Messiah

Barbican, London

17 December 2013

Countertenor Iestyn Davies in Handel's Eternal Source of Light Devine,. 

Not from the Messiah, but gives some sense of what Davies can do with decent accompaniment. From here.

A tedious performance wasting talented musicians.

This was the most anaemic Messiah I have encountered. That’s not necessarily because the forces were small, though in the Barbican it didn’t help.

It’s more that conductor Bernard Labadie adopted a deadening approach to tempi, and phrasing.

Handel, I feel, could have set the phone book in a pulse-quickening manner. In this work almost every aria, and every chorus, is exciting or memorable. Contemplating the refiner’s fire, or the wrongful sufferings of Christ, or the justice of the last judgement, brings out the best in the composer. Messiah also confirms that music can be dramatic even if there is no clear narrative, or characters.

On the plus side, the excellent diction from the soloists and chorus allowed us to recognise Jennens’ contribution in selecting some of the best verses from the King James’ Version of the Bible.

On the minus, I left wondering how Handel could have orchestrated the work so feebly. Perhaps this is the test of a decent performance. It should make us ignore the orchestration.

Slow tempi needn’t be a problem, but consistently smoothed-over phrasing certainly is. Every opportunity for contrast and vigour was missed, producing a single mush of beautiful, polite tones. The Hallelujah chorus lacked gusto, or even vulgarity, which would have been an acceptable substitute.

I suppose the many fans of countertenor Iestyn Davies would be happy, at least. His voice is beautiful, but that doesn’t in itself create drama, and in the event his arias only intensified the somnolescent effect.

The other singers also had ‘period instrument’ voices, ie no vibrato, which is a pity but it is not possible to blame them for the overall dreariness of the evening. Amazingly, the greatest aria in the work, I Know That My Redeemer Liveth, worthy of Bach, was a failure,  and surely that does reflect badly on soprano Lydia Teuscher.

Unwisely, this was a full-length performance, lasting around 3 hours (with short interval). An endurance test.

Roméo et Juliette

Barbican, London

6 November 2013

Olga Borodina singing the strophes from the first part of Berlioz' symphony. 

Conducted by Colin Davis rather than Valery Gergiev (as at the Barbican). From here.

An underrated – perhaps because unclassifiable – pinnacle of music drama receives another moving and profound interpretation.

Berlioz refused to make things easier for himself. Is this work meant to be judged as a representation of Shakespeare’s tragedy or is it an independent piece with aspects inspired by that drama? I think that is the correct way to think of the problem, for we can easily agree that it is a type of symphony and not a type of opera: it’s place is the concert hall, not the theatre.

David Cairns has been writing about Berlioz, and this work, almost everywhere for what must be decades now, and he has another go in the programme notes to this concert. But I think he still doesn’t address the right problem. He seems to want to justify the piece as a ‘pure’ symphony, but then what is going on in the penultimate section, Romeo alone at the tomb, if even Cairns needs to describe it in terms of Garrick’s mutilated Shakespeare? Can it stand alone within the context of the work, and nowhere else?

I’m probably making too much of this. Perhaps this is a hybrid, best understood sometimes in terms musical and sometimes in terms extra-musical. Thankfully it’s a dramatic masterpiece, regardless of classification. But I wonder if the tradition of playing the orchestral parts on their own doesn’t hint at a serious musical weakness when considering it as a ‘symphony’. We wouldn’t approve of playing one or several parts of Beethoven’s own Choral Symphony on their own. Then again, Wagner is often played out of context. Lapses in taste happen.

This is the second performance of this work I have heard recently: a blessing for which I am grateful. Valery Gergiev’s view of it corresponds to his view of everything – it is played with great ferocity and dynamic contrast. The start of the opening movement was so fast even the London Symphony Orchestra seemed to be gabbling.

Not everything was so hard-driven. The neoclassical choral simplicity of the fifth movement, starting the third part, came off well, though I didn’t feel the next two movements, the hardest to bring off, produced the right sense of troubled reconciliation emerging from conflict. Gergiev’s approach made the conflict extremely thrilling, but the lengthy aria-and-chorus that concludes the symphony needs to feel much less perfunctory.

At the centre of this titanic depiction of love and death, conflict and peace, is the wonderful Love Scene. It worked its effect, as it almost always does, but I regretted that the conductor maintained tension without providing suitable release.

The orchestra, double chorus and soloists were excellent, especially Olga Borodina’s dramatic performance of the strophes in the first part, quite unusually dramatic, but very appropriate.

