At Aldeburgh Festival 2014 : The Humphrey and Andy Show

This is a review of the t.v. documentary Benjamin Britten on Camera

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 July

This is a review of the t.v. documentary Benjamin Britten on Camera shown at - and as shown at - Aldeburgh Festival on Monday 23 June 2014

Also on Aldeburgh...

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

Ever-ambitious Aimard wows with authenticity


Humphrey Burton, of course, needed no introduction. When, having nonetheless been introduced (as, with his intense tan, we might otherwise have struggled to recognize him), Burton – in all seriousness – said something like I’m Humphrey, and this is Andy, it felt as though it was going to be Round the Horne, rather than the gentle parries of Sir Humphrey Appleby and Sir Jim Hacker (in the late but immortal Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington)…

The Humphrey and Andy Show proved to be one feeding the other prompts for what they had decided to say earlier, with the just slightly better hidden impression of news front-people, supposedly chatting casually to each other on a couch. Except that they were standing, had no notes / prompt-cards, and it had more class than with those typical presenters. Yet there was no challenge to Andy from Humphrey to say anything unprepared, but a united front to present this – well, what was it ?

We were in a nice cinema, with good sight-lines, but this was not Aldeburgh Documentary Festival, and Benjamin Britten on Camera was not a film (in the way that Rafea and The Great Hip Hop Hoax are, even though both were commissioned for BBC’s Storyville). And we had not, Humphrey, imagined for one moment that making this piece was just a matter of ‘splicing together’ material ‘in an edit-suite’ (even if we could easily credit that some do rarely see their finished piece on a screen such as this one) !

Even so, what was being screened did not have, much of the time, the aesthetics and approach of the powerful documentaries on the cinema circuit : they may then transfer very well to home-viewing, but those that are made for it will not always stand the test of this sort of public screening (as Poor Kids, for one, does). For the best of cinema demands greater rigour, and even greater attention to detail, than when such material is seen via its intended medium : the scrutiny that is given is necessarily more concentrated than at home, with its distractions, or even the scope for pausing a live programme to take a phone-call (or of recording it, and then introducing pauses when watching).

One critiques these two down at the front simply because Andy King-Dabbs, the documentary’s producer / director, might just as well have presented it himself. Needless to say, he did not (and never would), because he is not the draw at an event of this kind, and also because he has given a lot of screen-time in his programme to Burton, who is the draw – partly since he played (along with David Attenborough) an important part in the story of Benjamin Britten, BBC Television, and how they came to work together.

However, as Burton was quick to point out (by way, one supposes, of managing our expectations) – and as King-Dabbs cheerily and readily agreed – the story of Britten on ITV was not being told. Indeed, King-Dabbs additionally apologized that clips of musical performances cut away, when some might have wanted to stay longer with them, because the emphasis of the piece was on making these productions, rather than individual performance : this observation, perhaps unnecessarily even in the context of the title Benjamin Britten on Camera, served as a further elaboration of what this screened work was, and what it was not.

Simply put, introducing the screening without Burton would have been less interesting as an event, even to those of the same age-group as composer / conductor Oliver Knussen (born in 1952), let alone that of Britten and Burton themselves (born, respectively, in 1913 and 1931, respectively) – Knussen, because he had been allowed the most important contribution, that of talking in detail about how Britten’s compositions worked, which he did with concrete, thought-out examples (please see the foot of this posting, in the form of a question put to King-Dabbs).

And, naturally, we had Burton and David Attenborough, as movers and facilitators of the time, encouraging Britten to engage with t.v. as a way of sharing his music with Britons – for, not having a television-set of his own (but having acquired one to see the televised Owen Wingrave (or Billy Budd ?), he had not even been a (regular) viewer, and (as we saw, and were told) had to learn ways of working and engaging with what it is. As much as anything, this work considered how he came to grips with it, and it with him.

Therefore, it is a tribute to the BBC and to Attenborough and Burton that they helped Britten see the worth of this collaboration (even if, because of what we were told the cost of video-tape had been then, some recorded programmes ended up overwritten, and so lost to us) : when King-Dabbs was asked about the quality of the footage from Britten’s War Requiem, he candidly told us how what we saw, horizontal lines and all, had been produced simply by pointing a camera at a t.v. screen on which it was being received.

