Monday 14 December 2015

A supple rendition of Messiah from a modern orchestra and its chorus

This reviews Messiah, performed by Britten Sinfonia and Britten Sinfonia Voices

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 December (link to additonal review added, 22 December)

This is a review of Messiah, performed in Cambridge by Britten Sinfonia and Britten Sinfonia Voices at West Road Concert Hall, conducted by Eamonn Dougan and led by Thomas Gould, on Tuesday 14 December at 7.30 p.m.





Part I

Adeptly keeping the movements ‘ticking over’ was one of the many strengths of this performance by Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) and Britten Sinfonia Voices, under the leadership of Thomas Gould (@ThomasGouldVLN) and the baton of Eamonn Dougan (@ejdougan).
With, for example, the recitative for accompanied bass ‘For behold, darkness shall cover the earth’, which runs into an air for bass voice (Robert Davies), the transition was smooth, and both from one movement to the next, and within them, the orchestra evoked a feeling of chiaroscuro that matched a text that told of the people that walked in darkness having seen a great light. Many believe that Charles Jennens, the librettist of Messiah (HWV 56), was also that of Israel in Egypt (HWV 54), which was premiered three years earlier, to the month (almost to the day), and one cannot easily forget the like moment when Israel is still in captivity*, and Pharaoh and the Egyptian people being visited by plagues…


In the following Chorus, ‘For unto us a Child is born’, one both experienced something like that halo effect, from a core group of instrumentalists, that one associates with Bach’s St Matthew Passion (BWV 244), and noticed how neatly the bowing and the turns, according to Thomas Gould’s example, were executed : in his writing, Handel has musically prepared us for the change of focus and for the pastoral mood that ushers in the nativity. Here, then, he gives us nothing more elaborate than a cadence, and no word-painting, at the end of the accompanied soprano recitative, when the shepherds were sore afraid.

 Nicely pacing the further sections of recitative, with these familiar Christmas passages from Luke’s gospel, Carolyn Sampson made us ready to be greeted by trumpets – and, nice though it can be to hear the expertise of playing a natural horn, we had the warm assurance that we were not going to get split-notes or wavering pitch from Paul Archibald and Jo Harris :




When, following this moment, Carolyn Sampson finally came to an air, ‘Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Sion’, the string ensemble that we heard with her was nimble, and her voice was honeyed, with only a little vibrato in the higher register. Straight after, alto Iestyn Davies had a recitative, and then an air, and there seemed to be a tranquillity not just to such words as He shall feed His flock like a shepherd ; and He shall gather the lambs with His Arm, but to his voice itself. In another air, Sampson employed a little coloratura, and then there was a Chorus that closed Part I.



Part II

In the alto air ‘He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows’, following a short initial Chorus, Iestyn Davies was superbly judged as to pacing, and depth of tone – in a movement that is best with a careful and controlled overview, it was a delight to hear an approach gained from an experience of operatic roles put to good use.

As noted below (in the second paragraph, below, concerning Part III), and with Gould’s skilled leading, Dougan had chosen to emphasize the concerto feel in Handel’s score, probably in conjunction with how portamento was employed in the alto part. Thus, there were longer bow-strokes, but also Spring-like flourishes, and, with the string-colour, they made an excellent match with the celebrated purity of Davies’ timbre.


Particularly in the Chorus ‘Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows’, Emma Feilding and Jessica Mogridge beautifully interpreted the writing for oboe, which one was excellently placed to hear**. The size of the orchestra (and of the venue) means that one can appreciate it as a pervasive aspect (rather than Handel’s occasionally using brass), which makes for a very significant part of the sound of the work. (It has not been noticed before, but, in the Kyrie of the Requiem Mass in D Minor (K. 626), is Mozart making a reference to Messiah here, with his choice of fugal-subject ?)


In an important sequence linked by tenor voice, two passages of accompanied recitative (the first was heard with vibrant, angular strings) led up to a very modern-sounding air. Before it, in the second section of recitative, Allan Clayton movingly gave us the hollow feeling of the Messiah in the situation described by the text, and in the deepening of the hurt, with the repeated words in the second half of the sentence :

 Thy rebuke hath broken His heart ; He is full of heaviness
The second air, after even more desolate words from Isaiah (He was cut off out of the land of the living ; for the transgressions of Thy people was He stricken), reapplies them prophetically, and the gospel perspective accordingly changes the viewpoint completely to the divine one (with But Thou didst not leave His soul in hell, nor didst Thou suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption).

