Napoléon

Royal Festival Hall

30 November 2013

For once, a non-shit trailer, from here.

The greatest historical drama?

More accurately, the film should be called Young Napoléon, because although it lasts five and a half hours, it only reached his invasion of Italy, as commander of the French armies, not yet even First Citizen. Mind-bogglingly, writer-director Abel Gance intended this as the first of six films covering the central character’s life.

The ambition and scale of all this is staggering. The nearest comparison is with Peter Jackson’s six films adapted from Tolkein. And like Jackson, Gance is passionately in love with the visceral possibilities of a mobile camera and with spectacular set-pieces.

This kind of thrillingly edited experience is what Hollywood does best, in which case Gance should be its patron saint.

The film has been criticised as being proto-fascist, and it clearly is, but it is no moreso than many other artworks, especially those in the Romantic tradition. The ‘strong leader’ model of government has proponents even today among even within the ‘enlightened’ development community. And if Napoléon’s life cannot be presented as Romantic, whose can?

Gance and his team aren’t crude propagandists. The battle sequences are brutal, surely influenced by the 1914-18 European war. His hero takes on the mantle of the French Revolution but significantly doesn’t promise not to betray it. From the first sequences of a snowfight, Napoléon is presented as a Lord of Misrule, who not only thrives in apparent chaos but delights in it.

Combined with a well-constructed misanthropy, these characteristics make him a hero for his cruel, tumultuous times. And the film conveys these times with a gusto that works more effectively than naturalism.

Truffaut excitedly claimed that every shot contributed to furthering the story, the experience, that nothing was wasted. That is an impossible claim, but I did feel that at least every scene made a contribution, and was conscious throughout of momentum. The characters are so well known, their fate so well known, that the film makes no pretence of surprise; yet the tension is sustained throughout.

The only comparison I can make is with Shakespeare's Henry V, where the audience knows the outcome, shares the author's misgivings, yet still gets carried away by the glory and excitement of war and of 'history' unfolding.

The cast is phenomenal; it's as if they stepped from the late eighteenth century. There is no weak link.

The other, very prominent, ingredient in the success of this experience is Carl Davis' live score, a thundering postmodern mashup of composers from the period, most especially Beethoven. It's more brilliant than that suggests, however, for Davis gives the hero a recurring Brucknerian theme that seamlessly blends with the souped-up Beethoven.

The score, then, is also a masterpiece, and it was a privilege to hear Davis himself conduct a faultless Philharmonia. I wasn't sure he synched it fully with the images, but climaxes are hard to time. Should they come at the very end of a scene, or run over a little? I assume Davis achieved what he intended by opting for the latter.

I think every other critic is right. This was an unmissably cinematic experience.

Reich concert

Royal Festival Hall, London

10 November 2013

A full performance of the Music for 18 Musicians. From here.

The appealing, popular yet mysterious offspring of dada. How does this work?

This was the second concert of two devoted to the masters of 1970s minimalism. For my observations on minimalism generally, read the first review.

Critics tend to prefer high-minded Steve Reich to the more commercial and popular Philip Glass, but if we’re comparing their central works during the 1970s ‘pure’ phase of minimalism, I’m not sure the difference is so great.

Music for 18 Musicians is no more audience-demanding as Glass’ Music in Twelve Parts, and the effect is similar. The visual aspect, with musicians wandering around to various instruments, is apparently intentional, and it helpfully provides interest during this intense work. But as with Glass’ music, all other aspects of the performance – melody, harmony, tone colour, volume, tempo – varies only gradually.

You could argue that the 18 musicians are more actively involved in this conductorless work than in Glass’, but the similarities with the more decentralised musicmaking of jazz don’t seem so very great. Each musician is effectively a repetitive cog in the machine.

Reich’s piece is much colder, more percussive than Glass’, more open about its Gamelan inspirations. It is also, like Music in Twelve Parts, somehow immune to criticism, at least to mine. I simply haven't heard them often enough to notice significant alterations, or even to have significant views on a performance.

All I can note is that I can't pay the same attention to this music as I can with say, a similarly long-spanned Bruckner symphony. 

Some short experimental pieces set the scene. Though slight, all were interesting, and made the links between minimalism and dada explicit.  That even ‘pure’ minimalism is popular, as heard in these two concerts, should not mislead us over its revolutionary approach to music.

Glass: Music in Twelve Parts

Royal Festival Hall, London

9 November 2013

The first of the twelve parts, lasting 10 minutes. You'll know if you're ready for the remaining 3 hours. 

From here.

How is such a long, repetitious piece of non-music so successful and deservedly popular?

I’m tempted to pass judgement on minimalism as a whole when I get to hear central works by two enormously influential still-living composers over one weekend, as part of a retrospective celebration on twentieth-century music.

Both composers (certainly Glass) claim they no longer compose in a minimalist idiom, which I take to mean that the 1970s form was the most concentrated, the purest, form.

