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Monthly Archives: November 2012

English National Ballet’s The Sleeping Beauty

29 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Ballet review

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English National Ballet, Marius Petipa, Opera House, Petipa, Tamara Rojo, Tchaikovsky, The Sleeping Beauty, Vadim Muntagirov

The Sleeping Beauty

Music by Tchaikovsky

English National Ballet

Opera House, Manchester

28 November 2012

This marvellous production of the classic ballet clocked in at close to three hours of well-nigh perfect dance.

The two leads, Tamara Rojo in the role of Princess Aurora and Vadim Muntagirov as Prince Desire, are spectacular dancers; and one only realised how good – how breathtakingly good – a dancer Muntagirov is during the third and final act.  His solo was wonderful.  They all – all of the troupe – pull their weight, mind.  And they have to, for the intricacy and variety and, yes, let us be in no doubt about it, the sheer technical difficulty of Marius Petipa’s choreography demands it.

There is a clue here, too, as to why the ballet has stood the test of time: for there is so much here, an embarrassment of rich delights, to savour and enjoy.  Be in no doubt, English National Ballet’s The Sleeping Beauty will awaken and revitalise all your senses.

The Sleeping Beauty is at the Opera House until 1 December then tours the UK up until March 2013.  Details of future tour dates can be found here.

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Maxim Rysanov and Ashley Wass

28 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Music review

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Ashley Wass, Bach, Bibik, Bohuslav Martinu, Debussy, Faure, Irina Podushko, Manchester Chamber Concerts Society, Maxim Rysanov, Pavel Kozhevnikov, Ravel, Richard Dubugnon, RNCM, Simon Rowland-Jones

Maxim Rysanov and Ashley Wass

Manchester Chamber Concerts Society

RNCM Concert Hall, 19 November 2012

Maxim Rysanov.  Photo by Pavel Kozhevnikov and Irina Podushko.

Maxim Rysanov. Photo by Pavel Kozhevnikov and Irina Podushko.

Great viola players are rare, Maxim Rysanov is unique.

He plays a broader range of repertoire, from Bach to Bibik one might say, and has done most in recent years to revitalise the viola, that wondrously fabulist instrument.

The concert in fact began with Bach, a work arranged for solo viola by Simon Rowland-Jones, and ended with Richard Dubugnon’s Incantatio.  There were works by Faure, Debussy, Ravel and Bohuslav Martinu along the way.

Ashley Wass’s piano played a part in all but the Bach, and what made the concert flow, really, was the evident rapport between the two players.  You might characterise Wass’s piano style as being a bit like his suit: bright and businesslike, yet with the occasional delicate feature.

They were called back for, I think, two encores.  A very fine concert indeed.

For details of future Manchester Chamber Concerts Society concerts, kindly click here.

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Alps

27 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Film review

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Alps, Yorgos Lanthimos

Alps

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

Greece, 2011

Cornerhouse, 24 November 2012

Alps

Like the director’s Dogtooth, this is a highly original film with plenty to delight and disturb.

Alps is about a group of wannabe actors who offer a service to the newly bereaved: one of their number will stand in for the loved one, to aid family and friends in coping with their loss.  Disastrous consequences follow when their roles carry over into their actual lives.  Weird and weirder situations arise.  Danger reaches tipping point when one young woman just cannot get out of character.

Despite the wacky premise, it is set in contemporary Greek society.  It is dearly and darkly surreal, bewildering, always mesmeric; and there are nice allusions to Bruce Lee and Reservoir Dogs too.

I look forward to seeing Lanthimos’s next film, wherein a bunch of bourgeois people will decide to live their lives according to the extant fragments of Prodicus.  It should be fun.

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divine sound

27 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in osc poem

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divine sound, osc poem

stupid letter

tonal genius

literate idiot

divine sound

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Rear Window

26 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Film review

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Alfred Hitchcock, James Stewart, Protagoras, Rear Window, Thelma Ritter

Rear Window

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

USA, 1954

Cornerhouse, 25 November 2012

Rear Window

Truffaut famously remarked of Hitchcock that if you stripped his films of all dialogue, they would still make perfect sense.

