mongrel dogs scooted around in Genesi. (Castellucci's biggest failure to date on this score seems to have been with a cow, which objected strongly when he tried to milk it on stage.)
Targets? The tyranny of the text, naturellement . 'On its own,' he claims, 'text is pure inertia.' The answer is not to write better text but to abandon it in favour of sound, music, randomised and not-so-randomised animatronic and animal interventions and sumptuous, sensuous, visuals."
So what did we get on this occasion?
Castellucci himself is savaged by guard dogs at the start. He dons a special protective suit. They are evidently trained to bite clothing since they leave his exposed hands and face alone. There are three: they run on from the wings and are called off by a whistle. They're watched by half a dozen others, led on by burly handlers and left chained at the front of the stage. My memory is that the the six remained silent while the three attacked; D remembers them as quite agitated.
So that's a startling opening. And then a large black-draped cube is wheeled on and the drapes lifted off to reveal a bunch of toddlers inside, playing with toys. One little boy discovers that if he jumps up he makes a noisy metallic clatter when he lands; another little boy follows suit, a little girl half-heartedly tries it. Another little girl just sits. You worry if they're alright, by themselves. D reckons the oversized teddy bear sitting in one corner was actually an adult, on hand for emergencies. The inside of the (perspex) cube is brightly lit and amplified. As the kids play a vast black sheet billows above them. And then the drapes are replaced and the cube wheeled off. And your point is...?
There's a large cast of professionals and locally-recruited volunteers, dressed in "bright pastels" Benetton-style, who much of the time move silently in a group on and off the stage. At one point they all lie down and roll very slowly towards the back, individuals getting up and walking off. But, perhaps significantly, my memory of the stage pictures becomes much more fragmentary. Is this deliberate? "These fragments I have shored against my ruin", an Eliot-like commentary on the collapse of traditional culture?
Here's a few fragments, in no particular order.
A skull, placed beneath the back wall which has been raised like a paper guillotine. As the weight of the wall bears down on it the skull shatters.
A white horse is led on and its hindquarters splashed with red paint.
There's an old man, and an old woman, and a little girl, and a teenage boy in long shorts who bounces a basketball: each bounce produces an ear-shattering, earth-shattering explosion. They seem to spend a lot of their time standing at the front of the stage, looking out at the audience.
A grand piano is wheeled on and set alight.
Andy Warhol appears and takes polaroid photos of the audience. He is presumably a Virgil-like guide. At the end a ruined car is brought on and he sits in it.
Um, that's it.
Sunday, 29 March 2009
LONDON CONCERT CHOIR
28/3/09, Barbican
2hrs 5mins. Mozart's Coronation Mass and Mendelssohn's Symphony No 2, the Hymn of Praise, performed by a choir we hadn't heard of accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under the choir's conductor, one Mark Forkgen. The choir was large (forgot to count, but they filled the back of the Barbican Hall's stage with no difficulty) but, as so often, desperately short of men (so short, indeed, that one woman sang tenor). The RPO fielded around 30 players in the Coronation Mass, with only one set of violins and no clarinets (there were no clarinets in Mozart's Salzburg, G told me, and bless me, he was right); there were around 40 for the Mendelssohn. Both pieces featured a chamber organ.
Visual memory cues: chorus in black ties, band in white tie, soprano in fine dark burgundy evening dress and little black jacket.
The Mass is almost uniformly joyous and was sung with gusto, but the choral writing seemed unadventurous: almost all the choruses were sung in unison. I wondered if it showed Mozart had little faith in the capacities of the Salzburg cathedral choir, but I read instead that the Cardinal-Archbishop insisted on keeping masses short, and this was Mozart's solution (it lasts only around 30 minutes). The part-writing for the voice was limited to the soloists, mostly deployed as a quartet. There were only two quieter passages: the Agnus Dei, a beautiful soprano solo, and the Benedictus, where a reflective soprano alternates with the choir belting out Osannas. The choir seemed well-drilled right from the very first note, when they enter, all guns blazing, with a Kyrie.
Enjoyment slightly marred by a dreadful stomach ache brought on by too little exercise earlier in the day and a dyspeptic reaction to the meal beforehand at Searcy's (G paid): normally it's a good place and pretty quiet, but tonight it was full and they seemed overwhelmed. My starter never arrived; we were bolting our main course a few minutes before the concert started and more than an hour after we got there.