Faceless + Emily Richardson shorts

Barbican cinema

1 October 2013

Trailer for Faceless, from here.

Poetry and nightmare derived from images of everyday London, with mixed success.

One of the few events in the Barbican’s Urban Wandering cinema season to not be sold-out, this was also one of just two events dominated by women.

The film-makers were keen to stress afterwards that they didn’t feel their work was gendered, and indeed I wouldn’t have known the gender of the director by watching these.

There wasn’t much else to link the two artists either, except that both used London. 

Emily Richardson’s three short films (Nocturne, Block, Memo mori) were that form of documentary we’re familiar with through the psychogeography that has dominated the season. 

Nocturne showed empty London streets at night; Block displayed images from a tower block in Bermondsey. The result was absorbing and reminded me of the Romantic dictum that our imagination can make beauty from anything. 

The other side of that belief, that our imagination plays a negative role in our life, through fear, was hinted at in the other films.

Memo mori, with a voiceover from Iain Sinclair, focussed on a few scenes around the building of London’s recent Olympic Park (doesn’t that seem ages ago now?) Gleaming computer-generated imagination is pitted against an imaginative approach to the piecemeal of old East London.

Sinclair’s narration repeats his familiar complaints against the rise of the Olympics, but at least with Richardson’s images, we can more easily sympathise. The destruction of a series of makeshift allotment sheds does indeed seem a high price, after they have been apotheosised in this way.

Transfiguring the commonplace is an important aesthetic achievement, and is not easy, despite its popularity at the moment, and I was grateful to see it done so well here.

By contrast, Faceless by Manu Luksch struck me as a failure. An ingenious idea, to compile a fairly long narrative film using footage from the CCTV cameras that dominate London, was crippled because Luksch could only obtain a very limited amount of this footage, as she revealed afterwards.

The result is that what we saw became annoyingly repetitive, as if limited to just a few locations (which I assume it was). The quality of surveillance footage is also extremely poor, making the whole experience a struggle.

Luksch and her collaborators cobbled together a zany futuristic quest fantasy from the footage, making a virtue of the need to obscure everyone’s faces except Luksch herself, who is sadly no actor. Something interesting is hidden here, about our understanding of time and space.

Nightmare quests are a staple of art, but it’s still a great pity the project couldn’t use more locations and present greater variety.

Rigoletto

Barbican

15 September 2013

A new star tenor? An example of his Duke of Mantua, if you are into that. From here.

An inspired concert performance of this dark-tinted drama.

Rigoletto not only announced Verdi's maturity as a dramatic artist, it is also better than most of his subsequent works. Perhaps Victor Hugo's source drama contributes but it is an uncomfortable, wholly Verdian idea to make the audience fall in love with the Duke, quite as much as Gilda does.

The second act is nearly perfect, though so distressing I can only assume applauding interrupting audiences aren't paying sufficient attention. The Duke sympathises with the abducted Gilda, swears vengeance, proclaims a new leaf, and is entirely convinced of it himself, according to the music. When he learns the girl was abducted for his benefit, he quickly forgets about her distress and focuses on his upcoming pleasure. When we finally see Gilda the tense duet with her father makes it clear she has been raped. Rigoletto gets bitter pleasure from the thought of vengeance, but the suddenly banal music shows it is a weak compensation.

Admittedly Gilda is a pathetic figure, of a type the composer avoided using again until his Desdemona, who is much more spirited. What might properly be her tragedy is transferred instead to her father, a more complex and unlikeable figure, even compared to the Duke.

It may be a flaw that we are manipulated into caring more for the two most unpleasant characters – the Duke and his jester – than for the person who sacrifices herself at the end. The drama’s verdict is damning. Both the fortunate sybarite and the wretched waspish Rigoletto survive, indeed thrive in some form, while the innocent lover sacrifices herself without meaning.

Given the bleak situation throughout the work, in direct contrast to at least the singing of the Duke and Gilda, this is much more of a conductor’s opera than is typically supposed. Recordings by Giulini and Sinopoli should have established that, and the recent Covent Garden performances with Eliot Gardiner confirm it.

I didn’t find Gianandrea Noseda quite as convincing as Eliot Gardiner, but my memory may be faulty, for it was still a very impressive performance with the LSO, even if they were reduced to ‘opera pit’ size. Only a few times did the prominence of the on-stage orchestra threaten to overwhelm the singing, but Noseda maintained the necessary momentum and when needed obtained suitably vigorous climaxes.