Perhaps Rear Window is the film that illustrates this best of all, what with each apartment presenting James Stewart’s photographer (and we too, of course) with a short silent film of its own, a series of windows into other people’s lives.  He sees a young woman whom he names Miss Torso, a good-time girl surrounded by wolves; a newly married couple, passionate to a fault; a heart-broken pianist working on a new song; an older woman, ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’, who is desperately looking for love; and a salesman who may (or may not) have murdered his wife.  These people become real for us, even though most rarely or never speak.

Stewart plays detective in trying to prove that a murder has taken place, reprises a scene from Vertigo by dangling from a window (and there is an allusion to another Hitchcock film in the fate of the little dog, killed because it ‘knew too much’) and learns that Grace Kelly, his devoted girlfriend (improbable though that seems), has an adventurous streak to match his own.

In truth the film is clever rather than compelling, smart instead of suspenseful, except towards the very end when the action heats up significantly.  Throughout, Hitchcock displays a wicked wit, especially in the way he relates Stewart’s situation to what is happening in the apartments he surveys.  At one point Stewart (in detective mode) asks aloud something like, ‘How would you carve up a human body?’  This just after we’ve seen a shot of Miss Torso reclining on a bed, reading a magazine.

You could well call Rear Window a film about film, Stewart getting saddled early on with the accusation of being a Peeping Tom.  To look or not to look, that’s his quandary.

One incident grates.  When Stewart rings Doyle, his detective friend, and gets the babysitter it is clear from her voice that she’s black.  Yet there’s nary a black face in sight here, which is curious for New York in 1954.  Hitchcock was not a grand artist, and unlike Protagoras he never wrote a treatise on wrestling.

Still, this film is a virtuoso instance of Hitchcock’s consummate skill.  And Thelma Ritter is wonderful.

Rear Window is showing again on Wednesday as part of the Matinee Classics season, further details being here.

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Uri Caine: Beethoven 1 Improvised

23 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Music review

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Beethoven, Ludwig Van, RNCM, Uri Caine, Uri Caine: Beethoven 1 Improvised

Uri Caine: Beethoven 1 Improvised

RNCM Concert Hall, 22 November 2012

Uri Caine.  Photo by Bill Douthart.

Uri Caine. Photo by Bill Douthart.

We saw a master craftsman at work and a fine pianist at play.

Uri Caine’s concert closed day one of Ludwig Van, the RNCM’s Beethoven festival.  The idea is to devote one day every month or so over the coming year to the great composer, playing all his symphonies in the process.

In a talk beforehand, Caine had talked amongst other things about improvisation as practice.  Not just as a way of creating, but as a way also of exploring and understanding a piece of music, taking it apart and putting it back together, seeing how it all works.

He began with pieces by Mozart and Mahler, and then launched into an improvised version of Beethoven’s first symphony.  His playing was exhilarating.

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Sister

22 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Film review

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Gillian Anderson, Kacey Mottet Klein, Lea Seydoux, Sister, Ursula Meier

Sister

Directed by Ursula Meier

France, 2012

Cornerhouse, 16 November 2012

Sister

The English title is a misnomer, but it would give away too much to explain exactly why.

It is a film about Simon, a boy who is a thief.  He steals because he lacks something central to his life, naturally enough.  What he takes and cadges acts as a sort of ballast, its bulk displacing emptiness.  But this ballast is subject to erosion and so doesn’t quite do the job.

Kacey Mottet Klein is terrific in the central role; Lea Seydoux as his erstwhile sister and Gillian Anderson are fine too.  One way to describe Anderson’s character would be to say that she acts as a focus for the boy’s affections.  She has what he really wants to possess.  And since she’s distant (though polite), clearly a person of limited sympathies, it is a cinch that things won’t go well with her.

