The Pilgrim's Progress

English National Opera, 20 November 2012

An aria from the Pilgrim's Progress, details here.

 

A magnificent but disturbing work, constructively subverted by the production.

 

Much as I love the music of Vaughan Williams, I wonder what drew him so obssessively to Bunyan's allegory, given that he avoids most of the more appealing human aspects of that work in his adaptation for the stage, and in one vital respect stresses its least appealing aspect for a liberal audience, its puritanism.

Having the Pilgrim (Christian in the book) centrestage requires us always to recall that this is a morality tale, and that we are meant to be judging the joys of Vanity Fair as harshly as Bunyan thought we ought to. But this is simply not how we read the book, with its vital characters who only incidentally happen to have a didactic purpose.

Things would be much better if the composer had been able to breath erotic life into the music of Vanity Fair, or satanic glory into Appolyon. As it is, we are left with piety and landscapes, a kind of self-parody. The Pilgrim's Progress is not undramatic, as some people seem to think, but it is poor theatre and needs a lot of help to work.

It gets it here. Yoshi Oïda sets the imprisoned Bunyan's dream within the prison itself, so that the journey from this life to the next amounts to preparation for a public execution.

The grotesque conclusion might seem to completely undermine Vaughan Williams' incredibly beautiful and spiritual music, but instead the music transfigures what we see on stage. I would be interested to learn how a US death-penalty supporting christian evangelical might experience this production. I suspect they might approve, so that this drama is a powerful reflection of views diametrically opposed to my own.

For when presenting the slow attainment of this dubious grace by the Pilgrim, the music is overwhelmingly powerful, a mixture of introspection and rhapsody, and fully justifying the composer's belief this was his masterpiece.

Conductor Martyn Brabbins deserves the credit here, maintaining momentum and managing transitions masterfully. Acting and singing reach a very high standard.

A drama that exhalts humility and the spiritual life over the pleasures of the flesh, or even of affable sociability is hard to take, especially when the exhalting is quite so wonderful and the pleasures so meagre. English National Opera have shown how it can be done.

The Seagull

Southwark Playhouse, 19 November 2012

Promo video, focussing on the seagull of the title.

A very strong production still cannot make me care about Chekhov's characters.

The ususal description of what Chekhov is doing in his dramas, exploring love, jealousy, russian society and so on, seems to me entirely useless. It's as if critics thought either earnest Konstantin or charming Trigorin in this drama were his artistic surrogates, when I feel it is self-evident they are not.

Art need only describe problems, not solve them, says Chekhov in the epigraph of Anya Reiss' lightly updated translation. The power of Chekhov lies specifically in the way he describes our problems, specifically how we are to live, given that our desires are not harmonious with those of other people, or with the way the world works.

What strikes me as unique in Chekhov is his adaptation of the realistic novel to the stage. He forces us to empathise with each carefully articulated character, and finds ways to make ensembles emphasise their differences. For example, so long as the actors are fully in character, the scene with everyone watching Konstantin's bizarre play can become a microcosm of society, with everyone responding differently and illuminatingly.

This scene, and others, transcend the limitations of a realist novel and are utterly theatrical. Only the theatre offers us the possibility of choosing whom we watch, whereas a novelist (for example) is required to focus on one person at a time.

I imagine this is deceptively difficult to direct, for it requires both extracting magnificent performances and also ensuring that the arrangement of each scene is completely plausible. No one viewpoint or character should be highlighted above others; somehow Russell Bolam manages this feat unobtrusively.

The performances, while fine, would not draw tears from a stone. This is more the fault of Chekhov's composition; a scene involving a gun may heighten tension, but it also veers into melodrama. To maintain realism here both Konstantin and Nina must be prone to these hysterics, and working backwards, so must other characters, most obviously Arkadina.

At least Sasha Waddell's Arkadina does not dominate proceedings, however much the character might wish to. And Anthony Howell is a more appealing Trigorin than I've seen before. Such careful balancing brings out the full futility of the conclusion.