The cast were excellent, with some genuinely impressive acting, despite this being a concert performance. A highlight was when Rigoletto turns his back on his newly disgraced daughter: a response both understandable and horrific.

Dmitri Platanias was open-throated in the title role, and this is surely the only way to do it, much as it might wreak havoc with the voice. Desirée Rancatore was a limpid, girlish Gilda, though hers is a lyric not dramatic soprano voice. Saimir Pirgu’s Duke was appealing in both voice and appearance. Smaller roles were taken well.

The bride and batchelors

Barbican Art Gallery

14 February – 9 June 2013

Duchamp's Large Glass. Philadelphia Museum of Art. From here.

Duchamp's ambiguous legacy, both in his own terms and in terms of the art he influenced, doesn't distract from his originality and power.

This is a confusing exhibition. Duchamp’s works – among which may be the 25 years he pretended to be only a chess player – are complicated enough.

But this show also explores his influence on a later generation of artists in the US: the visual artists Rauschenberg and Johns, the composer Cage and the choreographer Cunningham.

Finally, an additional level of complexity is introduced by the curator, Philippe Parreno, who arranges ‘ghost piano’ versions of Cage’s work, ‘ghost dancer’ sounds of Cunningham’s and recordings of these artists speaking about their lives, inspirations, etc.

The exhibition is arranged thematically, which isn’t necessarily helpful, though the catalogue provides the works chronologically. The catalogue is also fairly dense, an anthology of writings as well as essays on these artists.

Amidst all of this information overload, it’s still possible to be impressed by the French master.

Quite properly, the exhibition ignores the obvious irony that an artist who explicitly sought to demystify his profession should have become talismanic to later artists.

Several of Duchamp’s greatest works are here, at least in replica, and they convey a good sense of his power and development, in much the same way as would be true of any great artist.

He appears to have pioneered all aspects of conceptual art, from chance and found objects to installations and performance.

I think the finest of the works from the later artists is Not wanting to say anything about Marcel, by Cage. The title sums up my feelings on Duchamp, while of course also attempting to use some of his ideas (in this case randomness, wordplay and painted glass) to create something interesting.

As the exhibition proves, whatever the master did, no matter how hard he tried to create anti-art, his ideas became the reference point for further variations, many of them interesting artworks.

A replica of his masterpiece, the Large Glass, justifiably dominates the exhibition, though his infamous sculptures were more influential (and we see them too).

It has surprising ‘wall power’, especially as it is free standing yet cannot be appreciated except from the front, as with more traditional paintings. Presumably it is an abstract – and sexualised – version of the Assumption, and a version that implies the physical mechanisms of the body while maintaining something of the spiritual mystery and yearning of the traditional concept.

It’s magnificent, but still within the boundaries of traditional ideas of art, boundaries that Duchamp was quixotically eager to destroy.

His US followers may also have wanted this, but were no more successful. Except, I suppose, in the sense that bad art, uninteresting art, is truly anti-artistic.

Much of this stuff is bad. John’s bronze casting of his paintpot has no appeal, especially subversive appeal, whereas Duchamp’s playful revising of an enamel tin is at least enjoyable, if frivolous.

Cage’s music, and Cunningham’s choreography, if it works, does so in spite of knowing the random methods employed. They may as well be created in the traditional manner.

Whereas Duchamp’s wonky versions of the standardised metre length raise the question of why a straight line should be our standard metric, rather than any other. Probably for aesthetic reasons, rather than mathematical ones; so here the artwork challenges this aesthetic notion.

I could continue: the artists, the catalogue, the mise en scene deserve it. But with limited space, I’ll finish by observing that MD was something of a dead-end, such that those he influenced were forced to be creative in a different way if they were to succeed. This is probably as close to anti-art as it is possible to get.

Rhinoceros

Barbican, 15 February 2013

 

Zero Mostel's famed transformation into a rhinoceros.

Vastly - truly vastly - inferior to the distrurbing transformation in this production.

 

The surely definitive production of this disturbing theatrical fable.

That the people turn into rhinos in this drama is a happy accident, according to Ionesco’s daughter, who took part in an informative after-show discussion at the Barbican.  

Although he wanted rhinos because they are alien, thick-skinned, stubborn, violent, and make incomprehensible trumpeting sounds, he had also wanted a gregarious animal. It’s clear also from his notes attached to the programme, that Ionesco was originally aiming at a satire on fascism, or fanaticism more generally. 