In complete contrast, technically, it was a ravishing Billy Budd for which we have, in part, to thank David Attenborough, crisply filmed, and full of tension and passion. Even so, it felt as though that achievement were gratuitously being undermined, by someone telling tales out of school concerning the recording : we heard how Peter Glossop, the singer playing Budd, when being led up to face his fate, and in take after take, kept missing the note, and so ended up having it hummed in his ear :

For, although this anecdote relates to preparing Britten’s work for broadcast, it effectively had nothing to do with Britten, and just diminished Glossop as a singer / performer, since it was not as if we were not told that this was done at his instigation. Whereas the story regarding the singer in Owen Wingrave, needing prompting about the lyrics (pistols and other weapons of war – and by way of signals, not with the note), at least seemed to show that BB had been in his own world as conductor, for he had apparently been unaware of these tricks of t.v.

That said, too much time was spent with footage and accompanying narration* on just the latter point, which surely could have been put to better use : here, t.v. showed its current leaning in the direction of entertainment, rather than educational purposes, as it also did by making a curiosity, an eccentric, of the already eccentric percussionist James Blades, with his drums, beaters, and thimbles. The effect of using this clip was, by association, to seem to trivialize the serious point about the interaction, between performer and composer, concerning the sound-world that the latter had envisaged when writing his score : in exploiting the person[ality] of Blades, the programme seemed too frothy, just to laugh about, Britten’s concerns for the use of drums in his ‘church parable’ The Burning Fiery Furnace.


The quick opening montage of scenes and shots from Britten in public had been on a different timescale and using another dimension, including much in a moment, and gave the impression that the programme was going to be a build-up to the recording of Peter Grimes at The Maltings, Snape, where Britten had founded his Festival, and which seemed presented as a unique requirement for agreeing to the project (which, since – as we had been told - Naughtie had written his own narration*, must have been down to him). Instead, Wingrave had equally been captured at Snape, and we had bypassed Grimes, whether we knew that it came first or second to Wingrave (presumably second, since the former had not been a BBC commission), and on to Britten’s burial, and to how that moment had been shared with the nation.

In between, for our modern audience, Britten and Pears were stated to have lived almost openly as a couple (probably defying society as Grimes defies The Borough’s mean conventions and morals, and Wingrave his family’s notion of military honour). Yet we had reserved to when Britten’s War Requiem was fleetingly featured any mention of his pacifism, with none of its consequences for him**.

In terms, then, only of its story-telling, this was no documentary worthy of a cinema, and, as to interpreting material to its viewer, did one have more than a scant sense of real curatorship ? One almost felt that someone had only just held back the question of whether PP & BB would, if living now, have done as Sir Elton John and David Furnish, and have a civil partnership and attempted to adopt a child, rather than addressing what it really meant to be gay at their time, prior to the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1956. Britten’s sexual orientation was included (as the extent of his pacifism was not**), but it might just as well not have been – it was not even obvious that it had any bearing on the BBC and Britten at all.

It was good to have the merest appearance of Sir Michael Tippett, a composer at least as much in need of our attention (along with Ralph Vaughan Williams, to name but one other), but it was just two or three sentences from a compilation concert, under Sir Henry Wood, to honour Britten. We had an even more meagre inclusion of some others, one of whom (Tom Service) had, much more recently than when Britten had been fêted ten years ago (and from when footage of a younger-looking Service had been taken), presented a long Radio 3 broadcast about the War Requiem :

So, a question was asked (one of only two, as Burton quickly decided, following the query about the quality of some of the footage – and on no immediate show of hands – to adjourn to the sunshine (or, rather, to being lionized in the foyer), this on the assumption that everyone had been satisfied…

Q : I am sure that people will agree that many of the contributions in the film were excellent, particularly those from Oliver Knussen, but blink and you missed Tom Service, and only a little less so for Charles Hazlewood, although these are the people on Radio 3, broadcasting about and interpreting Britten now – why was it worth including them, but giving them so little time ?

A : Burton opined that ‘Tom Service says a lot in a little while’ (and made no comment on Hazlewood’s appearance), whereas King-Dabbs elucidated that the footage of Service (and Hazlewood) had been from Celebrating Britten (around ten years ago). Moving swiftly on from why there had actually been so little from
Service (and nothing contemporary***), he told us that there had been good reason to include an academic from King’s College, London, as a cultural commentator who talked about Britten’s place in English life, but not what that reason was.


