Monday 14 July 2014

You need a Grand Budapest sticker to go abroad...

This is a follow-up piece to a review of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

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

14 July (updated, 30 November 2021)




Isn't he superb, @WaterbabyFlower @Saffronscreen ! My second time, but his own timing is grand, and Anderson's script / detail nigh perfect
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 13, 2014


This follow-up piece to a review of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) was written on watching it again at Saffron Screen (@SaffronScreen) : it is less in the nature of a second review, than a rumination on the film's themes and ultimate import



That deft substitution, of a clean ashtray for a dirty one, is only a moment, but it says what's at the heart of The Grand Budapest Hotel ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 13, 2014


The ashtray is mentioned because, at the bottom of the fresh ashtray, we see – which were effaced by butts, ash, soot¹ (if only as temporary deposits) in the dirty one – the essentials of The Grand Budapest Hotel : the crest, and the ‘GB’ within its swirls, its initials.

-> That moment and when GustaveH. trivializes Zero as a migrant, before realizing what he fled as a refugee and apologizing in remorse / GB
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 13, 2014

Throughout the film, we are reminded that Gustave H. (personified by the words, manner and decorum of Ralph Fiennes – abruptly swearing like a trooper, but with a heart and caring attitude of gold) is a creature of the past, a man who wants to preserve the things that not only matter to him, but which he also believes do (or, at any rate, should) matter in absolute terms². Yet, as he travels both to, and back from, Schloß Lutz with Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori), he realizes that the future is coming, and, rather than intending to keep the utterly fictitious³ Boy with Apple for the rest of his life (as he first states), he quickly revises his plan to have them sell it and run away to The Maltese Riviera.

Gustave H. offers a share in this to Zero, who tries to haggle before they agree on a deal, which (as an element in Anderson’s mockery of legality during the film⁴), he dictates to Zero, as if something noted on the back of a cocktail menu suffices for a binding contract – as such a man of his word might, if only to safeguard the interests of the other party (who need only, if memory fails, produce the memorandum of agreement (as, with good reason, such a document is called)).

The deal is to include inheriting from Gustave H., but it is only later – at the other crucial Tweeted moment – that they come to see each other as brothers. More interestingly still, they become equals, with Gustave deferring to Zero with his proposal to escape on the motorbike (just after Zero has saved his life), for which the trigger was Gustave’s heartfelt remorse, having realized how he has maligned Zero by imagining insulting reasons for his originally leaving his homeland. (And, if we are honest, we have all allowed ourselves, through disappointment, envy and the like, to judge wrongly by appearances – we trusted that we know the story from what we [thought that we] saw, only to be proved quite wrong.) :

The second time, near the end of our nest of stories, that Gustave sticks up for Zero, there is a different feel to the confrontation that we see. Which is not just because the ZZ militia are menacing⁵, on whose black uniform Gustave commented unfavourably just before (and which we can easily construe as the SS, with the formerly independent Zubrowka (the brand-name of a Polish vodka), maybe masquerading for The Sudetenland, if not more likely for Austro-Hungary, hence Budapest ? – there is further consideration, below, in an Epilogue).

The two other elements in this scene, which are intimately related to each other, are how close our awareness is of the point of view of the narrator, older Zero (having dinner with the younger Author (Jude Law)), which is on the surface of the story at around this point, and also the much greater esteem in which Zero, travelling with his bride Agatha, is held by Gustave, and vice versa (as long as Gustave does not flirt with Agatha !). Gustave is no longer instinctively protecting Zero as a lobby-boy (in training), but altogether as a friend, brother, and former refugee from violence (and we maybe sense that Gustave himself could be the last of these, too).

We know quite clearly that Gustave has his foibles, such as self-interestedly courting and bedding the wealthy female guests, but it is humanity, and his charming mix of naivety and streetwise cunning, that shines through. Right at the outset, with just baldly calling Author the person through whose words and eyes, as Tom Wilkinson (and then Jude Law), Wes Anderson wildly abstracts the story, and thus he challenges us as to whether we are going to believe all this.

