27 Wednesday Nov 2019
Posted in Music review
Elias Quartet, with Emmeline Quartet
RNCM Concert Hall, 26 November 2019
The Elias Quartet played Beethoven’s String Quartet in A to begin with, and what a wonderful performance of that great work it was. In the second half they were joined by the Emmeline Quartet and together they gave us Mendelssohn’s Octet in E flat major, equally good. As an encore we received a few Gaelic songs: haunting, fragile melodies.
A great evening.
Posted in Concert review, Music review
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Halle Orchestra: Wigglesworth’s Mozart Tribute
The Bridgewater Hall, 31 October 2019
For this exhilarating concert of classical and original compositions, Ryan Wigglesworth (pictured above) conducted the Halle, including in a performance of one of his own works, and played piano with Paul Lewis. A busy evening for him, then, and we certainly got our money’s worth.
Altogether, we heard these four gorgeous works:
The ‘Concerto for Two Pianos’ was my favourite performance, Mozart’s ease and elegance not quite disguising an elfin foreboding. That bad thing probably won’t happen, but anyway do take care. Meanwhile make the most of life.
Ryan Wigglesworth’s own ‘Locke’s Theatre’ draws on the work of the seventeenth-century English composer Matthew Locke, who incidentally was one of Purcell’s teachers. I didn’t know this while listening to it, having assumed that the title referred to John Locke, where his theatre might be the theatre of the mind. There was a frenetic, stream of consciousness feel to it. You could imagine Ideas (some atomic, some more multilayered) getting up on stage to strut their stuff, full-throatily delivering their lines and then exiting, no doubt being pursued by a bear. To be followed by a cry of ‘Next!’
Of the French works, I preferred Ravel to Debussy this time, though actually there were luxuriant moments in both. They were designed primarily to give pleasure, you felt, and in this they succeeded.
Details of future Halle concerts can be found here.
Posted in Film review, Music review
Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Blackmail’ (1929)
RNCM Theatre, 3 November 2018
It was an extremely well crafted film, especially considering its vintage (released in 1929, so almost a century old), but on reflection that is hardly surprising when you cast a glance at who the director was: the great Alfred Hitchcock. The film was shown at the RNCM with live organ accompaniment, dazzling in its own right, by Darius Battiwalla.
So a silent film and set in London – the archetypal big city – and you are struck first and foremost by certain scenes’ similarities to the great masterpieces of Hitchcock’s heyday. When the police officers burst into Tracey’s tenement flat and we see him reading a newspaper on the bed it is like the boarding room occupied by Joseph Cotton’s killer at the start of Shadow of a Doubt. And when Tracey escapes through the window and over the rooftops and we see police officers following it is like the prologue to Vertigo.One of those police officers could be James Stewart’s Scottie. And the film evokes The 39 Steps in myriad ways.
Anny Ondra, a very beautiful Czech actress with expressive eyes, plays the damsel in distress. In one scene we see her walking down the Strand, a desolate Trafalgar square in the distance. There is a fleeting glimpse of Piccadilly Circus in another scene. Elsewhere we are at a Lyon’s Coffee House, a bustling form of life. People dining after a day at work. And then we are at a police station, with its tenebrous interiors and murky corridors. Finally, there is the British Museum, with the villain Tracey scarpering over the tombs of Egyptian mummies and statues Assyrian nobles. A frantic pursuit that has echoes of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
It is wonderful how Hitchcock switches from verisimilitude – we are in a real city with real people – to showing us the anxious point of view of various different characters, saying in effect: this is the world that this person lives in. To be precise: not all of the characters are anxious. Some aware of their peril, others are oblivious to what is happening around them (as in life). There is a great, extended shot when Alice and the guy she has met walk up the staircase of his apartment building. It is a single tracking shot and we follow them floor by floor. How did Hitchcock manage to do that in 1929?
The concise and economical storytelling has a spellbinding elegance. There is artistry yet it never interferes with the momentum of the narrative, which is forever going forward.
Posted in Music review
Manchester Collective: Sirocco
RNCM Concert Hall, 15 October 2019
And that goes not only for Abel Selaocoe, the frontman of Manchester Collective (who here played cello and sang), mind, but for the whole group, which for the most part is made up of RNCM alumni. They showed the versatile pizzazz and the can-do quality of the city that gave them their name.
Manchester Collective were open for business, that was for sure, as they played Haydn and Purcell one moment and traditional African song the next. There was plenty of magnificent, bombastic drumming courtesy of Sidiki Dembele and a choir of angelic, baroque melodies from the Singh sisters (Rakhi Singh and Simmy Singh) and company on strings.
It was a collision of worlds, you could call it Alex Park and the Bridgewater Hall and all points in between. A cityscape of sound, and all good.
For further details of Manchester Collective, visit their website here.
Posted in Music review, Opera review, Theatre review
The Intelligence Park
Music by Gerald Barry
Libretto by Vincent Deane
Music Theatre Wales and The Royal Opera with London Sinfonietta
RNCM Theatre, 12 October 2019
The structure attracts one’s attention because it is so unusual in design. There is an opera composer who is tempted by a castrato, the singer appearing in his current production. While in turn the said castrato falls for the composer’s bride to be.