Are we nearly there yet?

Wilton's music hall, 16 November 2012



Image by Sophie Herxheimer. From Wilton's.

The concept of pilgrimage is stretched too far to be illuminating, but the approach is entrancing, if exploitative.

In this work exploring pilgrimages of  various types, all of the power, and many of the flaws, are intrinsic to the peculiar nature of this theatre piece, and how it was constructed. So I have to digress a little.

This is verbatim theatre, where the actors supposedly do not learn their parts but rather repeat snatches of recorded interviews from several people, hence presenting the voices of these people over the course of the event.

The effect is something like being present during the original interviews; non-actors being unlikely to be happy discussing their experiences in front of a group of complete strangers.

But only something like it. These are actors, after all, and the director / interviewer / editor is finally responsible for composing the work, and linking it to form an effective whole, which necessarily includes drama. So we end up with a theatre piece that is perhaps a little closer to reality than many others, but still noticeably an artefact.

Like reality tv, the thoughts and views of real people are enormously compelling, but also like reality tv, the presence of editing and of a focussing of attention introduces an element of exploitation that I don't experience with more conventional drama.

For example, comic elements are deftly interwoven with more serious narratives, but as some of this comedy comes from laughing at some of the characters rather than with them, it has an uncomfortable effect, despite this being part of the cruelty of most comedy.

The content of the work, four scenes depicting different stages of a pilgrimage, with many characters voicd by four actors, was extremely diffuse. The definition of a pilgrimage ended up being kin to a journey, something made explicit by one of the characters at the end of the piece. Did anything else unite these dozen tales? I didn't notice it.

Surely the most interesting aspect of medieval European pilgrimages is that they were undertaken at all, given their perils and demands, and by people who were otherwise unlikely to travel further than the nearest town during their lifetimes.

We all live in a very different environment, where travel is both easy and expected, and where we have at least seen photos from our destination. And all this is before we consider the respectability of unbelief, so that modern faith-based pilgrims are operating in a more secular environment than their ancestors.

Medieval pilgrimage is therefore still very mysterious, and an artwork might shed light on it, perhaps by drawing analogues with our ideas.

By extending the concept of pilgrimage to include intended journeys, or trips for self-enlightenment, Matthew Lloyd makes his work so vague as to defy interpretation. This isn't a weakness of verbatim theatre, but rather of the original concept.

The actors were good, the music couldn't be heard over the noise of Wilton's regulars, and the setting (upper rooms at Wilton's decorated with some uninteresting art on the subject of pilgrimage) irrelevant.

Scenes from an Execution

National Theatre, 15 November 2012



Titian's Death of Acteon (National Gallery, London). 
Howard Barker's Galactia presumably conveys the same sickeningly real sense of violence as does late Titian.   

Dramatising challenging issues in aesthetics and morality, what really brings this drama to life is the powerfully romantic central character. A near-masterpiece.

The title is a pun. Nobody is executed, though the central character Galactia is imprisoned and understandably fears she will be eliminated, although the audience understands that the poor old Doge is merely going through the tiresome motions of punishing her.

Rather, it is a work of art that is being executed, and we witness scenes of this work in progress, a vast canvas depicting the Venetian victory at the 1571 Battle of Lepanto.

Galactia, anachronistically a woman painter, creates a work of devastating realism, depicting the slaughter of the battle so violently that anyone viewing it is horrified by the brutality of warfare. Naturally, this upsets the commissioners, the civilised Doge and the Venetian state he represents.

So this is a drama of ideas, familiar from a tradition that includes Brecht and Shaw. Conflict emerges from people's different viewpoints and levels of power, and all views are treated sympathetically. The central character is a genius who challenges social, political and aesthetic conventions, in this case questioning the glory of war, or death generally (in the funeral scene). By doing so, she allows us all to examine how we live our lives.