His theatre parable is immensely more powerful for - accidentally - not having such a clear message. Nor, watching it, could I imagine he could ever have intended such a message, so convincing are the transformations into rhinos. No other animal could work in this drama, I felt. Certainly not one with a leader, or any kind of social mentality.

The hero, Bérenger, who alone fails to change into a rhino, is already alienated at the very start of the action. Purposelessly passionate, and typically yielding to others when he realises he has gone too far, he is also consciously detached from the world of work, the world of romance, indeed everything around him.

Rhinoceros is usually described as an absurdist drama, a term I’m happy to discover Ionesco found as confusing as I do. There are some wonderful absurd moments, none related to the transformations. For example, the prattle of the logician painfully satirises the reason that is supposed to distinguish us from rhinos.

Importantly, the transformations do not seem absurd: they seem inevitable and quite realistic. In this way, the drama retains its integrity, and avoids a straightforward interpretation.

Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota’s production is so good I can’t imagine a better one. Serge Maggiani is a convincingly pathetic Bérenger, while the moralistic Jean’s slow transformation, signposted from the start, involves no mugging on the part of Hugues Quester. It is deeply disturbing, as it should be.

The rest of the cast are also excellent, and the depiction of the gossip-ridden, mechanical wine merchant’s office where Bérenger works, is now burnt into my visual memory.

 

The final image, of the last man stepping into the void, is wonderfully correct. If there can be a better production of this drama, I will eat my horn.

Koyaanisqatsi

Barbican, 14 December 2012

An excerpt from the film, depicting urban industrial life.

A peculiar birthday celebration for a great composer, showing a film that beautifies even industrialisation.

This review falls naturally into two parts, first on the form of this event and then on its content.

This was a concert performance of Philip Glass' music for the film Koyaanisqatsi. The film was shown on a screen behind a fairly large orchestra and choir.

The effect, then, was quite different from watching the film in a cinema. The screen was further and smaller, the sound more immediate. Whereas the stream of images comprising the visual aspect of the film would take precedence in a cinema, here it was the music that had the greater sensory impact.

We're familiar with this idea in relation to rescoring of silent films from 80 or so years ago, but this was the first time I'd experienced a film with its original soundtrack presented in this way.

The experiment was unwise. Scoring that may have been justified for the film in cinemas seemed extravagant for a concert hall. What were all those string players doing? And the brass? For most of the time they seemed silent, needed only for the crescendos of the insistent 'tracks'.

The concert was staged as part of the Barbican's birthday celebrations for the composer's seventieth, but I felt it didn't display his music at its best. I hadn't heard it previously; perhaps in its original cinema context it comes across as less second-rate Glass.

The images might also have been more impressive if they dominated my field of vision, as they would likely do in a cinema. Especially the first part, astonishing footage of various natural wonders and landscapes.

I suspect director Godfrey Reggio intended to have a very different impact than the one I experienced. Apparently the title translates from the Hopi as 'a life out of balance'. The first part of the film depicts 'unspoiled' majestic nature and the second part shows us our urban experience, or parts of it, normally sped up.

Presumably I was supposed to feel our lives are out of balance, something I would normally be receptive to. Instead, the images of urban life formed as beautiful a pattern as the previous images of rural solitude, and I experienced man's supposedly despoiling effect on the environment as something wholly natural and even beautiful.

It is strange to witness the grinding monotony of industrial life and feel nothing, except perhaps that it is possible to find transcendent beauty even there. A disturbing consequence is the viewer's collusion in dehumanising workers, but if the images are beatiful and the music is beautiful, I don't see how the effect could be otherwise.

Art lies, but I doubt this was supposed to be the response I left with.

I want to end the review on a positive note. The concert reminded me that Glass is a major composer, prolifically creating music that is popular, individual and influential. His willingness to collaborate with others is commendable, personified here in his willingness to become just another player in the orchestra, conducted by Michael Riesman.

The audience gave him a standing ovation, and this seemed fully deserved, in his roles as both composer and interpreter of his music.

Missa Solemnis

Barbican, 17 October 2012

 The beginning of the 1991performance conducted by James Levine.

Beethoven’s music is so dramatic, seems so communicative, that I’m often frustrated he didn’t ‘pin down’ his feelings with words. Given his unhappy experience of opera, we are left with just this intense setting of the mass. 

 

It is not for every day, and as conductor John Eliot Gardiner pointed out before this performance, it is inconceivable it would be used in a church for an actual mass.

 

It is extremely demanding, and easier to love in the abstract than in performance, where the composer's grappling with the core concepts of Christianity becomes the listener's struggle to appreciate this lumpy, hysterical, urgent, sometimes sublime work.

