More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 March
Tim Brown, whose conducting I always find infectious to watch, brought together the forces of Cambridge University Bach Ensemble and Cambridge University Chamber Choir in to-night’s performance of the perennial Lententime Bach work, which never fails to find an audience.
To-night’s, if it – as I did – needed to read what Tim had written about the piece at the front of the programme to appreciate this truth, would have seen what he said about what determines how it unfolds to be perfectly correct: much about what The Matthew Passion (BWV 244) ends up being in performance is a result of the way in which the recitative of The Evangelist is delivered.
As I noticed for the first time in this performance (though I have heard two or three others before), three times he introduces Jesus saying, with remarkable economy and concision, Du sagest's*:
(1) The first is an answer to Judas, asking whether he is the one to betray him, Bin ich's, Rabbi?.
(2) The second is when Jesus is already before the High Priest, who seeks to compel Jesus to say whether he is The Christ with the words Ich beschwöre dich bei dem lebendigen Gott, dass du uns sagest, ob du seiest Christus, der Sohn Gottes.
(3) The final one is a little further on, when, before Pilate now, he is asked Bist du der Juden König?.
Of course, the threefold repetition chimes with Peter's three denials. Just as much as Judas, Peter betrays Jesus, first by saying Ich weiss nicht, was du sagest, and then, twice, Ich kenne des Menschen nicht. And we are led straight to what is almost certainly the aria in the piece capable of most beauty, Erbarme dich, mein Gott**, which made such an impression on me when Tarkovksy used it in The Sacrifice (1986), his final film.
As to the other two denials, one is by the High Priest, who tears his clothes and accuses Jesus of blasphemy for what he says about how the Son of Man will be seen seated at the right hand of glory and coming on the clouds of Heaven; the other is by the head of the secular authorities, who seems to see through the motives of those who seek for Jesus to be crucified, but ultimately seems powerless to resist the crowd that has been worked up to bay for his blood***.
Enough on the performance for now, save to say that Stefan Kennedy (as The Evangelist) and Nicholas Mogg (as Christus) both showed a feel for delivering recitative where some of the members of the choir, who had solo spots but also a passage of recitative immediately before, appeared vocaly less comfortable, and almost as though it were a chore to be got out of the way before the aria: as becomes quite evident when seeing the work, Jesus does say remarkably little in the quite lengthy time taken before the High Priest and then Pilate, and not because he has nothing to say, but Nicholas Mogg concentrated extremely well to give a cohesive Jesus.
In the case of Stefan Kennedy's recitative, I only felt very occasionally that it was a little rushed (and that only towards the end of the piece), but that it was otherwise carefully and thoughtfully paced to best effect****: I was certainly won over by how he placed emphasis as the interpretation developed, and, with a solid but often silent Jesus, there was an interesting dynamic between them.
All in all, not least with regard to the quality of the instrumental playing from the Bach Ensemble (with a highly solid continuo line from Dan Smith on organ and Kate Aldridge on violone), a very fine Matthew Passion!
End-notes
* The quotations are all taken from the text as it is given in the insert to the first version, on LP, that I owned of this work, as just an English translation was printed in the programme - I largely followed the German in that insert, but referred to the programme.
** Though this is not the only time that this verb is used, because it is in a passage of recitative that recapitulates that Jesus has been given over by Pilate to be scourged, ready for crucifixion. In the meantime, Judas has repented of his actions in accepting money to betray Jesus to the religious authorities, and there is a telling bass aria after he has thrown the money back at them and gone away and hanged himself:
Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder!
Seht, das Geld, den Mörderlohn,
Wirft euch der verlorne Sohn
Zu den Füssen nieder.
*** I was reminded a little how the Tribunes in Coriolanus (most recently seen as a film directed by Ralph Fiennes, who plays the title role) also stir the crowd.
**** With a few vowel-sounds, there seemed some variance from the text that I was following, but the score being used may have adopted a different editorial policy with regard to rendering past tenses in eighteenth-century German.
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Showing posts with label Coriolanus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coriolanus. Show all posts
Sunday, 11 March 2012
Tuesday, 7 February 2012
Fiennes as Coriolanus - a touch of Anthony Hopkins?
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 February
* Contains spoilers *
I did like the conception of where this film geographically and historically placed Rome and Antium, and I missed noticing who the person credited with screenwriting is, but which I now know was Ralph Fiennes' co-producer, John Logan. Those credits also made me aware that Fiennes had directed.