Supposing, like me, you like this approach to drama, you will be delighted that Howard Barker has written something like this, as there seem to be too few contemporary authors in this tradition.

But something special sets this apart from the works of Edward Bond, the other dramatist with similar ambitions that comes to mind. Galactia is a magnificent, full-blooded creation.

Arrogant, violent, earthy, sensual and apololitical, she indeed blazes like a comet, as the Doge remarks. The reported physicality of her art is extremely plausible.

Among the many fine touches, the most original moment in the work is when she inadvertently annoys a cardinal by refusing to defend her painting, not out of contempt, as he suspects, but because she doesn't know how to. And she is right.

In displaying appropriate inarticulacy in the face of brute reality, the drama briefly touches upon what is otherwise its major weakness. A painting conveys its impact without words, or movement, and is therefore intractable to theatre.

But Barker is primarily concerned with what is 'behind the picture', as the cardinal puts it. We cannot see the art, we get only the discussion of its meaning, a discussion in which Galactia's voice is rightly only one among many. It's as if we are witnessing the battle several stages removed, but it feels as if that level of abstraction is where the most important decisions need to be taken.

Among actual paintings, perhaps Guernica is closest to what is being described, but the comic-grotesque aspects of that work do not convey what Galactia's painting is supposed to have done. I left the theatre wondering why nobody has painted such a scene, and what this says about us. For that reason alone, this is an important drama.

Nonetheless, there may be a problem with a work of art (this drama) that cannot show us what is supposedly a greater work of art (the painting), but can only tell us about it.

The cast were lively, and the direction adequate, but the only truly memorable aspect of the performance was Phoebe Nicholls' tightly controlled Rivera, the critic whose words transform what the painting communicates, deadening or celebrating it depending on viewpoint, but in any case highlighting the limitations of visual art.

Photography vs painting: 2 exhibitions

Seduced by Art

National Gallery, 31 October 2012 – 20 January 2012

Rothko/Sugimoto

Pace Gallery, 4 October – 17 November 2012

Irini II, photograph by Bettina von Zwehl.

 

Exhibitions trying to promote photographs over paintings only reveal the weaknesses in the former medium.

The National Gallery exhibition specifically attempts to display the influence of painting, specifically oil painting, on photographers. The private Pace Gallery only compares Mark Rothko’s paintings and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs, though as the Rothkos are from private collections and not for sale, I assume we are supposed to be concentrating on the photographs.

Primed by Brian Sewell’s ferocious attack on ‘Seduced by Art’, I didn’t have high expectations, but I left feeling the old curmudgeon had gone a little too far. That said, it is easy to think the curators were biased against photography from the outset – to be seduced by art implies photography is not itself art.

As if the title were a self-fulfilling prophecy, most of the photographs are indeed poor art. This isn’t a case of good photographers being trumped by great painters, as it might easily have been: many of the paintings for comparison were also poor. But any of them had greater intrinsic interest than most of the photographs.

In contrast, at the Pace I felt that the curators did Sugimoto no service by inviting comparison with Rothko.

Overall, both exhibitions rest on a false premise: that photography and oil painting are simply two different forms of visual art, much as oil paintings might hang next to drawings.

This assumption seems fairest with still life, which celebrates the mere technique of the oil painter in depicting things. A good photographer can do the same. This seems to confirm John Berger’s  idea that advertising photos continue the oil painting tradition, in stressing the tangibility, and perhaps desirability, of objects.

But everwhere else, and even in the best painted still lifes, there is the critical difference of composition.

A painter, with whatever technique, be it watercolour, fresco or computer generated images, must choose what to include, and can change details as necessary.

A photograph is first of all a record of something. The photographer can control composition to some extent, but almost every line and contrast and the way these connect is given, and cannot be changed without massive intervention.