Of course, by the end, Gustave and the whole cast is indelible (with Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and others taking star turns), even if refracted through Zero, and through him as he ages, and what (according to older Author) older Zero then tells younger Author – of course, none of this ever happened (as we may sense with Stefan Zweig’s writings), but it feels as though it could have done, on some level - where Mendl’s is a make of cake (apparently, the principal confection is a Courtesan au Chocolat).

Is the film just Andersonian entertainment, or is it saying more to us amongst the sight-gags (such as that cheeky Schiele painting, or the rib-tickling skiing / sledding sequence) ? As with Moonrise Kingdom (2012), there are patent depths amongst the humour – the pairs of young lovers have the same frank awkwardness (e.g. Zero giving Agatha (Saoirse Ronan) the gift, in which we have another ‘Z’, with his having dedicated it ‘From Z to A’), which in no way detracts from their love, but the sense of doom that is in the earlier film (and lifts (somewhat)) only enters in earnest with the ZZ. At the same time, the trigger-happy firefight with the ZZ set off by Dmitri (Adrien Brody) reminds of easy-spirited boneheaded moments in films such as Westerns from the 1960s, or skits on them by the likes of Mel Brooks or Woody Allen (all looking back to the era of The Keystone Cops / Kops), and is part of making this grand hotel seem utterly real (with that shot of the glass ceiling, amazingly unscathed by gunfire !).

The hotel, though, and the other-worldly, old-fashioned decency and good manners of its concierge, what about them… ? When older Zero says, effectively, that Gustave had been, even then, fighting a rear-guard action for such principles, are we not reminded a little by the initials GB in that ashtray of our own Great Britain ? Billy Bragg, on the album England, Half English (especially in the song ‘Take Down The Union Jack’), certainly wants to pose questions about the ‘greatness’ of Britain (and such honours as Orders of the British Empire), but is it possible that Anderson is being as political with this film – that his ‘bloody immigrant’, as Gustave first really sees Zero, is our refugee, our asylum-seeker, condemned for years by an element of the British press, and mocked along with human rights ?

Well, Anderson’s non-specific / generic ‘Author’ is British, and his younger self, at the end (and as if ashamed of himself, and how he came by the basis for writing a book called The Grand Budapest Hotel, which we see at the beginning with the Author's young fan), relates how he did not ever see Zero again (after nerving himself to ask, through curiosity, what he thinks an impolite question, just before M. Moustafa and he part that night), and how he continued ‘his cure’ for a long time elsewhere in the world – whereupon the layers of narration promptly unwind again.

Put crudely, he came to this hotel that smacks of The Eastern Bloc, and, having what he wants (and which gets a statue erected to him in due course, and admiring hotel-key-bearing fans), casually absents himself : at times, M. Moustafa feels as though he has told too much, whereas, for young Author, it is the standard British mode (more so perhaps in that era than now) of getting away from feelings that are ‘near the knuckle’ by just suddenly closing down.

Anderson would hardly be the first writer / director to get our attention on issues such as what makes a refugee by setting the film / play / novel somewhere else : we see it in Ken Loach / Paul Laverty’s Jimmy’s Hall (2014), just as we did in the former’s Land and Freedom (1995) (collaborating with screenwriter Jim Allen), and we equally see it in Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, tackling in Philomena (2013) issues that are not unique to that time or that Irish setting. (It is perhaps, there, too easy to get riled and identify with the fictionalized reactions of Steve Coogan as Sixsmith, whereas the film, as The Railway Man (2013) also desires, seeks for us to identify with the response that Philomena, and Eric Lomax, find within them.)