Although there is brief refreshment in the lovely soprano air ‘How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace’, in which we felt solace through Sampson’s voice, Part II continues, and concludes, in a less personal vein of theology in global terms : the refusal of God’s authority, rebellion against his rule, and the vanquishment of the rebels (when the libretto has ‘the Lord shall have them in derision’, Dougan had that laughter in the strings). Victory and a celebratory frame of mind are part of the pattern here.

 From the perspective of the Hanoverians, the way in which, just four years later, The Jacobite Rebellion was to be bloodily put down would be seen just in these terms, beginning by how it ended disastrously for the Jacobite cause at The Battle of Culloden (on 16 April 1746, again almost to the day).

In this performance of Part II, the Chorus 'Hallelujah, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth', with which it concludes, was attended with great dignity, but avoiding the not unusual sense of pomp (or, as far as one was aware, people standing in some sort of patriotic erectness), which can draw too much notice to the form, rather than the intention, of the libretto. A modest pause then preceded Part III.



Part III

 Maybe it was no more than having stayed three times near Fishamble Street in Dublin, and been taken, during a literary guided walk, to the site of the Great Music Hall there where Messiah had first been performed (on 13 April 1742), but there seemed to be an Irishness, in the lilt of the voice, and tone of the instrumentalists, to the famous soprano air that starts Part III, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’. Sampson was radiant, as she had been throughout the evening, and clearly relished embodying conviction in this number.

 In the opening alto air from Part II, one had been struck by the impression of early concerto-writing, with Dougan and Gould bringing out variations in attack and feeling between adjoining passages (please see the second paragraph, above, concerning Part II) : here, the delivery was much more legato, and with delicate flourishes. Continuing with the Chorus ‘Since by man came death’, we had contrasts in mood from soft to declamatory, as between ‘death’ and ‘resurrection’ – within each half of the two scriptural sentences, and between them.


When it came, soon after, to the equally famous ‘The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible’, trumpeter Paul Archibald perfectly accommodated the bass voice of Robert Davies, and in an ensemble whose sound had been integrated and equitably balanced all evening. A peculiarity of the setting (which was one aspect that the pre-concert discussion had addressed, though not this specific point) is the dual rendering of the word ‘raised’ here (and of other words earlier***), a question to which one was made alert from having read Claire Tomalin’s biography of one-time Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Jonathan Swift.

When we first hear ‘raised’ in this bass air, it is as a one-syllable word : Tomalin tells us that, in Swift and Handel’s time, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a literary battle had raged, whether to make it the convention that such a word as ‘raised’, when the –ed ending is not separately sounded, should always be written ‘rais’d’. (With ‘sounded’ itself of course, used in the last sentence, there can be no doubt, because it inevitably has two syllables : in this sentence, then, if those arguing for the convention had not failed, we would now write ‘us’d’****.)

 To recap, when we first (and also in the repeat) hear the words ‘the dead shall be raised’, the word is one syllable, but, when Handel jumps straight back to focus on a shorter part of the phrase, he makes it two syllables. (Indeed, and as we may be used to in choral singing, look through the libretto of Messiah, and, in most words with an –ed ending, it is sounded.) No doubt musicologists have theorized why that is so in the case of this pairing, but the effect appears to be this : that we notice the word less the first time, but, when it immediately reappears in this two-syllable form, it allows Handel to dwell on it with the voice, and draw attention to it as an action.


The soprano air ‘If God be for us, who can be against us’ is the last item with a soloist in Messiah, and this was a very special moment. Not uniquely, the Sinfonia reduced here to a small group of instruments (which was probably Caroline Dearnley on cello, Benjamin Russell (bass), Stephen Farr (organ), with leader Thomas Gould), since one can hear other examples of this sort of treatment (or even, for example, see soprano Lynne Dawson here, with an ensemble [the clip has no acknowledgements] where, in much younger days, Stephen Cleobury is the conductor (but here just brings the players in)).