Reading between the lines, King-Dabbs appeared to be admitting that the programme had had to have popular appeal, and so featured Attenborough and Burton in priority over those now regularly broadcasting on the BBC’s own classical radio channel, and, perhaps for his authoritativeness and stature, giving over so much of the musical interpretation to Knussen, as a fellow composer.


Also on Aldeburgh...

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

Ever-ambitious Aimard wows with authenticity


End-notes

* James Naughtie was supposed to be the documentary’s narrator, but, for want of an overarching role, he might as well not have been.

** Going to the States with Pears, for three years from April 1939, and then, on their return, not immediately (and only on appeal) gaining exemption from military service (as a non-combatant). (By contrast, Tippett rejected even being allocated non-combatant duties, and served two months out of a term of imprisonment of three.)

*** At one point, it was mentioned in a caption that Knussen had been ‘Speaking in 2010’, but not flagging up, in that way, that Hazlewood and Service had been recorded earlier still.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

This is a review of Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès in Schubert’s Winterreise

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

This is a review of a performance at The Maltings, Snape, of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (Op. 89, D. 911) by Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès on the evening of Sunday 22 June 2014 in the 67th Aldeburgh Festival (@aldeburghmusic)

One might have imagined that the theatrical nature of to-night’s Winterreise at The Maltings, Snape, was Nicht für alle – but when Adès had sounded the final moment of calm, beyond bereftness, and had maintained long his final position on the keys (holding the reaction off), the vivid acclaim proved otherwise.

And seventy or more minutes had passed without seeming so, taking us to Der Leiermann quite, it might almost have felt, by surprise – could we really be at journey’s end already (wherever we actually were in time, that is)… ? Had we not been immersed, and begun to lose track of the number of song-settings by around the seventh – and why, anyway, was the figure of thirty-two floating around in the mind (or was that from The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 ?) ?

In ‘Gute Nacht’ (1*), right at the start of Wilhelm Müller’s sequence (though there were originally only twelve poems), there might have been some wonder at Bostridge’s extreme enunciation of clusters of letters at the ends of words such as gemacht / Nacht, and then, in reverse order, Nacht / gedacht**.

The initial impression was that maybe Bostridge had reacted to some criticism of his German by over-accentuation – but no, with further listening, diction in other places was more interior by far, not simply quieter, and, although (with the hall’s fine acoustic) it must have, seemed in danger of not reaching halfway up the side-stalls, let alone carrying to the back of the raked seating :

Something more complicated was going on with the voicing of this piece, which not only looked back to Bostridge’s recording with Julius Drake of ‘Erlkönig’ (D. 328) (on the EMI album Schubert Lieder*** in 1998), but also to his acclaimed appearances in so much Mozart, so much Britten, even as Caliban in Adès’ own much-lauded opera. (And, as Bostridge was in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, fitting to be reminded of a Director of Studies at Cambridge, who once expressed the belief that the separate characters in The Rape of Lucrece are different parts of one person – and the concomitantly repellent implication that Shakespeare had composed a fantasy of rape.)


Bostridge was bringing what amounted to a semi-staging to this late work of Schubert (hardly anything later than the year of death, and correcting the proofs of Part 2 of the song-cycle), but almost within the conventions of the concert-hall : done-up dark suit, single buttoned and almost a less-showy dinner-jacket, white shirt, but no tie for Adès or him.

Sometimes leaning on the curve of the Steinway grand as if this were cabaret (and sounding not a little Kurt Weillish), sometimes feeling like about to dive into it, under its lid (yet not as at a word-prompt, but as if his lost love and heart might be there), other times advancing upstage, at yet others writhing, contorted, and seeming to start disintegrating. Which, of course, is at the heart of Winterreise (after – and painfully leading on from – [Schubert’s setting of] Müller’s optimistic and enthusiastic Die schöne Müllerin (no sly self-reference there).

Or, more than two centuries later, at that of Beckettt in Molloy**** (and the other two novels of that trilogy, or even in the earlier work Mercier and Camier), though one was reminded most of that writer’s more famous and actually once cultured ‘men of the road’ in Vladimir and Estragon (affectionately, Didi and Gogo) : Could Bostridge possibly be seeing himself as a Vladimir, first of all seeing that special tree (‘Den Lindenbaum’ (5)), but with difficult feelings because of the mismatch with what is rooted in memory ?