Perhaps we should better think of a musical revolution, akin to that of atonalism 60 years earlier, or the neoclassical counter-revolution. Glass is quoted in the programme notes saying his music is not normal, not what people expect, and as a result they claim it is similar to hypnosis, religious ceremonies or other experiences that are not normal.

He has a point, but so does his audience. It is difficult to describe this music. It takes monotony to an extreme, but is not unpleasant, which is remarkable. Small variations maintain our interest, but the original theme is so brief, and the work is so extended, that the sounds become a kind of aural wallpaper, and it is impossible for me to invest all of my concentration, or even significant portions of it, to listening.

Here, Glass massively increases the monotony by allowing only small variations along any of the axes usually ascribed to music: of melody, of harmony, of tone colour, of volume, of tempo. The impression is that everything occurs in a brilliant ‘light’ that endures almost forever, though each discrete part is around 15 or 20 minutes long.

We ought to be astonished this works at all, much less that it is popular. It connects with traditional Western ideas of music in only the most marginal manner, and from what I have heard, it connects no better with any other kind of music (in this, it differs from the music of Steve Reich).

If there is a connection at all, it is with one of Glass’ teacher, Nadia Boulanger, and through her the neoclassical tradition of Stravinsky. With so little variation possible, Glass needs to create a beautiful, transparent starting point, meaning that his tone colours and orchestration need to be absorbing. And they are.

This is an extremely demanding work, but the comparisons made during the concert, or in the programme, are entirely misleading. This is not anything like reading (or attending a performance of) the Mahabharata, the Ring Cycle, or even a Mahler symphony. Those are dramatic works, with a narrative. ‘Pure’ Glass was understandably narrative-phobic, and definitively anti-dramatic in this work.

Any performance by the composer’s own ensemble is going to be unimpeachable, especially as they have performed it many times before. The key aspect of a performance is how well the synthesisers blend with the other instruments: after decades of it, this group are experts.

Woyzeck

Canada Water Cultural Space, London

31 October 2013

The poster, from Scene Productions.

A towering dramatic masterpiece, both in text form and in this realisation.

Sometimes a small-scale, bootstrap production can be revelatory, can remind us of an aspect of theatre hardly possible with larger budgets and larger audiences. This was one of those productions. Everyone should see it.

Büchner was born 200 years ago, the same year as Wagner and Verdi, two of the pinnacles of High Romantic drama. Part of my respect for his achievement is therefore historical: how could a drama as expressionist, as proto-Brechtian as Woyzeck be written at this time, and indeed well before either of his great contemporaries reached maturity?

This is misleading: the work survives only in fragments, and is significantly incomplete. So we don’t know how the author might have wanted to present it as a finished product. We might be disappointed if we found a finished version somewhere.

All this historical information is secondary. More importantly, the drama we have now creates a powerful impact, and if the author can’t completely escape his time, so that we sympathise more with the two central characters than we are allowed to do in say Brecht, for me this is a great strength.

An important part of this impact is the ambiguity around the cause of the murder. Woyzeck has certainly been oppressed by those grotesque pillars of society, the captain and the doctor, but he is also shown to be a poetic critic of that society and possessing an acute conscience in spite of his claim to the contrary.

The painful impossibility of resolving Woyzeck’s guilt raises the work to tragedy, as we wonder whether a less callous society could prevent such crimes.

Due to its fragmentary nature, any performance of this work is an adaptation in a more extended sense than is typical with other works in the canon. Here, it is performed by three actors in around an hour without interval. This means some scenes are shortened, others necessarily dropped altogether, and there are seeming additions: inside the showman’s tent we get not only a man-turned horse but a man-turned-ape.

It succeeds, for this is a very physical, mime-influenced production. Perhaps it overstates the grotesque nature of the characters, but I can’t see that as a weakness in such an expressionist piece.

The director has unobjectionably updated the setting to the great European war of 1914-18, and has Andres die going over the top, a terror which plausibly adds to the trauma and isolation felt by Woyzeck. One of the finest scenes in this production is a simple puppet image of death looming over the character in his final descent into murderous judgement on Marie.

My only criticism is that I needed to root around Scene Production's website to work out the cast and creative team. I'll retain their anonymity by simply stating they were all magnificent.

Tell Me Lies

British Film Institute

20 October 2013

Trailer. From here.

Visceral examination of the Vietnam war protests in London, examining questions still very relevant today.

It’s difficult to review this film, because watching it was something of a theatrical event – it has long been unavailable, has been restored with the involvement of its director, Peter Brook, and the director and some of the surviving cast were present for this screening as part of the London Film Festival. At the end, Brook answered audience questions, an event in itself.