With great verve the opera explores the relation between life and art (we watch as the composer’s anxieties acted out by singers in Frank Sidebottom heads) and the malleability of gender and sexuality. At times there is a frenzy to the music; we are in a torture garden of acrid blooms, sweet and sickly blossoms. You feel zest, yes that is true, yet it is undercut with agony. That sense of a boundless freedom marred by shards of compulsion. And on some mornings, the question: do you step out into the sunlit landscape or do yourself in? Not a question for me, I should add, rather one for the protagonist here.
An interesting production of an interesting opera.
Posted in Concert review, Music review
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Andrew Manze, Bizet - L’Arlésienne Suite No.1, Debussy - Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Elgar - Symphony No.1, Halle Orchestra, Halle Orchestra: Elgar’s Massive Hope
Halle Orchestra: Elgar’s Massive Hope
The Bridgewater Hall, 10 October 2019
For this exhilarating concert Andrew Manze (pictured above) conducted the Halle, and they played these three gorgeous works:
Debussy’s work will forever be associated with Nijinsky’s ballet L’après-midi d’un faune. If you have ever heard the haunting flute solo at the start, the way the melody swirls and soars, like a beast of prey careening its way through a dense forest, you can never forget it. Somehow the melodic theme recurs throughout the work, like the refrain in a villanelle.
By contrast, Bizet’s work was originally written for the theatre, in fact for Daudet’s play L’Arlésienne where it worked as a soundtrack, a background to poetic dialogue, but that play has now been almost wholly forgotten. The music has shed its origins.
Still, Daudet’s drama is there in the music. You feel it first in the Prelude, where the stop-start melody tugs at your sense of calm, creating a vague disquiet. The Menuet has a lot in it, a waltz and a minuet too, of course. It is a varied assemblage, a bag of goodies. While the Adagietto is subdued, tender, very beautiful indeed.
There followed the interval, a serving of the Bridgewater Hall’s excellent ginger ice cream (courtesy of Doddington), then Elgar’s Symphony No.1.
And it was a happy homecoming for Elgar’s masterpiece. For, let us recall, the symphony had its premiere in Manchester, having been first performed at the Free Trade Hall on 3 December 1908. The orchestra on that occasion was… the Halle. A very welcome reprise, then. All good here, simply to say that the performance of the third Adagio movement was absolutely glorious.
The Halle will be performing the same concert program on future dates, further details can be found here.
Details of future Halle concerts can be found here.
Posted in Concert review, Music review
Halle Orchestra: Shostakovich’s Defiant Response
The Bridgewater Hall, 19 September 2019
Klaus Makela (pictured) conducted the Halle this evening, and they played these three wonderful works:
Beethoven’s ‘Overture: The Creatures of Prometheus’, the great composer’s only ballet score, was full of vivid images and versatile invention. Being something of a Promethean figure himself, it is hardly surprising that Beethoven was atttracted to the subject. It is a ballet where Prometheus plays God, bringing a male and female statue to life. Time for a revival?
As for his ‘Piano Concerto No.1’, well it is a masterpiece, clearly. I loved the Largo, the second movement, though in truth it was all good. Some passages are playful, others possess a raw power, an ineluctable rhythm and irresistible force. Víkingur Ólafsson played piano with consummate skill; and his encore, a Bach adagio for a friend who had just died, was plenty moving too. Both Beethoven works, incidentally, were first performed n Vienna.
Shostakovich’s ‘Symphony No.5’ was a complex, ambivalent epic, a tussle between authenticity and irony. The first movement, incorporating a quote from Carmen, was slushy and romantic. While the second featured a Landler, a slow waltz. In the third, a Largo, you were drenched in longing. Which led you to ask, Where was the composer going to take us next? Well the fourth and final movement was a military march, all that torment and anguish directed outward. Violence in service of the revolution. The question to be asked, though it can never be answered, is whether the symphony should be taken at face value. Was Shostakovich for real? Or was he being ironic? Was this music – spectacular as it often was – simply a show to avoid as show trial?
The Halle will be performing the same concert program on future dates, further details here.
Details of future Halle concerts can be found here.
Posted in Art review, Museum review, Music review
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Arik Brauer: All of My Arts, Café As. The Survival of Simon Wiesenthal, Daniela Pscheiden, Danielle Spera, Jewish Museum Vienna, Michaela Vocelka
Arik Brauer: All of My Arts
Curated by Danielle Spera and Daniela Pscheiden
3 April 2019 – 20 October 2019
Jewish Museum Vienna
Arik Brauer, um 1965 (c) Brigitte Lüttge-Dauth
At the Jewish Museum Vienna there are two exhibitions, each very different from the other, each in its own unique way compelling.
Arik Brauer: All of My Arts is a survey of the great Austrian artist’s life and work. His paintings are much in evidence. Yes, the Fantastic Realism masterpieces but also, as well, a Bosch pastiche that he completed whilst a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (unlike Hitler, he got in) and a number of coloured drawings he did even earlier, when a child: beautiful, prodigiously accomplished drawings.