However, in playing obbligato for this air, Gould brought so much more expressiveness than in that example, and such sensitivity to playing to accord with Carolyn Sampson and her voice, that the experience was a thing of beauty : with one’s unquestioned mainstay for the piece in the group of Sinfonia players, the sense of adventurousness, even riskiness, in his playing, and how it fitted to her artistry, was compelling. As one says, the moment was very special, and (as, in contrast to those, say, in the St Matthew) it then almost made Handel’s task harder in achieving the effect of the concluding Choruses :

Given post-mediaeval precedents such as Palestrina, Handel is not the first person to set the single word Amen as a movement, but he is scarcely writing in that musical tradition (unless we remember that we are in Dublin ?). Yet does he do so here at such length that it might feel like pastiche (if not, maybe, an extended musical-joke ?) – certainly to begin with, and partly in relation to what preceded, one did wonder.





Possibly one is always wise to wonder, a little, at Handel and his exact motives, but in time the Chorus did build beyond feeling as though it were an exercise, and made an impressive and agreeable end to this evening with Carolyn Sampson, Iestyn Davies, Allan Clayton, Robert Davies, Eamonn Dougan, Thomas Gould, and the whole of Britten Sinfonia and Britten Sinfonia Voices.








End-notes

 * Moses is, of course, looked to as a precursor to the figure of Christ, and likewise the deliverance from bondage and across The Red Sea.

** It is always nice to listen out for Sarah Burnett’s contribution, as the Sinfonia’s principal bassoonist, but doing so is made easier when there is a visual link, and podium and other players intervened this time.

*** For example, in the first Chorus in Part I (just after the air for tenor ‘Every valley shall be exalted’), when we first hear the words And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, that final word ‘revealed’ is two syllables, but it is then sounded as just one.

**** On account of how the dispute became resolved for ordinary writing (if not for scores), we now write raiséd, when we wish to indicate that it is two sounds, but our norm is not to put ‘rais’d’ for one (although one will find that form appearing in texts that have not been modernized when edited).

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Sunday 13 December 2015

Trying too hard to be strange ?

This is a review of The Lobster (2015) (seen at Saffron Screen)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 November (quotation added, 26 December ; link to a new review added, 1 January)
This is a review of The Lobster (2015) (seen at Saffron Screen)



 Director Yorgos Lanthimos (and his co-writer Efthymis Filippou) may tell us that they (intend to) subvert the notion of a film having a story with The Lobster (2015) – though they would hardly be the first, in the history of cinema, to set out to do so. Certainly, in the overlong first forty-five minutes¹, they may set up a situation that is relatively internally coherent², but it appears to be as a point of departure and contrast, and, until then, we could be frankly little less concerned or engaged with what is presented³.




In the original t.v. series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (with Arthur Pewty (Michael Palin) and his wife Deirdre (Carol Cleveland) visiting the marriage guidance counsellor (Eric Idle)), unexpectedly disinhibited behaviour was used to provoke both shock and laughter (partly through shock / embarrassment, partly through incongruity). However, it was never more than a sketch, to which an end – of sorts – was brought (after Pewty has challenged the counsellor and, being told to go away, just does so) : the script has the direction Arthur is then hit in the head with a chicken by a man in a suit of armour.

Fourteen years later, with The Meaning of Life (1983), one essentially has a loosely connected series of sketches (as The Pythons themselves describe it and its genesis in The Pythons' Autobiography By The Pythons (heard via the audio CDs of the interviews)). There, the topic is revisited, as a lesson on sex education to a class of boys abruptly changes gear and (again provoking hilarity, for the reasons given) becomes a practical demonstration of sexual technique⁴.



Into The Lobster, and - not for the first time - seemingly for no more than a gratuitous laugh (since the scene does not obviously have any bearing on what happens⁵), Lanthimos brings this familiar conceit, and adopts it as the inappropriate behaviour of two so-called loners (Colin Farrell (David) and Rachel Weisz (Short-sighted Woman)). In the film’s initial locale (which proves not to be unique in this regard), it dealt with, amongst other things, punishments for what the regime has decided are crimes, and retribution was both swift and Dante-esquely fitted to the offence : in all of this, a curious acquiescence, and with scant notion of rebellion or refusal. (Later on, as will be explored further, there is no sign that anything is different in another place, with other just as arbitrary prohibitions, and painful practices to secure compliance.)



If Farrell and Weisz’s [characters] bizarrely behaving in company has a meaning (beyond a laugh), it is, if not lost, almost submerged. Their trying too hard to look a couple (was Seydoux also meant to be one, with Smiley ?) has now become excessive, but we never did know the conceit behind their needing to be in the company of Seydoux’s parents and play up their status : earlier on, with his flowery speech, Farrell’s character had over-acted (more laughter), but it did not seem to have counted against him, but won him congratulation (though, one must repeat, seemingly purposelessly – what was all this pretence for (other than as a clothes-horse for gags), and to show Farrell better at it than someone else confronted in a shopping-centre).