But, of course, the fantastic Fiennes is overflowing with lusciously camp aristocratic British manners, yet breaking into hilarious coarseness when he cannot quite see the point of maintaining the illusion : Anderson’s gives him, and us, hope in The Order of The Cross Keys, which embraces everyone, and is a lifeline that feeds both the plot (with the elaborate arrangements to meet doomed Serge (Mathieu Amalric – an actor with a perpetual look of surprise)), and restores Gustave’s bonhomie, aided by puffs of his precious Air de Panache (the joke / clue is in the name) – as he said to Zero at the sewage-exit and with mortified self-disgust, I smell ! (and Zero, with a sniff, concurs).

Perhaps an appeal to the fair-mindedness that once mattered about being British. For, in this film, if Gustave had not saved Zero, Zero could not, in return, have saved him – and been around to tell the tale… In Gustave H., and despite the brilliant humour and wonderful high jinks, cannot Anderson be seen to be asking the British (amongst others) a question ? :

Gustave, in his decency and striving to put people at his ease, embodies a notion of Britishness that, if not gone already, is soon to disappear – are we happy to lose it, if we do not look beyond our stereotypes of immigrants, and our ostrich-like (it-is-not-my-business) failure to stand up for our fellow human-beings when we can (as we also see exemplified in Loach and Laverty’s portrayal of the real-life Jimmy Gralton…) ?






Epilogue

Finally, it is mentioned above that Zubrowka, which is clearly stated to be an independent republic (so there is an act of war by the invading ZZ forces), shares its name with that of a brand of Polish vodka.

Here, Anderson is certainly playing with us, just as he is by ending with a grand sequence for balalaika orchestra over the closing credits (he usually dispenses with opening ones) – which suggests, despite all the Germanic names, that maybe we are further into Eastern Europe – and likewise by having Vivaldi transposed for mandolins as a stately musical accompaniment to when we are ‘getting to know’ the GB.

To close, here are some hints at what is recollected of a few other ways in which Anderson has laid little jokes or clues (beyond such running jokes as Gustave quite casually saying Uh-huh every time that he is asked if he is who he is, until he finally and superbly loses his rag and magnificently swears in exasperation !) :

* The resort where the GB is appears to be called Nebelstadt, which crudely translates as Fogtown – we see the fog at the observatory, and earlier when the stag-statue is introduced with the first sight of the hotel's façade

* Why are we stopping by a barley-field ?, asks Gustave on the train to Lutz (also called fucking Lutz) : which begs the question how, when the ground is covered with snow, Gustave knows what sort of field it is, or calls it that :

Well, die Gerste is German for ‘barley’, so a field might be Gerstenfeld – or, as der Acker also means ‘field’ (our word 'acre', plural die Äcker), one might be reminded of Gerstäcker, a character who is part of K.’s maddening experience in Kafka’s unfinished novel Das Schloß (The Castle - a link here for those to whom it is unfamiliar, despite Michael Haneke’s excellent film), as well as the fascinating life of Friedrich Gerstäcker, one-time proprietor of a hotel in Louisiana during his first travels in the States.

* Made by Mendl’s, though Gustave has little time for Mendl himself, we see a confection that is at the root of much gleeful mischief, as cakes bribe Agatha’s - then Zero and Gustave’s - way into anything (despite an iron-heeled regime, whose forces just end up shooting at each other), and also provide the way out of confinement, too, as well as being a soft landing for Agatha and Zero (just as, in Moonrise, Suzy and Sam are faced with plummeting, but spared) :

The friar Gregor Mendel is the most famous bearer of the name, as the man who experimented with pea plants and discovered something about inheritance between different generations – the contraction to Mendl is a habit of alpine regions (amongst other places), and so the name itself appears to be a diminutive of die Mandel, meaning ‘almond’ (a significant ingredient in marzipan, of course)

* We go to a Schloß, Schloß Lutz, where Gustave pays his respects to an Anderson regular in Tilda Swinton (the embodiment of the functional and largely soulless Social Services in Moonrise, pushing papers, etc., and just doing a job) :

The jokes at the coffin (and on the train to Lutz) aside, Swinton is splendid as this 84-year-old with zest – maybe that name Lutz reminds us, deep down of the jump in figure-skating of that name, and thus prepares us for the snowy antics / acrobatics to come (as we are unlikely to see it as a short-form of Ludwig, with the connection to Ludwig of Bavaria’s fairytale Rhineland castles, of which the GB is, of course, reminiscent) ?