You get to hear as well many of his most famous songs. For those unfamiliar with Brauer’s music, imagine Dylan writing not in an American idiom a la Woody Guthrie but in a contemporary update of Johann Nestroy’s Viennese Deutsch. You will have a pretty good sense of why Brauer is admired as a singer-songwriter.
Also in the exhibition there is a chess set , I think though set up wrong (on the board, the white square is not on the right hand side, unless I have read it wrong); a clip from a French film, Les distractions (English title: Trapped by Fear), with Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Parisian cool playing off against Brauer’s passionate song. Another section of the exhibition explores Brauer’s buildings: architecture became an interest for him in his mid-late career. And much else besides.
Arik Brauer: All of My Arts is an exhibition that does full justice to the great artist’s’s fecund creativity.
As it happens, the other exhibition, Café As. The Survival of Simon Wiesenthal, is also about architecture. It is curated by Michaela Vocelka and runs until January 2020.
When Simon Wiesenthal was at the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945, he made friends with a fellow prisoner named Edmund Staniszewski. Staniszewski had an ambition to start a café after the war (if he survived, that is) and Wiesenthal, who had trained as an architect, designed some plans for him. He made sketches and drawings of the premises, its outside and interior, and even thought about staff uniforms. Here is Wiesenthal’s design of a chess room within the cafe. Note the chequered floor and seat coverings, the rook depicted as a tank turret in the painting on the wall, where we see as well a pawn being carried away on a stretcher. No doubt it has been sacrificed for the greater good…
Schachzimmer des Café As (c) Jüdisches Museum Wien
This project was a hinterland for both men, you sense, a shared dream that likely helped them to survive the dire situation that they found themselves in. In planning the future of the Cafe As, they projected themselves into the future and reaffirmed their resolve to survive.
You see a slue of Wiesenthal’s designs in this exhibition, along with letters and photos and other archival materials. It is a valuable contribution to our understanding of this fierce warrior for justice.
Further details of Arik Brauer: All of My Arts can be found here.
Further details of Café As. The Survival of Simon Wiesenthal can be found here.
11 Thursday Jul 2019
Posted in Music review, Special Events
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‘Leningrad’ Symphony, Grossman, Halle, Jonathon Heyward, Life and Fate, MIF, Shostakovich, Stalingrad
Halle Orchestra
The Bridgewater Hall, 11 July 2019
The Halle performing in concert. Photo by Russell Hart
In the first half, we had a sometimes lively discussion about a work-in-progress to be premiered at The Factory, MIF’s new venue (The Factory is to be built on the site of the old Granada Studios complex, so Tony Wilson’s old stomping ground). Mark Ball, Creative Director of MIF, took part along with Sir Mark Elder and Johan Simons, with Elizabeth Alker keeping them on quite a loose leash. We learnt that Sir Mark and the Halle would perform Shostakovich’s fourth symphony and that Simons would adapt Grossman’s Life and Fate (and, who knows, perhaps its presequel Stalingrad, only translated into English this year) for this new work. An interesting collaboration.
As for the second half, there Jonathon Heyward conducted the Halle in a blistering performance of Shostakovich’s ‘Leningrad’ Symphony (the composer’s seventh). Heyward’s astute conducting was attuned to the defiant, anxiety-ridden music, so lyrical and explosive, so replete with poetically charged booby traps. Like a trekthrough a treacherous labyrinth. You were uprooted but still standing at the end; and grateful for that.
Posted in Music review
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Debussy: Images for Orchestra, Halle Orchestra: Ravel’s Bolero, Mussorgsky (in an orchestration by Ravel): Pictures at an Exhibition, Ravel: Bolero, Warhol
Halle Orchestra: Ravel’s Bolero
The Bridgewater Hall, 9 May 2019
Sir Mark Elder conducted the Halle and the orchestra played these three wonderful works:
You could see how the works, although in many respects very different in tone and texture, were interlinked. Debussy’s Images for Orchestra aimed to evoke scenes from memory – it is focussed around various countries – and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition attempted a similar feat: it was about a painter and his pictures. There is a difference, mind, between memories, psychological images as it were, and external vision: pictures, things seen in the world.
Ravel orchestrated the version of Mussorgsky’s work performed here and he composed the final work, Bolero. There is also a further connection: the most elaborate of Debussy’s Images focuses on Spain, the country from which Bolero takes its inspiration.
In Bolero just the one theme is repeated again and again, with more colour and orchestration gradually added with each repetition. But the underlying theme is always present, never obscured. It is thrilling – the way it builds up to a climax, the uncertainty as to how it will all end – but a bit gimmicky, in truth: you are pleased that Ravel wrote it because that means that no one else now has to. Here, though, a visual analogy occurred to me. That Bolero is like one of those Warhol silkscreen prints where the same image (say: Marilyn pouting, Elvis drawing a gun) is repeated over and over, with slight variations in colouring, say.
An evening of vital music and visual culture. A lot to hear, a lot to see.
Details of future Halle concerts can be found here.