That was the first really lyrical voicing, with Lieder-type gestures and tone, but it led, for example, to :

* ‘Wasserflut’ (6), with a massive, expressionistic stress on Haus (the ultimate word of the lyrics)

* Looking back on the town, as the departing man leaves it behind (‘Rückblick’ (8))

* The heart’s unfettered reaching out, in rapturous hope, when ein Posthorn klingt (in ‘Die Post’ (12)) – more clamorous lyricism

* The fixéd resignation / resolution (in ‘Der Wegweiser’ (20)) of :

eine Straße muß ich gehen,
die noch keiner ging zurück


Maybe at this point a different note set in – or perhaps as early as ‘Der greise Kopf’ (14)*****, contemplating the poet’s happy illusion of being old (because of frost on the hair). From then, diese Resie not seem to be demanding of Bostridge in the same way, and the slightly reeling and slurred Tom Waits down tone, contrasting with the defiant up voice that clearly and angrily states how the traveller has been treated, had evaporated – the feeling of ill-treatment had been early, starting with ‘Die Wetterfahne’ (2), and seeing Cressida-like inconstancy in the weather-vane signalling a change of direction (indicated by what is described as ‘[ein] Schild’, a crest or shield), and in the cynicism of the wind-changed beloved’s parents :

Was fragen sie nach meinen Schmerzen ?
Ihr Kind ist eine reiche Braut.


Yet this living so deeply with the role (no less than that, say, of Lear, where there is some respite) must have been at, and continued to be at, a price : at the end of Winterreise, when Adès and he went off, Bostridge seemed physically reduced from being already slim – though perhaps it was just the back view – and looked depleted, almost lamed.


Just one minor hesitation…

Yes, we can be plunged into this winter-world, but (especially if we do not know it, and struggle to follow the unremitting text in the concert-hall’s relative gloom) do we best find our emotional direction with Schubert’s work here ? Coming to the performance with our maybe hurried occupation of seats, our life outside the hall, brought into our seat ? – until, though, we relax into the offered music. No, we definitely would not have demanded more of Bostridge before Winterreise, but could we not have had a momentary taste of the composer just for piano, just to get us in his sound-world ?

As it was, it transpired that Adès, as accompanist, had read back into the early sections the spiky strangeness of the close, with his brought-out bass-figures and what seemed quirkily anachronistic stress, but could we have followed him better, and alone first, with a suitable Impromptu or two, to remind ourselves of the Schubert who after all strove, not least in Rosamunde (however fragmentarily his efforts usually survive, outside Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3’s) Schubert marathon, as ‘incidental music’), to be part of theatre ?

Or even Liszt transcriptions of some songs, to take us away from the text-based, score-based literalism with which we might have approached what, it turned out, was anything but a hide-bound Winterreise, but a dangerous encounter with the part-like nature of the self…


A review of the following night's marathon solo piano recital by Festival director Pierre-Laurent Aimard is now available here



End-notes

* The numbering denotes the positioning of the poems of the song-cycle (as against Müller’s sequence of poems).

** Not here, but later, is where sounds were almost launched at the front rows of the stalls, right below Bostridge : ab in ‘Gefrorne Tränen’ (3), and, probably next, überdeckt andausgestreckt in ‘Auf dem Flusse’ (7).


*** The initial recording, to which a Volume II was added (in the release in 2001).

**** ‘Rast’ (10) talks of sheltering in a charcoal-burner’s house, and there is such a person in Beckettt’s Molloy…

***** In the closing two lines, we have confirmation that this is a definite departure, eine Reise :

Wer glaubt’s ? under meiner ward es nicht
auf dieser ganzen Reise !


Also on Aldeburgh...

Ever-ambitious Aimard wows with authenticity

The Humphrey and Andy Show (Britten on Camera)


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

I always wished I was an orphan [Suzy] ~ I love you, but you don’t know what you’re talking about [Sam]

This is a review of Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

5 April

This is a review of Moonrise Kingdom (2012) - sweet, but not saccharine

* Contains small spoilers *

It is not until the very end of the film – and then it is not really an explanation – that its title makes an appearance, as a description of a place where things seemed to be very sweet. (Moonrise Kingdom (2012) has a suitably quirky web-site, which may say more.) Except that life was going to catch up with the idea that it conjures up, that of getting away from it. For, as twelve-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman) confidently says to Suzy (Kara Hayward) (and, by now, we know that he paints) :

That sounds like poetry. Poems don't always have to rhyme, you know. They're just supposed to be creative.