Even portraits, where photos have taken precedence over paint, are very different depending on the medium. A good photo portrait, like any photo, captures a moment. A painting must necessarily capture something different, and in the greatest portraits it seems to depict a context, or the inner life.

As you’d expect, this difference is clearest in the landscapes at the National, where even the trickiest modern efforts, digitally compiling a view, are nonetheless required to be a documentary. This is how the sky looked, or could look like.

Sugimoto supposedly photographs landscapes, but they are so treated as to make them effectively abstract slabs of dark or light. In this respect, I agree with the curators that he is aiming for something similar to Rothko, in whose hands landscapes became completely abstract, and the communicative aspect became intensely, almost too intensely, direct.

On its own, some of Sugimoto’s work is very effective. But despite apparent similarity with Rothko, the painter is much more powerful. Part of this is due to the irritating symmetry of the planes in the photographs compared to Rothko. But comparing the symmetrical Untitled, 1969 with the photos, I was struck by the differences in texture. Some of this is even captured in the comparison (a photo, so limited) offered by the Pace here.

 

The painting is composed. As we can see the brush strokes, we know it has been composed. That the artist wanted precisely this effect, at this point. I perceive the overwhelming effect of a Rothko being this sense of struggling to communicate. Sugimoto doesn't achieve this.

 

Some of the finest photos in Seduced by Art exploit this difference between the media. An image cheekily entitled ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, depicting various reproductions, and being itself one, is amusing. A photo of people looking at a painting in such a way that they merge with the painting’s scene, is an ingenious trompe l’oiel. 

 

National Gallery I, London 1989, by Thomas Struth. From Tate.

 

Another image arrestingly highlights the texture of Goya’s portrait of Wellington, while perhaps the finest are von Zwehl's two tiny portraits of a woman, where the lighting is so careful that for once it feels that a photo is ‘painting realistic’ rather than the other way round.

 

It’s a shame that Sugimoto’s photos weren’t displayed at the larger exhibition, as they would have illustrated that photography can indeed convey the same power as painting, in the hands of a serious, fine artist.

Bernstein conducts Stravinsky and Sibelius

ica classics



Excerpt from Sibelius symphony 5, from ica classics.

Though the performances on this dvd, of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Sibelius' Symphony 5, are both very good, that is not the best reason to watch it.

The best reason is the 'extra', 12 minutes of interviews with conductor Leonard Bernstein, discussing the works.

Bernstein was acclaimed for his music theatre, his orchestral works, his conducting and even for his piano playing, but it may be that his greatest achievement was as a musical educator. Perhaps that needs a caveat, as his writings are not the best place to experience this side of his achievement.

Certainly he was incredibly well-suited to television, attractive in both appearance and delivery. But the content seems to match the form. He could provide surprising insights concisely, without pretension, and in particular with such conviction that it is easy to believe, watching him, that these works must be experienced without delay.

2013 marks the centenary of the Rite of Spring. It is usually seen as the first mainstream piece of modernist music, but for these 1966 concerts Bernstein pairs it with the more conventionally romantic Sibelius under the label 'symphonic twilight'.

Challenged about this in the interview, Bernstein demonstrates that the work employs the same foundations as the music of the symphonic tradition from Haydn to Mahler, as opposed, he feels, to the new foundations proposed by Schoenberg and other atonalists.

It's a thrilling idea, and totally convincing. Bernstin then provides practical proof through his performance with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO). The LSO has a great pedigree in this piece, as I recall Colin Davis conducting it at the Barbican a few years ago, and found it having a physical effect on me, as if my heart might stop.

I suspect Bernstein's performance would have been equally visceral for the live audience, but this wasn't captured by BBC television, understandably. As usually happens with recorded performances of the Rite, its excitement is muted, though this performance banishes any thoughts that this isn't great music, should that still be required.

The pairing with Sibelius' fifth symphony is inspired, and confirms the romantic nature of the Rite. The performance was excellent, but the central transition in the first movement, or between the first and second continuous movements, if you prefer, didn't seem to work. On rehearing I might change my mind. 