So it is hard, on reflection, to distinguish between my feelings about the film and my feelings overall about the experience. Brook was already a controversial, thrilling theatre director when in 1968 at the Royal Shakespeare Company he directed US (or ‘us’, it is an intentional pun), a drama, or perhaps a ‘theatrical happening’ about the Vietnam war. That subsequently became this equally innovative film, a semi-documentary as one character puts it.

That was 45 years ago, and Brook has gone on to increase his theatre guru status through his decades in Paris, pioneering minimalist world theatre and suchlike. So part of the screening experience was religious, an audience devoted to a man and his ideas rather than his actual output.

I’ll try to focus on his output here. The film’s subtitle tells us it is ‘about London’, and this is significant because although it addresses the Vietnam War, it does so through the perspectives of various Londoners, except for a ballad celebrating a US draft objector.

There are several songs in this piece, with Brechtian lyrics by Adrian Mitchell, and the overall style owes something to Brecht, though more, I think, to Brook’s own talent with actors. A small group of actors are present throughout, visiting different events in London (an anti-war poetry reading, marches, a Buddhist teacher, etc).

When they speak, we aren’t sure if they are inhabiting a role or telling us their direct feelings, and this ambiguity is both intentional and enormously powerful. When ‘real’ people, such as Kingsley Amis or Stokely Carmichael are speaking here, their certainty seems affected, and they are trying to win an argument, present forcefully their point of view. When the actors express their doubts and anxieties, they seem more authentic, which isn’t paradoxical, though it seems so.

This matters because the narrative of the film is that of trying to navigate in a world where almost unimaginable horrors are taking place, but these are taking place far away, and any individual’s ability to influence these events seems very small.

At times, the film goes too far in creating a sense of utter confusion. It contrasts our desire for strong heroic action with more practicable but ineffectual efforts. But as the Buddhist teacher says, when asked about monks burning themselves alive, there are more effective ways of helping people than such extreme actions. The film doesn’t really accept this, though in fairness it doesn’t suggest that the accumulation of smaller actions had no effect: and subsequent history is inspiring about this.

This is a work that tries to make us question ourselves, and it seems to me very effective. Yet it also has almost never been seen, so in the end I suppose this makes it a failure. The good news is it hasn’t dated much, so perhaps it will enjoy a potent afterlife when no longer linked to the still-developing myth of its creator.

Roméo et Juliette

Royal Festival Hall

26 September 2013

The great love scene under Salonen, this time with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms in 2007. 

From here.

Beautiful playing from the Philharmonia misses some of the work's passion in favour of establishing symphonic credentials.

Although you can see why Berlioz called this masterpiece – one of music's pinnacles – a dramatic symphony, it’s a misleading and indeed oxymoronic title: a symphony is already a form of drama in music.

It is because he took things rather further, and linked his work closely to Shakespeare’s drama, adding arias and choruses, but although I feel this is an important attempt to ‘realise’ Shakespeare’s tragedy in music, that isn’t the central achievement here. This is firstly a symphony, albeit a strange one.

For one thing, the work doesn’t end in tragedy, but rather in reconciliation and hope, more related to Beethoven’s ninth than anything in Shakespeare (except The Tempest). Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen was especially good here, expertly pacing the final movement’s transition from conflict to peace, itself reminiscent of the last few minutes of the ninth.

The finale is less important than in other major post-Beethoven symphonies because its composer sidesteps the problem of how to craft a finale that will sounds effective after a profoundly searching slow or tragic movement.

Berlioz’ slow movements are an ecstatic love scene and a Gluck-inspired funereal chorus, both extremely moving though the love music carries off the palm by virtue of being some of the most beautiful music we have (as Toscanini claimed).

The last movement instead contrasts with and follows the jarring, forceful music of the movement titled ‘Romeo at the Capulet’s tomb’. Salonen’s pacing and dynamics were excellent in both of these tricky movements.

Berlioz isn't self-evidently successful in creating a symphony out of these disparate movements, though the sense of being jolted around is much less prevalent here than in his other characteristic works, and there is less of the sense of frantically running without moving.

I have some sympathy with those critics, starting with Wagner, who adore parts but find the whole tiring. This may be because the aria-and-chorus concerted bookends can seem problematic. The first movement is described as a prologue even by champions like David Cairns, and the symphony does seem to be launched twice. The ending, as described above, counterbalances sudden and shuddering violent death rather than overwhelming grief, which comes earlier and is in any case classically restrained.

So it’s to Salonen’s credit that he imparts full gravity to these outer movements and makes them work.

It is a pity his approach was less successful elsewhere. Partly this was due to lack of ferocity or crudeness, common among conductors wanting to place Berlioz within the pantheon of sober symphonists. Partly it was also due to insufficient romance, either in the first movement or more seriously in the love scene.

But this is actually a small quibble. Is a more magical experience possible than when the offstage voices fade away and the love scene properly starts? And wasn’t Toscanini right? This is the kind of experience that transforms the way we feel, at least for some decent time afterwards.