Bob Balaban (familiar from a recent repeat viewing of Deconstructing Harry (1997), where he plays Richard) is credited as The Narrator. Garishly, even gnomishly dressed, he is perkily moved, by magic as a static figure, from scene to scene to paint the backdrop to what we will see in the course of the following three days : from his measurements (for his narration is an omniscient one, and – without the grandiosity, but with assurance – reminds of Hamm telling his story in Beckettt’s play Endgame), he makes us aware of what is to come. Nonetheless, it is a sort of surprise.

With Suzy and Sam, their secret correspondence and their desire to get away together illicitly, we may feel that the film is operating on one level : there are gentle ways in which they seem to be more adult than the adults (say, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand as the Bishops, Suzy’s parents), so Sam has a pipe and that Heath Robinsonesque flair for designing mechanisms that we see featured in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and Suzy is dressing to impress*, and hurt by the booklet that she has discovered her parents have, called ‘Coping With the Very Troubled Child’.

Yet the climax takes us beyond all these small things to the big question of what life is all about. Mr and Mrs Bishop, for example, think that it is a matter of asking how the other’s litigation went, but their formal manner shows that it is a duty to remember the detail and ask, by contrast with the commitment that Suzy and Sam have to each other. Their letters to each other may have been oddly matter of fact and have made us laugh or smile, but this belies the connection that they have made.

When we first saw where The Bishops lived, it was in elevation, but one that proved to be a decoration for one of the walls of their precise abode, a bit like a castle, as Wes Anderson has us scan it up and down and through, seeing, say, Mr Bishop both upstairs relaxing and downstairs about something less passive – however, it has an unreality to it, as fully as if it were Wemmick’s Castle in Great Expectations, or Kafka’s The Castle, a quality that it shares with The Grand Budapest.

Engaging both with Benjamin Britten’s music in a very impressive way, and also having the film scored by collaborator on Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Alexandre Desplat**, Anderson creates a scope for this film, building on the story and imagery of Noye’s Fludde (Britten’s Op. 59), that transcends its particulars. It feels, early on, a bit like a fable, and looks less like a cartoon than Budapest, but it has the impact of a Biblical account like that of The Flood :

The Khaki Scouts flee to St Jack’s Church, because it is high ground (smacks of Father Ted, as a feature that Anderson has given to New Penzance Island ?), which aptly seems to be where Sam first saw Suzy and talked to her – in the organ loft, two figures amongst those with masks are momentarily there, then gone. What unfolds is a stand-off, which provokes an offer from Captain Sharp (of the police, played by Bruce Willis in a fairly unaccustomed subdued style of role (Looper (2012) ?) that pacifies the embodiment of Social Services in Tilda Swinton***, complete with a stamp to certify that she has done her duty.

Setting the film in late September 1965 allows Anderson to take a sideswipe, from the seeming perspective of history, at the forces that would normalize (or, conversely, pathologize****) everyone and, if deemed necessary, do so with uncaring foster homes, and highly invasive treatment for those who do not fit in, and focus our attention on the couple.

Suzy, in Noye’s Fludde, is a raven, the first creature let out of the ark (Genesis 8 : 6–7), and probably usually forgotten because of the dove with that olive token. Suzy says of herself to Sam I like stories with magic powers in them. Either in kingdoms on Earth or on foreign planets. Usually I prefer a girl hero, but not always. Though the books that we see are fictitious (artists are credited with the cover images), and within a fictitious story in a fictitious place, Sam and she still have a lot to share with us in a film well worth watching more than once.


End-notes

* One is put in mind a little of the appearance and delivery of Emma Watson (as Nicki) in The Bling Ring (2013) (or one of the more feminine girls in Foxfire (2012).

** Who has scored some significant films, from Budapest to Philomena (2013), Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013) to Argo (2012).

*** It seems a little hard to credit that IMDb is right that Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons were considered first for the role (and offered the part)…

**** At the same time, the rise in diagnosis of – and shockingly adult treatments for – ADHD (see, for example, Benny in Bombay Beach (2011)), and the sizeable recent controversy in the UK about the classifications in DSM-V, the latest (fifth) edition of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual suggests Plus ça change…


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)