On the other hand, a Japanese woman sat at the next table in full fig, and there were more kimonos in the foyer beforehand, there to see the Ninagawa Kabuki production of Twelfth Night in the theatre.
The Mendelssohn is really rather fine, a three movement sinfonia, which lasts about 40 minutes, and then a 20 minute choral finale with three soloists (mezzo, a South African soprano called Erica Eloff, who had a powerful voice and a young tenor, Nathan Vale, with an agreeable voice but not perhaps quite enough heft). It starts with a distinctive and authoritative fanfare on the trombones which is then echoed by the rest of the orchestra and returns several times during the piece, including at the very end.
There were some lovely touches in the orchestral sections, including a clarinet solo which dies away to nothing; and in the finale there's a wonderful crashing chorus ("the Hymn of the German Reformation", apparently) with the band batting the notes of the fanfare back and forth between brass and horns, and which ought to be the work's climax. What can he follow it with? you wonder. In the event he pulls off a potentially very difficult transition by going straight to an unaccompanied chorale of Nun danket alle Gott, set to the familiar tune, and then a duet for soprano and tenor and finally another chorus, not quite so crashing.
Mendelssohn does write some lovely melodies and manages to write music that is mellifluous without being cloying. Why isn't this piece better known? G thought it better than Elijah. I'd love to hear it again with a better balanced choir.
2hrs 5mins. Mozart's Coronation Mass and Mendelssohn's Symphony No 2, the Hymn of Praise, performed by a choir we hadn't heard of accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under the choir's conductor, one Mark Forkgen. The choir was large (forgot to count, but they filled the back of the Barbican Hall's stage with no difficulty) but, as so often, desperately short of men (so short, indeed, that one woman sang tenor). The RPO fielded around 30 players in the Coronation Mass, with only one set of violins and no clarinets (there were no clarinets in Mozart's Salzburg, G told me, and bless me, he was right); there were around 40 for the Mendelssohn. Both pieces featured a chamber organ.
Visual memory cues: chorus in black ties, band in white tie, soprano in fine dark burgundy evening dress and little black jacket.
The Mass is almost uniformly joyous and was sung with gusto, but the choral writing seemed unadventurous: almost all the choruses were sung in unison. I wondered if it showed Mozart had little faith in the capacities of the Salzburg cathedral choir, but I read instead that the Cardinal-Archbishop insisted on keeping masses short, and this was Mozart's solution (it lasts only around 30 minutes). The part-writing for the voice was limited to the soloists, mostly deployed as a quartet. There were only two quieter passages: the Agnus Dei, a beautiful soprano solo, and the Benedictus, where a reflective soprano alternates with the choir belting out Osannas. The choir seemed well-drilled right from the very first note, when they enter, all guns blazing, with a Kyrie.
Enjoyment slightly marred by a dreadful stomach ache brought on by too little exercise earlier in the day and a dyspeptic reaction to the meal beforehand at Searcy's (G paid): normally it's a good place and pretty quiet, but tonight it was full and they seemed overwhelmed. My starter never arrived; we were bolting our main course a few minutes before the concert started and more than an hour after we got there.
On the other hand, a Japanese woman sat at the next table in full fig, and there were more kimonos in the foyer beforehand, there to see the Ninagawa Kabuki production of Twelfth Night in the theatre.
The Mendelssohn is really rather fine, a three movement sinfonia, which lasts about 40 minutes, and then a 20 minute choral finale with three soloists (mezzo, a South African soprano called Erica Eloff, who had a powerful voice and a young tenor, Nathan Vale, with an agreeable voice but not perhaps quite enough heft). It starts with a distinctive and authoritative fanfare on the trombones which is then echoed by the rest of the orchestra and returns several times during the piece, including at the very end.
There were some lovely touches in the orchestral sections, including a clarinet solo which dies away to nothing; and in the finale there's a wonderful crashing chorus ("the Hymn of the German Reformation", apparently) with the band batting the notes of the fanfare back and forth between brass and horns, and which ought to be the work's climax. What can he follow it with? you wonder. In the event he pulls off a potentially very difficult transition by going straight to an unaccompanied chorale of Nun danket alle Gott, set to the familiar tune, and then a duet for soprano and tenor and finally another chorus, not quite so crashing.