However, if we do believe the narration (and it is open to question whether we should – please see below), the draconian prohibitions seemed never to have meant anything to Weisz and Farrell (the ‘love story’ that the poster promises ?). Indeed, beyond another joke - albeit, this time, in passing - with the idea of a coded, private language, there actually seems so much freedom (and absence of surveillance or control) that we have scant evidence of needing the elaborate communicative subterfuges of which we are told in the narration (designed, by making Semaphore sound like child’s play, to amuse : as can be seen in this video-clip, linked from the web-site of rottentomatoes.com, @RottenTomatoes).



In fact, having lovers with their (actually or imagined) unseen ruses is no more unique as a subject of comedy than the Pythonesque excess (and it may actually be from another Python sketch, where the team ridicules romanticism – if not from Woody Allen (doing the same with Russian literature) in Love and Death (1975) ?). For The Telegraph (though seemingly only as an endorsement, not as any review that one can conventionally find), Robbie Collin calls the film ‘dizzyingly funny’, but one has to ask, if so, how much other humour he knows, for the first part of the film, when it is not setting out to shock (which it manages with some skill), is arguably not breaking new ground, but doing no more than stringing together largely unrelated satirical material.



Too much, and not all that interestingly, revolves [the wisdom / content of] adages and truisms such as Alone in a crowd, Love will find a way, Birds of a feather flock together, Two’s company, three’s a crowd, and the film actually spends a lot of its extended opening doing no more than exaggerating, in the form of a rigid hierarchy, how those who are not in a couple can be ostracized (often in ways no less cutting than here, if more subtle). (Although we largely leave this setting behind, there is a foray back, but it also serves no clear purpose : it confronts selected people with the truth, but, at best, this sequence really only seems designed to challenge ourselves, with our on-screen desire for blood and retribution [as Haneke does in Funny Games (1997)], and not to move anything on in structural terms.)

The Lobster is well-acted and thought-provoking. It works as a commentary on the way that society conditions its population to pair off and the stigma which surrounds single people.

As a point of reference in Lanthimos' films, and not, of course, to say that he (or his co-writer Filippou) has to do the same again, their last feature-film Alps (Alpeis) (2011) (of which a review is, as yet, still incomplete) also gives us the arbitrary assumption and use of power, at times to violent effect, in a reality that resembles ours, but yet is of its own kind. (As one reviewer of The Lobster remarks (Nick Pinkerton – please see below), the world we are introduced to looks very much like our own in the present day—specifically Ireland, where the film was shot.)

Alps works by duration and disturbingly, by playing out a few strands, principally through one central character. What governs those strands, though not incomprehensible on the level of agreed rules (if agreed under threat), defies being accepted or assimilated because of what it demands. There, Lanthimos achieves his aim without additional elements, baffling us not as to those rules per se, but as to what it implies about this world that things are as they are – again, a world recognizably ours, and so it makes us ask, in our disquiet, why it came to be that way.

[This words displayed above are from a review by Neil White (@everyfilmdteled) who, seemingly insufficiently content with the demands of being Editor of The Derby Telegraph (!), every year sets himself a challenge (largely given by his Twitter-name) : to review it for his blog, trying to watch every film released in the UK, and clocking up hundreds in the attempt. He seems to have surprised himself by now warming to Lanthimos…]



If artistry does come into this film, it does not consist in an ill-judged and repeated failure to resist the temptation to tell a gag (even in the service of superficially giving The Lobster commercial credentials ?), or even in the ‘unconventional love story’ that the poster wants to promote : that part of the story may be, in terms of the rules that are accepted to apply to forbid it, subversive or transgressive, but one can still effectively ask So what ?, because, despite the blatant reference in the first few minutes, we are not talking of those in the position of a Winston Smith or a Julia.

[As alluded to above, there is underground activity, but scarcely in the same way (since it seems centred more on survival ?), and with no real rationale that the screenplay cares to give. At the same time, an absurdist claim could, of course, be made : to show what one will to challenge perceived notions of reality / rationality… Then one is in the territory of Holy Motors (2012), which, however much it may reference cinematic history, for some has a fairly tenuous basis for what it does, and one which also – much more extensively and explicitly – seeks to include discrete and disparate episodes by means of a very modest (undeveloped ?) linking device.]