* Last, we have Gabelmeister's Peak, which translates as Forkmaster's, since the place-setting in German is das Messer (knife), die Gabel (fork), and der Löffel (spoon) (one of each gender)


As if all that were not enough, there is an interesting piece about the film's locations from The National Geographic...



End-notes

¹ As we know, through having seen it, crushing the cigarette to extinguish it produces the former, and with it, that sooty residue, unlike true grey ash.



² A film such as The Way Way Back (2013), through Sam Rockwell as the attractive Owen, shows a similarly encouraging father-figure to a slightly younger equivalent of Zero in Duncan (Liam James). Or The Book Thief (2013) has Hans Hubermann (Geoffrey Rush) as a new, kind father to the very much younger Liesel (Sophie Nélisse). (One could go on and on, with ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) in The Color of Money (1986), or Pacino as Lt Col. Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman (1992), etc.)

³ Model and artist are named (separately), as those who stay to read credits – and therefore see and hear the balalaikas (one with a boar within a boar, another people by chimneys of industry) – will know… This state of affairs is quite as we would expect of an Anderson film, and of this world, because of what he created in and for Moonrise Kingdom (2012), but employing the just as real Noye’s Fludde (Benjamin Britten, Op. 59) (and many other Britten works), alongside (as here) a score by Alexandre Desplat : the Wikipedia® entry for the film says more about why Britten is important to Anderson...

⁴ Both in the person of Jeff Goldblum as Deputy Kovacs, with the attempts that makes to get Dmitri (Adrien Brody) to come to heel (the second of which is more costly), and when, for example, Gustave insists on interviewing not only Zero (a sly little echo of Beckettt’s Endgame with all those zeroes ?), but also Agatha - or when he tries to tell the same thuggish Dmitri that the legal nicety is that his mother’s house is not his until after probate.

⁵ This, though, without the physical brutality – and the first pair of bloody noses – of the earlier encounter with authority (until Henckels, played by Edward Norton, intervenes, which he does on Gustave’s customary personal level of grace, courtesy, and gratitude).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday 9 July 2014

Responses to Metzger [means 'Butcher']

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

9 July









Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday 2 July 2014

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.



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday 1 July 2014

A musical Academy in Cambridge - other than the Academy of Ancient Music...



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

1 July (updated 4 July)

This review is of some highlights of Britten Sinfonia’s (@BrittenSinfonia’s) / Britten Sinfonia Academy’s lunchtime concert at West Road Concert Hall (@WestRoadCH), Cambridge, on Tuesday 1 July (At Lunch 5)


Strix, Philip Cashian’s difficult new piece for chamber orchestra, premiered at West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge this lunchtime, with five members of Britten Sinfonia supporting, encouraging and (in the person of violinist Alexandra Reid) directing the twenty-four-strong force of its Britten Sinfonia Academy : Cashian himself, briefly spoken to afterwards to thank him for his piece, thought that they had played it pretty well.


In rehearsal, at West Road, under Alexandra Reid's direction
(by kind permission of Britten Sinfonia)


One could soon see why it was paired, for a slightly smaller group, with the opening movement (Marche introduction) of Stravinsky’s Danses Concertantes (from 1942) : the Stravinsky had been played beautifully, in a lively and sometimes spiky way, and with a cheeky ending, and Cashian’s work, of around twelve minutes, started in its orchestrational and rhythmic spirit, with a prominent triangle-note that led quickly to a pizzicato section, and to the unbowed cellos and double-basses coming to the fore, an exciting sound against the background of their fellow strings.