There is a feeling of entrapment apparent throughout and it derives from poverty, yes, but from a deep, confused, emotional entanglement too.

A sad and beautiful film.

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Paco Pena

22 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Dance review, Music review

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Paco Pena

Paco Pena

The Lowry, 21 November 2012

Paco Pena

You got shimmering movement, a kaleidoscopic explosion of limbs, spectacular dance.

The music was all Spanish guitars and African drums.  This kind of Flamenco dance, serpentine and seductive though it is, has also a martial (or maybe a matador) quality.

It is as though the dancers are on a battlefield or are otherwise imperiled.  Glancing from side to side, moving speedily all about, advancing suddenly forward: it is a fierce spectacle and very exciting to watch.  And the bodily rotation serves as well to sculpt the dancer in the landscape – for you see them from all angles – creating a Piero effect.

A fantastic show.

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Amour

21 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Film review

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Amour, James Salter, Last Night, Michael Haneke

Amour

Directed by Michael Haneke

France, 2012

Cornerhouse, 18 November 2012

Amour

A woman suffers a stroke; her husband cares for her in their home.

She gets him to promise that he’ll never place her in hospital.  He keeps his word, even though they become locked together in an unbearable situation.  But bear it they must, terrible and dreadful though it be.

Her decline is slow and agonising, and he is in agony watching her die.  At certain moments she wants to die, but he won’t let her.  It is a confused, bewildering game.  Love.

Haneke’s film is measured and ultimately moving; there are no unseemly flourishes intended simply to shock.  Such as you find, for example, in Funny Games.  This is a profound, bracingly serious, salutary film where every act and emotion has its due weight.

It recalled to my mind ‘Last Night’, James Salter’s great short story on the same theme, which I am now minded to reread.

The finest film of the year by far, unforgettable.

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In the Locked Room & Ghost Patrol

16 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Opera review

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Ghost Patrol, Huw Watkins, In the Locked Room, James McOran-Campbell, Music Theatre Wales, Nicholas Sharratt, Raymond Short, RNCM, Scottish Opera, Stuart MacRae, Thomas Hardy

In the Locked Room & Ghost Patrol

Music Theatre Wales & Scottish Opera

RNCM Theatre, 7 November 2012

NICHOLAS SHARRATT as Sam (left) and JAMES MORAN-CAMPBELL as Alasdair in GHOST PATROL.  Credit: © CLIVE BARDA / ArenaPAL.

NICHOLAS SHARRATT as Sam (left) and JAMES MORAN-CAMPBELL as Alasdair in GHOST PATROL. Credit: © CLIVE BARDA / ArenaPAL.

A double bill of contemporary opera: that is what you get with this lot.

The first offering, In the Locked Room, was based on a story by Thomas Hardy, and it was an intriguing, mysterious affair.  Perhaps it could best be described as a preternatural love story.  Huw Watkins’ music was eerily effective.

To many, Louise Welsh will be a familiar name.  She is a fine novelist, author of The Cutting Room amongst others, and was the librettist for Ghost Patrol, our second opera of the night.  This might have been – and in parts, perhaps, it skirted with being – a love triangle too, but as it turned out it touched mainly on the far-reaching effects of war.  Their night patrol had undergone an awful ordeal, some foul accident that’s oh so slowly revealed, but when Sam and Alasdair, the two ex-comrades who’re apparently fairly well adjusted, meet again in Civvy Street, all the buried memories come rushing to the surface.

There is again plenty of fine music, this time from Stuart MacRae.  A Scots ballad is hidden in the opera, one of those visions in marble, and the score for the fight sequences is exciting and very effective.  He can do a lot of different things and can do them very well, can Mr. MacRae.  Raymond Short choreographed the fight sequences and it struck me that they’re rarely seen at all in opera, and never as well as this.  I wondered why, then the answer struck me.  Opera singers aren’t generally as – how should one put it? – as mobile as Nicholas Sharratt and James McOran-Campbell are here.

All in all, this was an excellent night at the opera.

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