Though maybe – just maybe – The Lobster is doing something, and much more subtle, that is to do with what it means to use an authorial voice (of, one has to suggest, doubtful reliability therefore) ? Partly on account of the bipartite nature of the film, the narrator is unplaced for a very long while : during that time, and in a cursorily fleeting way, the voice tells us what the loners, as a category, do that means that they behave indistinguishably and as a group. (It is another gag, this time oral, and at the expense of those who listen to electronic music (though headphones), but the jibe comes, and it goes : except to recur as a visual joke, with people in one place, but dancing separately to what they are listening to, it expendably seems to lack rootedness in the fabric of the whole.)


As elsewhere – in a distinctively brittle, almost dry, manner – we were told this so matter-of-factly, so unemotionally, that we might have started wondering why any of this is being told at all (and whether whoever the narrator is pictures it to herself as a story that, maybe unwillingly, she believes). Indeed, just after the brief initial scene, and the shot of Farrell over his right shoulder (which very gently telescopes in on him), we hear this voice, telling us what ‘he’ did, and how he chose his brown shoes : only was there the suggestion, right from the off, that this was an adapted short story or novella ?

The Lobster uses that form, and sometimes the voice-over is very present – and not always adding, but, by over-interpreting or even unnecessarily stating what can be seen, it acts to interpose itself between us and the on-screen world, i.e. an alienation technique (Verfremdungseffekt). (Other reviewers have commented on the stiltedness of the characters' speech. [So, for example, Nick Pinkerton (please also see below) writes all of them deliver dialogue in much the same mannered, tin-eared cadence : unvaryingly measured, stilted in tone, unnervingly to-the-point, and devoid of any softening niceties.] However, if one regards those who are speaking as created by, or creatures of, the narrator, that quality is put in another context : it remains, as it ever is, meaningless to talk about 'what really happened', but here the film is well nigh brought into existence by the voice that tells it.)

At other times, though, it is quite absent, and it seems possible that the device may have been abandoned, yet not, for example, with what happened in The Transformation Room : let alone how what, in general terms, is supposed to have happened there took place, we are kept outside the door that we see Farrell go through. The voice's ignorance (of what went on), that of the unknown 'she', becomes ours – but, in the first place, we only know any of this by placing credence in what the voice tells us, and we might wish to reflect on the silence and the lapse of time with which the film concludes…

 Of course, the deliberate allusion to Room 101 put one in mind of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but, along with thinking that we are in the dystopian genre³, it is probably a misdirection to see Orwell here any more than to make a connection that, in a way, is just as much there with Animal Farm.



For those in search of other thoughts :

* This review (from Nick Pinkerton, of Reverse Shot), from which there have been quotations above, may tell too much for those who have not yet seen the film, but is interesting...

* Peter Bradshaw, for The Guardian, has some good points to make, but lapses - in the third to the fifth paragraphs of his review - into telling us what happens, rather than why we should be watching. (As, for example, he did with a review of The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) (2013)).

* Finally, with the review by Demetrios Matheou (The Arts Desk), we have to bear with his worryingly getting his facts wrong (such as calling Farrell’s character John (not David), and saying that he has been widowed), but it is worth a read.



End-notes

 ¹ Except on the level that the film creates a desire, for this scenario in the screenplay not to continue as it is, which is then sated – even if we scarcely welcome what takes its place, or how that resolves…

 ² By contrast, those who have read in David Eagleman’s small collection Sum : Tales from the Afterlives will know the superlative concision and exactness with which he conceives of numerous different futures.

 ³ People who only choose to look at the world within the film as dystopian are thereby easily failing to credit that elements of it, at least, operate not only on the level of satire, but also of allegory : does calling this filmed world a dystopia, by imagining it as a possible future, thereby miss its applicability, as a deliberate distortion, to our present social norms, practices and trends (such as our expectations of couples, or of single people, and how they may tend to stay with their own kind) ?

 ⁴ Other examples surely abound, but Hale and Pace (not a little obsessed with a stereotypically sexual portrayal of Sweden) could not resist confronting a British couple with a Swedish one, being unnecessarily frank.