The next section melded oboe, flute and clarinet, forging a cry that echoed the roots in a compositional workshop that Cashian had held with the Academy players in the modern gallery-space of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum (@FitzMuseum_UK), and which had resulted in the young players’ responses to Graham Sutherland’s bird-based painting La Petite Afrique III (1955)*, whose writing Cashian took away and used in Strix : bassoonist Katherine Worster, in one of three interviews that Reid conducted with Academy instrumentalists during stage-movements, told us about how this process had worked, and how it had seemed strange to encounter what Cashian brought back to the group, after he had composed the piece away from them.

This cry, as it emerged, continued with the pizzicati lower strings, but with the intensifying use of syncopation, a prominent aspect of the piece, and one which placed demands not only on the players to keep count in bars of differing time-signature, but also on percussionist Tim Gunnell, who here, as at other times, had to provide a clear, regular beating : the feel was of the Stravinsky, who had been better known since Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) for his approach to rhythm and metre (a ballet that the programme-notes reference in relation to Walt Disney and Fantasia (1940)), and even of the jazz vibe that he used around this time**.

A pleasant nod in Igor’s direction, but the tock-tock that Gunnell then brought forth was taking us on, elsewhere – to the more irregular measures beloved of Sir Michael Tippett, with Claire Cormie now switched from flute to piccolo, and with the piano’s percussive quality ably laced into the mix by Alex Little (whose excellent technique had been evident earlier in an excerpt from Schubert’s famous Piano Quintet in A Major (D. 667)). With wood-blocks and high piccolo to the fore at the top of the sound, Little’s part shifted to a motivic role, with the rest of the ensemble delivering nicely jerky cross-rhythms, into which the angularity of bass-drum entered in.

The metrical nature of this composition, and of its emphasis on on the element of percussion, was by now evident. Cashian now, three times at least (but just for a fraction each time), gave us a momentary hiatus in the very impressive ensemble of professional and younger musicians : the percussive beating, which had returned, and the prominently and excellently played trombone (from Katherine Surridge), alongside Sinfonia’s Paul Archibald on muted trumpet, thrillingly halted, allowing us, perhaps, an unimpeded heartbeat.

Once more, triangle sounded, heralding a slowing – probably physiologically, as well as emotionally, for players and listeners alike… Again, we had Cormie’s flute, paired with Thomas Mullock on oboe, and with a feeling of suspension soon added by Little, and by Imogen Ridge (a Britten Sinfonia Academy Associate) on harp. Again, the sensation of a heart a-beating, before a transition to a different constellation of oboe, harp and trumpet. Maybe we sensed that we were nearly through, but the return of the pizzicato section, double-basses and cellos up front, clinched it : with a variation in the pattern of tones from the wood-blocks, the piece came to a sudden end.

And to very appreciative applause for this energetic and enlightening partnership, between older and newer, in an adventure in music !



Other highlights :

* Claire Cormie performing confidently centre stage as flute soloist, ringed by cellists, in Bachianas Brasileras No. 5, a well-worn path (comprising, in short sonata form, an Ária followed by a Dança) - not least as performed by Sir James Galway on his album Annie's Song (for which he made his own arrangement, for flute instead of soprano voice) - but sounding fresh, and with Caroline Dearnley's lead with the pizzicato (who is no doubt an inspiration to the seven younger cellists (not all playing full-size instruents as yet))

* Alexandra Reid's interview, both with Cormie, and with Joseph Cowie, who had just played double-bass in the extract from Schubert's unusually scored Piano Quintet (please see above) - it was a delight to hear Joe saying how playing a chamber piece had taught him that the visual cues between players are as important, if not more so, than what one hears one's fellow musicians doing : for the listener in the hall, watching that communication (be it nods to come in, or smiles at some lovely moment) is a valuable part of concert-going, just as seeing the bright joy that illuminates even, say, Dearnley's face (as a well-established member of the Sinfonia) at passages or turns of phrase that are clearly favourites (please see below)


In rehearsal, in advance of the concert at West Road
(by kind permission of Britten Sinfonia)