Leaving aside this notional carve-up between director and screenwriter as to who crafts what we see, since Logan and Fiennes were clearly in this together up to the hilt - a bit, maybe, like Aufidius and Martius - I really did feel that using news reporting (with a wonderful cameo and lovely verse-delivery by Jon Snow) and a modern setting didn't harm Shakespeare at all. He, like Bach, is a pretty tough bird, and, if it's done with love, it'll - probably - work.
As to this play, over the years I have engaged with it a few times, and - as I have remarked elsewhere - caught a young(ish) Toby Stephens in the role under the RSC at Stratford. Slippery though it is, I probably haven't locked horns with it since - and there is, which may have drawn Fiennes / Logan to it, a quality of otherness about the play, and about its title character, that is more like the so-called late Beethoven string quartets, if King Lear is a sort of Winterreise of the soul.
And yet, there, there is a connection, because I was struck, this time, how like Cordelia Coriolanus is: in Lear because, loosely quoting, Cordelia will not heave her heart into her mouth, the division of the kingdom proceeds, but proceeds all wrong, because Lear - who should know how much she loves him - is vain enough to want her to say so before everybody. An impossible stand-off, just as, with Coriolanus, his refusal to demean himself to fawn before the people leads to his banishment and joining with the Volscian forces against Rome. (So Cordelia and her husband's forces against those of Goneril and Reagan under their husbands.)
As with all of Shakespeare, he had his sources for this story (and I want to research them), but it was, with Lear, a given of his source that Cordelia cannot speak to secure her 'more opulent' share (I quote from memory) - it is not 'will not', but cannot: she is almost literally choked by the hypocrisy of his sisters in this absurd set-piece that Lear has arranged for her to fail at, though, if he looked into his heart, he would know that she loves him best.
All of this is so close to unlocking Coriolanus, and yet so far. It is not so much his mother's crazy upbinging - what happened to his father? it may be in the full text - as this constitutional inability to pander to people, to represent what is not as what is. Tragic weakness if you like, but he cannot do it, any more than Cordelia can, and he - for all his warlike strategy - plays straight into the hands of his enemies in politics (with both a big and small 'p').
As to whether Fiennes, with his deliberately - it seemed - restrained affect for the soldier when not in the height of battle (urging his men on to bloody, noble and glorious victory), but in the first key scene, before the grain stores, where she speaks so chillingly calmly to the mob - has caught the right note, others may judge differently. For me, though, there was too much a sinister air of Hannibal Lecter, or of Fiennes' recent role as Lord Voldemort, in that rather inward reading of the verse - beautiful, but too much with psycopathic undertones, which I honestly do not believe are there in the original.
Yes, Martius is a man torn in his allegiances, but who looks, most of all, to valour and honour (his mother's incalcation), not to killing or the thirst for blood for their own sake (however much we are reminded, again vividly in this film, of the opening scenes of Macbeth, and of Macbeth himself as some bloody slaughtering priest, blind to his own safety in service of his king and is foes - Macbeth, too, has a heart and conscience, and has to be mightily persuaded by his wife to kill Duncan, and that under their own roof).
So, I felt, that Fiennes' overlayering of an awkward man, ill at ease with social situations, with the icy qualities of speaking up to the other side in a stand-off and keeping his calm when an exlosive utterance of the lines could have been just as possible, just did not gel, except in the psycopathic personality, which I do not think is that of the real Coriolanus. He struggles to do what he believes in, consistent with his own limitations, but has only the awareness of what to do on the battlefield, not on the political field of human life.
Too much has been said about Fiennes' characterization, and something should be said of that of Gerard Butler as Aufidius, whose character's role has to run only the gamut from admiration to hatred to (in this version) a clearly homoerotic compassion for Coriolanus to envy and revenge, but which he ran nicely and smoothly enough, giving Fiennes the space to do what he needed to flesh out his notion of his own figure. Ultimately, nothing falls by that doubt about whether Fiennes has pitched Coriolanus the man right, and much could have been weaker if Butler, Brian Cox (Menenius), and James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson (as tribunes Sicinius and Brutus) had not been so reliably strong.
They gave the film the space to live, but the real honour must go to Redgrave for the half-mad Volumnia, who has had a part in making her son what he is - a man whose passions and whose dignity she can only half understand, but ultimately call on.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 February
* Contains spoilers *
I did like the conception of where this film geographically and historically placed Rome and Antium, and I missed noticing who the person credited with screenwriting is, but which I now know was Ralph Fiennes' co-producer, John Logan. Those credits also made me aware that Fiennes had directed.