Mendelssohn does write some lovely melodies and manages to write music that is mellifluous without being cloying. Why isn't this piece better known? G thought it better than Elijah. I'd love to hear it again with a better balanced choir.
Tuesday, 17 March 2009
HAYDN SYMPHONIES AND ARIAS
12/3/09, King's Place.
Two Haydn symphonies, No 26 Lamentatione and No 45 Farewell, plus half a dozen solo arias for tenor and soprano, played by a period band we hadn't heard of called the Orchestra of the Classical Opera Company founded and conducted by a chap called Ian Page. Around 20 musicians, two-thirds women, dressed in black, augmented by a harpsichord for the songs. The tenor a chap called Joshua Ellicott whose voice G especially liked; the soprano a rather self-satisfied lady called Gillian Ramm with an ill-judged dress and fringe but a cracking voice.
Five days later I can of course remember almost nothing in detail about the music (mark you, I could remember almost nothing in detail five hours later).
So let's review the venue instead. It's a basement concert hall, rectangular, pale wood (as at Glyndebourne, and presumably for the acoustic), with a narrow balcony running round the back and sides and a surprisingly high ceiling. The chairs are uncomfortable (according to G) but have individual heating/air conditioning in the base, again as at Glyndebourne. There are clever but understated lighting tricks: when the performers enter or exit the stage they do so through wooden doors that open to reveal a blue-lit area behind them; there are drapes hanging from the back wall lit by subtly changing lighting.
The public areas are exceptionally spacious: a large entrance hall which seems to occupy half the building's footprint, with box office, sandwich bar, bar-and-restaurant-with-canalside-terrace at the far end, and a great well in the middle through which you travel on an escalator down to the concert hall (Hall One: there's also a Hall Two rehearsal space) past a gallery floor on a semi-basement balcony or mezzanine. Ceiling heights are everywhere generous. Off the ground floor is an entrance to the offices of musical organisations like the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and another to the Guardian offices which occupy the lion's share of the building. The Guardian has another entrance on the corner as you approach from King's Cross: more escalators, this time going up. As you stand in the ground floor atrium you can look up through the glass walls of the newspaper's offices to see signs like "arts and culture" and "interview room two" and "society".
Like a lot of modern buildings it's a pleasant contrast to the penny-pinching, cramped and often surprisingly dark developments of past decades, especially the 60s and 70s. Compare the National Theatre, whose public areas get much more crowded more quickly and which has to deploy plush carpets to fight the oppressive quality of the bare concrete walls. Or the Barbican, which is also in a basement and more spacious than the National but much gloomier than King's Place. Perhaps it's the plain white walls and pale wood; perhaps we're just better at lighting these large spaces. (Whichever it is the environmental implications are probably horrendous.)
As for the music... I'm ashamed to say I hadn't realised Haydn wrote any operas. Perhaps they're rarely done; several are lost with only isolated arias surviving. L'infidelta deluso was his fifth, but the earliest to survive in completed form. The arias we heard were spectacular, tuneful and charming by turns.
Of the symphonies I remember little of the first except its generally plangent tone. The last was introduced by the conductor, who said he hoped there were at least some people in the audience who didn't know how this symphony ended, and explained it was a kind of coded message to Prince Esterhazy that his musicians, who had been away from home in Eisenstadt at the prince's new palace at Esterhaza throughout the summer of 1772, wanted to go home now please. Since I had no idea how it ended this merely reinforced the impression I often have at classical concerts that everyone else there is far more familiar with what we're about to hear than I am, can hum the music backwards and knows exactly when to applaud.
(Look away now if you don't want the ending spoilt.)
In fact the symphony bowls along merrily for three movements. Then, during the fourth, the musicians leave the stage one by one until only the leader and the principal second violin are left. It's very effective.
There seem to be lots of non-musical hooks like this in Haydn's music, or what I know of it: jokes, gimmicks, back stories. He seems to have been a rather engaging as well as remarkably hard-working fellow. His stuff is tuneful, long on musical variety etc etc. So why don't I know it better? Why do I dismiss him as a rather boring composer who wrote too much and whose music all sounds the same? You could say the same about Handel, and I adore Handel. Perhaps the problem is that, unlike the earlier Handel, he was oveshadowed by the romantic composers who came after him and who found a musical language (helped by the development of larger ensembles and more advanced instruments, perhaps?) to express heightened emotion that Haydn couldn't quite manage, trapped as he still was in the polite conventions of 18th century music.