* A good choice of opener, the Coriolan Overture of Beethoven (Op. 62, from 1807) gave one the chance to observe Sinfonia and Academy players working together in solid repertoire as an ensemble - as well as hearing the piece not for massed forces or in the context of the all-too-frequent overture / concerto / symphony type of programme, but leading into some chamber pieces

* If any of the Academy's string-players were able to hear Britten Sinfonia's programme with Patricia Kopatchinskaja (as director and violin soloist, in Cambridge on 3 March 2014), they would have been able to feed into their gestation of Bartok's Romanian Folk Dances (from 1915) for this concert not only her 'unstraight' performance, but also her enthusiasm and passion for this music : needless to say, the suite was played with less of Kopatchinskaja's wildness, but movingly, with energy and delight (which one could see in Dearnley's smile), and with Reid's patent encouragement as director***

* Finally nailing that little tune, which marks the hours / divisions between segments of Radio 3's (@BBCRadio3's) Through the Night (and is only played marginally more frequently than Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 In F Minor (Op. 21) (which one can reckon on hearing, during this sequence of broadcasting only, at least once per week !)), as the opening of the last movement, the Madrigal - Nocturne, from Darius Milhaud's suite of film music (along with that of Honegger and Désormières) for La cheminée du roi René**** (1939)




End-notes

* With a strong resonance in Francis Bacon’s architectural approach to, in particular, his later work.

** As exemplified by his Tango, for solo piano, from 1940 (or, more simmeringly, in his Ebony Concerto, written for clarinettist / band-leader Benny Goodman in 1945).

*** It may be scored so, rather than being Reid's doing, but one could several times see three other violinists near her taking a phrase in turn, after her lead, in the solo part.

**** Which the programme-note translates, as if unambiguously, as 'chimney', although the word means 'fireplace', when used within a property...




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday 24 June 2014

Ever-ambitious¹ Aimard wows with authenticity

This is a review of Pierre-Laurent Aimard's solo piano recital in June 2014

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

24 June (updated, with link, 6 July)

This is a review of a solo piano recital given on Monday 23 June 2014 at The Maltings, Snape, by Pierre-Laurent Aimard during the 67th Aldeburgh Festival (@aldeburghmusic), as also relayed live on Radio 3 (@BBCRadio3)

Also on Aldeburgh...

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

The Humphrey and Andy Show (Britten on Camera)



The best £13 ever spent !


Why are all concert / recital programmes not like this, mixing memory and desire, as Eliot once wrote ?

That was written at the end of the first half, but it could have been inspired by later seeing the Aldeburgh music booklet ‘Leaving a legacy in your will’, which has Eliot on the back cover (You are the music while the music lasts (which seems sure to be from Four Quartets)), and the words Make Your Mark¹ on the front :

If Pierre-Laurent Aimard (PLA – just as Kristin Scott Thomas is always KST in these postings) has not made his mark on people’s consciousness to-night, that of the bewitched audience at The Maltings, Snape, and in those listening to Radio 3 (@BBCRadio3), he never will !


PLA at The Friends' Reception


(One almost hesitates, having perfectly seen those fingers and hands crossing, separating, interlocking, even one above the other, to go to the Radio 3 web-site and Listen Again (for seven days only), but, as one of my fellow occupants of the front row suggested, one wants to hear again the juxtapositions that PLA has made here.)



He has built on the wonderful curation in past Aldeburgh Festivals, both in partnership with the amazing Tamara Stefanovich (on both one and two pianos), and his solo piano non-stop miscellanies, which had seemed, until last night, to be ground-breaking music marathons. Not that they were not, but PLA has now shattered the unhelpful image of separateness in and between composers and their compositions, and, with the sheer dynamism with which he interpreted these two, differing halves, thrown down a sort of gauntlet to the question of what we listen to – and why : with the first sounding as though it contained some Scriabin (although it actually did not, because studies of his, exquisitely rendered, had only been scheduled, according to the running order, after the interval), the second with a complete short set of pieces by Bartók, whose score alone (and not exclusively) was remarkable for resembling pyramids, upwards triangles of notation.