Bernstein is much less articulate when interviewed about Sibelius than about the Rite, but he is surely correct when describing the symphonies as being at the end of the symphonic tradition rather than inspiring a whole new tradition.

This doesn't seem to do Sibelius enough justice. When I hear his works, they are so powerful that I am convinced that they are the greatest, most searching, most profound, of orchestral works. I marvel at how the symphonic structure, explored and developed by Beethoven, seems so well designed for making these arguments in sound.

I'd have liked to hear Bernstein discuss this mystery, and how Sibelius' unshowy concision seems so much more impressive, on reflection, than Bernstein's beloved Mahler. And also why, after all, Mahler remains popular and it's more likely that we would choose to listen to his music than to Sibelius.

To complain that an interviewer didn't ask my most pressing question is churlish. This disc gave pleasure from start to finish.

In fact, this dvd is something of a tribute to Humphrey Burton, who as a young executive producer arranged these performances, and conducted the interviews. Many years later he wrote a biography of Bernstein, and he provides historically interesting liner notes to this release.

2 piano recitals

Jeremy Denk. Brahms: Six piano pieces; Liszt: Petrarch sonnet; Liszt: Dante sonata; Wagner/Liszt: Liebestod; Schumann: Davidbündlertänze.

Wigmore Hall, 7 November 2012

 

Naufal Mukumi. Beethoven: Sonata op81 “Les Adieux”; Chopin: Scherzo #2; Debussy: l’Isle joyeuse; Verdi/Liszt: Rigoletto paraphrase; Balakirev: Islamey.

Chappell of Bond Street, 8 November 2012

Balakirev's Islamey, played by Simon Barere.

Two recitals inadvertently suggest that attempts at poetry in music fail if they don't also hold together as music.
 

These were two contrasting programmes of music from essentially the nineteenth century mainstream piano tradition. Both were enjoyable, but flawed, and I think this has something to do with the intrinsic value of the pieces but perhaps more importantly the art of concert programming.

Denk’s recital stressed the wistful, overtly poetic side of the romantic repertoire, while Mukumi focussed more on the technically demanding aspects. Denk gave lengthy, barnstorming Paganini variations as an encore, perhaps to illustrate that his fingers muscles were not deficient.

Given this difference in approach from the pianists, it is perhaps not surprising that the second concert would be flawed; whereas I expected the first to be a complete success. But this was not the case.

The late Brahms works combine intense feeling with a muted, introspective style. But they were not best showcased at the beginning of a concert.

I generally find Schumann impenetrable rather than charming, and the extramusical crutches he uses don't help me. A suite of dances must first of all work as a musical unit, then it may be possible to understand the use of alter-egos Florestan, Eusebius and David's Band.

A great contrast was offered just a few hours later at the start of the second concert, with Beethoven's sonata emerging as a well-structured piece, indeed argument, for which the poetic movement titles were unecessary, though evocative. Here was a genuine musical equivalent to the strict forms of all the best poetry.

Likewise the Chopin and Debussy pieces seemed more effective in terms of emulating the experiences of reading (or hearing) poetry than anything in Denk's programme, with the exception of Liszt's Dante sonata.

On the other hand, in relegating bravura to an encore, Denk displayed greater self-confidence and confidence in his audience than Mukumi.

Perhaps Liszt could endow his Rigoletto pot-pouri with the peculiar combination of legato and savage drive that characterises Verdi, but in Mukumi's performance I was merely impressed with the pianist's dexterity. Likewise Islamey strikes me as the kind of showpiece that could come to life only under the very greatest pianists, such as Simon Barere. 

I can't judge the quality of playing of either pianist, except to note that Mukumi is apparently still an undergraduate, which struck me as ludicrous. It certainly isn't his fault that some of his pieces were inanimate: where an initial spark of creative genius exisited, he was magnificent.