Either way I should find out more. Memo to self: listen to more Haydn. Read a biography.
Two Haydn symphonies, No 26 Lamentatione and No 45 Farewell, plus half a dozen solo arias for tenor and soprano, played by a period band we hadn't heard of called the Orchestra of the Classical Opera Company founded and conducted by a chap called Ian Page. Around 20 musicians, two-thirds women, dressed in black, augmented by a harpsichord for the songs. The tenor a chap called Joshua Ellicott whose voice G especially liked; the soprano a rather self-satisfied lady called Gillian Ramm with an ill-judged dress and fringe but a cracking voice.
Five days later I can of course remember almost nothing in detail about the music (mark you, I could remember almost nothing in detail five hours later).
So let's review the venue instead. It's a basement concert hall, rectangular, pale wood (as at Glyndebourne, and presumably for the acoustic), with a narrow balcony running round the back and sides and a surprisingly high ceiling. The chairs are uncomfortable (according to G) but have individual heating/air conditioning in the base, again as at Glyndebourne. There are clever but understated lighting tricks: when the performers enter or exit the stage they do so through wooden doors that open to reveal a blue-lit area behind them; there are drapes hanging from the back wall lit by subtly changing lighting.
The public areas are exceptionally spacious: a large entrance hall which seems to occupy half the building's footprint, with box office, sandwich bar, bar-and-restaurant-with-canalside-terrace at the far end, and a great well in the middle through which you travel on an escalator down to the concert hall (Hall One: there's also a Hall Two rehearsal space) past a gallery floor on a semi-basement balcony or mezzanine. Ceiling heights are everywhere generous. Off the ground floor is an entrance to the offices of musical organisations like the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and another to the Guardian offices which occupy the lion's share of the building. The Guardian has another entrance on the corner as you approach from King's Cross: more escalators, this time going up. As you stand in the ground floor atrium you can look up through the glass walls of the newspaper's offices to see signs like "arts and culture" and "interview room two" and "society".
Like a lot of modern buildings it's a pleasant contrast to the penny-pinching, cramped and often surprisingly dark developments of past decades, especially the 60s and 70s. Compare the National Theatre, whose public areas get much more crowded more quickly and which has to deploy plush carpets to fight the oppressive quality of the bare concrete walls. Or the Barbican, which is also in a basement and more spacious than the National but much gloomier than King's Place. Perhaps it's the plain white walls and pale wood; perhaps we're just better at lighting these large spaces. (Whichever it is the environmental implications are probably horrendous.)
As for the music... I'm ashamed to say I hadn't realised Haydn wrote any operas. Perhaps they're rarely done; several are lost with only isolated arias surviving. L'infidelta deluso was his fifth, but the earliest to survive in completed form. The arias we heard were spectacular, tuneful and charming by turns.
Of the symphonies I remember little of the first except its generally plangent tone. The last was introduced by the conductor, who said he hoped there were at least some people in the audience who didn't know how this symphony ended, and explained it was a kind of coded message to Prince Esterhazy that his musicians, who had been away from home in Eisenstadt at the prince's new palace at Esterhaza throughout the summer of 1772, wanted to go home now please. Since I had no idea how it ended this merely reinforced the impression I often have at classical concerts that everyone else there is far more familiar with what we're about to hear than I am, can hum the music backwards and knows exactly when to applaud.
(Look away now if you don't want the ending spoilt.)
In fact the symphony bowls along merrily for three movements. Then, during the fourth, the musicians leave the stage one by one until only the leader and the principal second violin are left. It's very effective.
There seem to be lots of non-musical hooks like this in Haydn's music, or what I know of it: jokes, gimmicks, back stories. He seems to have been a rather engaging as well as remarkably hard-working fellow. His stuff is tuneful, long on musical variety etc etc. So why don't I know it better? Why do I dismiss him as a rather boring composer who wrote too much and whose music all sounds the same? You could say the same about Handel, and I adore Handel. Perhaps the problem is that, unlike the earlier Handel, he was oveshadowed by the romantic composers who came after him and who found a musical language (helped by the development of larger ensembles and more advanced instruments, perhaps?) to express heightened emotion that Haydn couldn't quite manage, trapped as he still was in the polite conventions of 18th century music.
Either way I should find out more. Memo to self: listen to more Haydn. Read a biography.