 Afterwards, when a couple was heard comparing this Festival very positively with previous ones², they appeared (unless they were talking about another performer) to be saying that PLA’s response is an intellectual response, not an emotional one, whereas one could not agree less. Yes, he is clearly a shy man (on the level of being unassuming, but proud of what he has the conviction to attempt, and succeed with), but he clearly accepts that a public face is part of performance (as, maybe, Glenn Gloud could not), and he entered into this recital as another John Ogden (who, one is glad, is being recalled just now on Radio 3) :

 No one who saw Ogden, for all that he had these feats of memory and technique at his fingertips (pun intended), could doubt how brilliantly he felt the music in his soul. (Quite apart from whether having the experience of worlds known to Alexander Scriabin [the programme prefers the spelling 'Skryabin'] allowed Ogden to enter into the landscape of his harmony, and make so many remarkable recordings that we can go to³.) With PLA, one could see the pleasure, joy, surprise, anguish and discomfort with what all this music, at its height, had to say to him from the page.

 He has little physical resonance with the look of Ogden on stage, but there was a resemblance in that he had clearly fixed the order of works in his head not only so that he could transition into the next one as the page-turner moved the concertina, booklet or collection of pages that was (as the case might be) the score, but be fully present to the music in each case :

And this was not ‘compartmentalization’ at all, in no sense a glib characterization of the next composer, but internalizing the essence not only of the moment, but also of the connection that he had, in scheduling the works, made with what went before : the quotation from Eliot is so relevant here, that, whilst the music – in each case – lasted, he was not only with it, but was it.




A butterfly on the lavender in the lovely garden at By The Crossways
(where The Friends' Reception was held)


 Performers as different as Stile Antico (@stileantico), Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia), and (to name but one other pianist) Vladimir Horowitz⁴ all have had their notion of a sequence, but the programme of PLA’s two halves was curated in such a way that we only (especially if one had a clear view of PLA’s hands, and where he was on each score) incidentally noticed the practice-elements in these various Études, such as octaves, chimes, dissonances, or even what, at the beginning of the very first piece, presented just as a simple scale (and how it developed from there !).

He had not, of course, not just jumbled these pieces all together, and the programming alone deserves enormous acclaim (though could another have brought off delivering it ?), alongside the precision and pianism with which PLA played. (Some might have wanted to follow the listing, to see what he was playing, where ‘we had go to’, but that seemed unnecessary (although one was partly still playing The Radio 3 Guessing Game, when, having switched on during a piece, one tries to guess what it is, before it is announced).)

 More so than through enviable technique and stamina, it was in the integrity, the conviction that this should – and would – work. Rarely, then, in a second half will we have heard the top note struck and stroked to such effect, but entirely integrally and organically, as much as finding pentatonic scales, or bell-notes, and chimes. PLA did seem to be saying two things very clearly :

 Why do we need opus numbers, keys, and sets of pieces so often brought to us as sets⁵, etc. ?
More importantly :

 Why, in all these things, do we seek what divides music from music ?
Do not just take @THEAGENTAPSLEY's word for it that this recital excelled - read The Guardian's review, which gave it five stars, and with the following extract from which one cannot at all disagree !

Yet he will surely never make a more heartfelt tribute to Ligeti than this recital, where he placed the Hungarian composer squarely in the context of the piano greats. This was an exquisitely constructed programme, interlacing 12 Ligeti studies with 12 by Debussy, Chopin, Bartók and Scriabin, first paired and then heard in blocks of three. It made for spellbinding listening.

Rian Evans

Also on Aldeburgh...

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

The Humphrey and Andy Show (Britten on Camera)


End-notes

 ¹ In the good way, that of extending an ambit, here that of musicality and the true life that is, and is of, music.

 ² Not, though, that they seemed in any way let down with them, but highly impressed this time, whereas, at The Friends’ Reception on Sunday, someone had sounded a note that there had been uncertainty about how successful of this year, but that it – and PLA – had proved him or her wrong.