 

Unlike any of his other pieces, Beethoven engages completely with the setting of words, and the phrases of the mass dictate the musical accompaniment, or atmosphere. But as the music also thrusts forward with characteristic dynamism, the listener (at least this listener) can feel buffetted and exhausted by the regular switches in mood.

 

The long credo section is the extreme example of this – every word seems to warrant its own mood, and the transitions between these moods are a fiendish challenge for conductor and audience. The melting loveliness of the phrase ‘et incarnatus est’ contrasts so strongly with the music before it that I was jolted into tears. That is surely exactly what the composer intended, and he must have intended many more such violent reactions, all very difficult to achieve in performance.

 

With the Monteverdi Choir, we could be sure that the purely choral side would at least sometimes be magnificent, as in the ‘et incarnates est’. But the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique was a more mixed blessing – brass seemed to be in another room, and startlingly ugly; when the organ started playing I thought someone’s mobile phone had started beeping. On the other hand, I feel Beethoven benefits from some cragginess, some ugliness, some oddness.

 

Unfortunately John Eliot Gardiner’s overall conception is a small one, meaning both in terms of the sound and in relationship between the various sections of the mass. Each section seemed self-contained, which only increases the exhaustion of the listener. I was reminded of the music of Berlioz, and its sensation of bustle without forward movement.

 

In a work like this, a lot of things have to go right, and some of these seem impractically demanding. For example, the Sanctus, with its transition from low growling tones to the high flights of the violin solo. The violin tune is so beautiful it might have featured in a concerto. We need a Jascha Heifetz playing the tune, but are unlikely to get it. 

 

It is more likely we can get great solo singers, and unfortunately we need them, as we can hear from those recordings blessed with them. For example, the tenor entry in the Kyrie demands at least a Domingo, and it is cruel to complain that the singers in this performance did not match that. They sounded well-fitted in ensemble, and were committed.

 

I left feeling delighted, but also exhausted, and neither of these responses felt appropriate. Perhaps Beethoven's reach exceeded the grasp of even committed interpreters.

Mademoiselle Julie

Barbican theatre, 24 September 2012

 

Mlle Julie. From the Barbican website.

A surreal production of Strindberg's drama highlights the hysteria while downplaying its underlying tragedy.

Two glamorous women, one older and supposedly more powerful, struggle for the heart of a ruggedly handsome, cynically poetic menial. This struggle takes the form of lengthy dialogues in cool white interiors, focussing on the nature of love, class and death. Jump cuts disorient the viewer, as does the tendency of characters to switch from screaming hysteria to calm philosophising. A white rabbit appears occasionally, along with other surreal touches. And very little happens.

 

If I add that Juliette Binoche is the lead character, surely I’m not being fanciful to think this is Strindberg reinterpreted as a French period Buñuel film.

 

The rabbit. Adding a touch of surrealism from Wonderland to Donnie Darko.
And now retrofitted to Strindberg.

When this drama was premiered over a century ago, it was in the vanguard of the Naturalist Movement, but Strindberg went on to create intensely dreamlike works, and Fisbach’s production at the Barbican suggests that the best way to experience Miss Julie is in the light of these future developments.

 

The staging emphasises the sense of paralysis that the three characters suffer from, especially Julie. It’s as if they were in a dream, with action taking place around them, while they feel detached and unable to influence events.

 

Whether the author wanted this effect or not, I think the production does make sense of the work, but by doing so restricts its ambitions. If the social situation were filled in, it is possible for the drama to seem as if it is making pertinent comments about the role of class, or gender, in restricting opportunities, either for Jean or for Julie respectively.

 

But I feel Fisbach is right to resist the temptation to fill out the drama – those social aspects, once shocking, are now dated. Let us hope nobody still needs to be told that women and servants are people too.

 

Unfortunately, once stripped of this irrelevant ‘relevance’, Miss Julie can seem fairly thin stuff. For people who enjoy a dreamlike atmosphere, this production is enjoyable; for people wanting a little more, I found it hard to care enough about these people to sympathise with their paralysis.

 

A stronger realisation of the text could make more of the way our fears and anxieties trap us, even to fatal results.

 

It is an odd characteristic of our time that many of us seem happy to witness surrealism and ask for nothing more, so perhaps we shouldn’t expect productions of the father surrealist, Strindberg, to focus on anything else.

 

The cast were excellent, though I find it hard to assess acting in a dream.