Thursday, 26 February 2009
COLIN DUNNE
25/2/09, Barbican Pit.
1 hr, no interval. One man show, Out of Time, by the Irish dancer.
We'd seen him in a Fabulous Beast production at the Pit last year: a spectacular dancer with a gift for self-parody and a witty spoken delivery.
This one-man show was almost exclusively dance. It was sweaty: he changed his clothes two or three times. And sometimes it was breathtaking. He put microphones on his shoes to create a rhythm as infectious as Fred Astaire, and danced along to an audio track which was either his own pre-recorded steps or perhaps a delayed echo of his actual steps. Either way it created highly intricate sound patterns (full marks to Fionan de Bana, who designed and operated the sound). At other times he slowed the steps right down, deconstructing the dance.
The only speech came in a routine called "rashers and sausages", the mnemonic dancers use to remember the rhythm of one particular Irish dance, which Dunne used as the jumping off point for a wonderful, rather surreal verbal riff that was genuinely funny as well as mirroring the relentless overlapping patterns of Irish dance.
Highlights: the video of traditional dancers, several filmed in television studios in the 1980s, with audiences in a circle watching rapt as dancers in beautiful shiny brogues and three-piece suits went through their dazzling paces, arms at their sides, faces set in a mask of concentration. There was one (apparently silent) film of four men dancing in a row and taking solos, filmed at some agricultural event, wearing tweed suits and in one case plus-fours.
The best clip was of a ten-year old Dunne in brown kilt on Blue Peter, showng why he'd won some Irish dancing trophy. At the end he was interviewed, and spoke up smartly if a little breathlessly in a perfect Brummie accent, for that was where he came from. Today the adult Colin Dunne speaks a mid-Atlantic Irish-American English which slips and slides often (though with considerably less discipline than his feet).
On You Tube I found videos of him dancing in Riverdance, of which hewas clearky a star. Yet this show makes no mention f that except elliptically, in a line about some of the finest Irish dancerrs selling out. I thought he was talking about Flatley. Maybe he was talking about himself.
He's technically astonishing and I couldn't fault the staging, but I didn't quite see the point. Perhaps more narrative and context would have helped, or no narrative at all, just a virtuoso display and even more sweat-soaked shirts.
1 hr, no interval. One man show, Out of Time, by the Irish dancer.
We'd seen him in a Fabulous Beast production at the Pit last year: a spectacular dancer with a gift for self-parody and a witty spoken delivery.
This one-man show was almost exclusively dance. It was sweaty: he changed his clothes two or three times. And sometimes it was breathtaking. He put microphones on his shoes to create a rhythm as infectious as Fred Astaire, and danced along to an audio track which was either his own pre-recorded steps or perhaps a delayed echo of his actual steps. Either way it created highly intricate sound patterns (full marks to Fionan de Bana, who designed and operated the sound). At other times he slowed the steps right down, deconstructing the dance.
The only speech came in a routine called "rashers and sausages", the mnemonic dancers use to remember the rhythm of one particular Irish dance, which Dunne used as the jumping off point for a wonderful, rather surreal verbal riff that was genuinely funny as well as mirroring the relentless overlapping patterns of Irish dance.
Highlights: the video of traditional dancers, several filmed in television studios in the 1980s, with audiences in a circle watching rapt as dancers in beautiful shiny brogues and three-piece suits went through their dazzling paces, arms at their sides, faces set in a mask of concentration. There was one (apparently silent) film of four men dancing in a row and taking solos, filmed at some agricultural event, wearing tweed suits and in one case plus-fours.
The best clip was of a ten-year old Dunne in brown kilt on Blue Peter, showng why he'd won some Irish dancing trophy. At the end he was interviewed, and spoke up smartly if a little breathlessly in a perfect Brummie accent, for that was where he came from. Today the adult Colin Dunne speaks a mid-Atlantic Irish-American English which slips and slides often (though with considerably less discipline than his feet).
On You Tube I found videos of him dancing in Riverdance, of which hewas clearky a star. Yet this show makes no mention f that except elliptically, in a line about some of the finest Irish dancerrs selling out. I thought he was talking about Flatley. Maybe he was talking about himself.
He's technically astonishing and I couldn't fault the staging, but I didn't quite see the point. Perhaps more narrative and context would have helped, or no narrative at all, just a virtuoso display and even more sweat-soaked shirts.
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