Leaving aside this notional carve-up between director and screenwriter as to who crafts what we see, since Logan and Fiennes were clearly in this together up to the hilt - a bit, maybe, like Aufidius and Martius - I really did feel that using news reporting (with a wonderful cameo and lovely verse-delivery by Jon Snow) and a modern setting didn't harm Shakespeare at all. He, like Bach, is a pretty tough bird, and, if it's done with love, it'll - probably - work.
As to this play, over the years I have engaged with it a few times, and - as I have remarked elsewhere - caught a young(ish) Toby Stephens in the role under the RSC at Stratford. Slippery though it is, I probably haven't locked horns with it since - and there is, which may have drawn Fiennes / Logan to it, a quality of otherness about the play, and about its title character, that is more like the so-called late Beethoven string quartets, if King Lear is a sort of Winterreise of the soul.
And yet, there, there is a connection, because I was struck, this time, how like Cordelia Coriolanus is: in Lear because, loosely quoting, Cordelia will not heave her heart into her mouth, the division of the kingdom proceeds, but proceeds all wrong, because Lear - who should know how much she loves him - is vain enough to want her to say so before everybody. An impossible stand-off, just as, with Coriolanus, his refusal to demean himself to fawn before the people leads to his banishment and joining with the Volscian forces against Rome. (So Cordelia and her husband's forces against those of Goneril and Reagan under their husbands.)
As with all of Shakespeare, he had his sources for this story (and I want to research them), but it was, with Lear, a given of his source that Cordelia cannot speak to secure her 'more opulent' share (I quote from memory) - it is not 'will not', but cannot: she is almost literally choked by the hypocrisy of his sisters in this absurd set-piece that Lear has arranged for her to fail at, though, if he looked into his heart, he would know that she loves him best.
All of this is so close to unlocking Coriolanus, and yet so far. It is not so much his mother's crazy upbinging - what happened to his father? it may be in the full text - as this constitutional inability to pander to people, to represent what is not as what is. Tragic weakness if you like, but he cannot do it, any more than Cordelia can, and he - for all his warlike strategy - plays straight into the hands of his enemies in politics (with both a big and small 'p').
As to whether Fiennes, with his deliberately - it seemed - restrained affect for the soldier when not in the height of battle (urging his men on to bloody, noble and glorious victory), but in the first key scene, before the grain stores, where she speaks so chillingly calmly to the mob - has caught the right note, others may judge differently. For me, though, there was too much a sinister air of Hannibal Lecter, or of Fiennes' recent role as Lord Voldemort, in that rather inward reading of the verse - beautiful, but too much with psycopathic undertones, which I honestly do not believe are there in the original.
Yes, Martius is a man torn in his allegiances, but who looks, most of all, to valour and honour (his mother's incalcation), not to killing or the thirst for blood for their own sake (however much we are reminded, again vividly in this film, of the opening scenes of Macbeth, and of Macbeth himself as some bloody slaughtering priest, blind to his own safety in service of his king and is foes - Macbeth, too, has a heart and conscience, and has to be mightily persuaded by his wife to kill Duncan, and that under their own roof).
So, I felt, that Fiennes' overlayering of an awkward man, ill at ease with social situations, with the icy qualities of speaking up to the other side in a stand-off and keeping his calm when an exlosive utterance of the lines could have been just as possible, just did not gel, except in the psycopathic personality, which I do not think is that of the real Coriolanus. He struggles to do what he believes in, consistent with his own limitations, but has only the awareness of what to do on the battlefield, not on the political field of human life.
Too much has been said about Fiennes' characterization, and something should be said of that of Gerard Butler as Aufidius, whose character's role has to run only the gamut from admiration to hatred to (in this version) a clearly homoerotic compassion for Coriolanus to envy and revenge, but which he ran nicely and smoothly enough, giving Fiennes the space to do what he needed to flesh out his notion of his own figure. Ultimately, nothing falls by that doubt about whether Fiennes has pitched Coriolanus the man right, and much could have been weaker if Butler, Brian Cox (Menenius), and James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson (as tribunes Sicinius and Brutus) had not been so reliably strong.
They gave the film the space to live, but the real honour must go to Redgrave for the half-mad Volumnia, who has had a part in making her son what he is - a man whose passions and whose dignity she can only half understand, but ultimately call on.
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