 ³ An excellent choice, made available by gullivior, is his interpretation of Beethoven's Opus 111...

 ⁴ Who could seem almost impatient to move on to the next piece in a recital, and not to be ruffled by applause…

 ⁵ In a recent piano recital (15 February) in King’s College Chapel (@ConcertsatKings), Leon McCawley (@leonmccawley) had brought us Rachmaninov’s whole Opus 32 (from 1910) in his second half, Thirteen Preludes, and, stunningly nice though it was to hear them through (the familiar and the less familiar), they made no connection of this kind :

 Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Brahms were still the other side of the interval, in another place. And, with the Songs Without Words, there had seemed little feeling for the three pieces played : how often (and what does it tell us ?) might we have been to a recital where we could take or leave staying after the interval ? (Yet, to give an example, Sodi Braide’s all-Liszt second half redeemed a performance at Cambridge Summer Music Festival where one had initially felt exactly that.)


Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday 23 June 2014

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)



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday 11 June 2014

Post-Concussion Syndrome

In the wake of this review of Concussion (2013)

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

12 June

* Contains spoilers *

In the wake of this review of Concussion (2013)

One can just imagine it* !

They’ve got on set, they’ve filmed fifteen set-ups, and suddenly realize that – apart from a discussion at the party, with its idle prurience about how one ‘becomes a lesbian’ – they have overlooked something…

At stages such as script-meetings, revisions, read-throughs, etc., it is incredible that no one spotted the panther on the porch, the slug in the sauna – undetected, because noticeable only by not being present** : Concussion (2013) had missed an element.

Or it is later on, after other stages such as rushes, previews, re-edits, focus-groups, that a film almost totally peopled by undressing, de-stressing, caressing, congressing… is seen, despite all this, to have a flaw : who is divorced from all the sybaritic intensity, thereby making this not a State-side Blue is the Warmest Colour (La vie d’Adèle – Chapitres 1 et 2) (2013), but more like Jeune et Jolie (2013) – which no one*** should call Young and Beautiful.

Yet it is, say, Jeune et Jolie meets the world of (the far less successful, but French) Bright Days Ahead (Les Beaux Jours) (2013), for this is more comedic… In fact, it has all the fluffiness of films such as Pretty Woman (1990) – but between women. Whence 'the marketing problem' : No key token man in sight !

For the lecherously nosy guy at the party is just a libidinous cameo (with a plot-purpose to sate our priapic needs about Abby), and Abby’s partner Kate’s (Julie Fain Lawrence’s) divorcing client, desirous of a ‘shitty’ loft (as Justin calls it), barely registers - alongside Lawrence - in their brief scenes. Even with Justin (Johnathan Tchaikovsky), Abby’s (Robin Weigert’s) handy friend with tools, there is nothing about him that compellingly foregrounds him.

Yes, in terms of the plot, he is not inconsequential – though we have to credit that, when he suddenly suggests sleeping with other women for money, it is somehow passed off as natural that he does so now, but without seemingly having referred to such things before. For all that, he has no presence as any sort of ‘arranger’ of Abby’s liaisons, because he is really only an intermediate between the matter-of-fact, but barely mysterious, The Girl (Emily Kinney) and her.


So, the question arises :

Could Justin have been made into a male part, at the last minute, to make this less like an all-female film, as Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac) (2013) is - and is happy to be - an all-male one… ?

What are the dynamics that makes that role necessarily that of a man (just as it was asked before whether it matters that Abby’s partner is not a man****) ?


End-notes

* Well, at any rate, @THEAGENTAPSLEY did.

** Like the universe’s missing anti-matter ?

*** Since ‘jolie’ means pretty (feminine form), not beautiful (and Marine Vacth, lovely and accomplished though she is, is not (yet) beautiful...

**** Some reviewers assume, because of some comment about Kate’s surname, that Abby and she are married – unlikely, perhaps, since a court only ruled in New Jersey at the end of last year that gay marriage must be allowed.




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

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

12 June







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