⁵ * Contains spoilers * If it is what did change anything (and not what, nearer the relevant time, we hear read aloud), we never have any idea, in all honesty, whether there is an ultimate and licensed aim that their Leader (Léa Seydoux), at whose instigation they are acting, when she, they and one other loner (Michael Smiley) make it The City for short periods, pretending that they belong there.

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday 11 December 2015

The Unthanks - live in two places (work in progress)

Live : The Unthanks at The Stables and The Union Chapel

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

12 November

Live : The Unthanks at The Stables and The Union Chapel

On Saturday 31 October, during their tenth-anniversary tour, The Unthanks made a stop at The Stables*, where they had been heard before, but probably just on one occasion. (Recollection is confused by also having seen A Very English Winter : The Unthanks at Aldeburgh Festival 2012, made for BBC Four.)

 Their playing number from that incarnation (as Rachel Unthank and The Winterset) substantially remain : Rachel and Becky Unthank themselves, and Niopha Keegan, with Adrian McNally (then their producer) taking the place of their former pianist (Belinda O’Hooley), and with guitarist and bass-player Christopher Price completing the five-piece line-up.



First set :

 1. Low Down in the Broom – Traditional (learnt from Nancy Kerr)

2. A sea shanty [‘One of the cleaner ones’] – Billy Rich

3. On a Monday Morning – Cyril Tawney [Cruel Sister]

4. I Wish - Traditional [The Bairns]

5. A Great Northern River – Graeme Miles [Diversions, Volume 3 : Songs from the Shipyards]

6. Mount the Air – Traditional [Mount the Air]

7. Annachie Gordon – Traditional (learnt from Nic Jones** ?) [Here's the Tender Coming]

8. Sea Song – Robert Wyatt [Diversions, Volume 1 : The Songs of Robert Wyatt and Antony & The Johnsons, Live from The Union Chapel, London]

9. The Gallowgate Lad – Joe Wilson [Last]


 To start the gig, Rachel and Becky Unthank came onto the stage at The Stables (@StablesMK), without instruments except the duo of their voices, to sing (1) ‘Low Down in the Broom’ (which Becky had learnt from Nancy Kerr), followed by (2) a sea shanty.

 They said that they wanted to remind themselves and us how they had begun as a pair of sisters, desiring a way to get into folk festivals free. This evening, when trying to start the first number, even they were surprised to be reliving having the giggles, several times – eventually, they controlled setting each other off, after Rachel had remarked that they found, back then, that stopping drinking wine before singing helps.

 In the first of these a capella performances, The Unthanks were haltingly syllabic in how it was paced, with words carefully ‘placed’ in the air. They showed us that they were communicating, in strophic form, intense and heartfelt emotions, and, just hearing them, one was quickly reminded both of Rachel’s killer vocal timbre, and the ‘innerness’ of how their harmonies sound.

[On Thursday 10 December, when it came to the gig at The Union Chapel (@UnionChapelUK), it also began a capella (but they did not repeat the fit of giggling, of which there was no hint). Familiar with the format, one could seek to take in the space and look of the venue, with its feeling of inclusiveness from the fact that no one was very far from the stage.]
On hand-pumped harmonium (and with additional vocals), Niopha Keegan joined Rachel and Becky for (3) ‘On A Monday Morning’, and, when she opened with the lyrics, Rachel vocally embodied the feeling of devastating realization, and its rawness, in this song of the demands of ordinary working life. To it, Becky brought her own, smoky tone-colour in turn, and the treatment was exposed and hurt, maybe more so than on the first Winterset album Cruel Sister (which the band did not seem keen to acknowledge much afterwards).

Adrian McNally, no more wearing a dress than he did at the later gig [but there saying that he had never looked as masculine as when in one], came on for (4) ‘I Wish’. With a drone from the harmonium, and echoed by Becky’s voice, one had a strong sense of the devastation in Rachel’s voice, more so than on the album. Yet the piano part came across as a little too ‘arty-farty’ to be impressionistic (which was later explained by being told that Adrian was newly playing some of these numbers live), and the whispered words of doomed hope were too obvious to work well [and had greater effect at The Union Chapel].


With ‘A Great Northern River’, part of a project with Richard Fenwick at Tyneside Cinema, we welcomed Christopher Price, a multi-instrumentalist, and also described as ‘very cheerful’. (Originally from Barnsley, and now local, as a resident of Hitchin – with the inevitable comment that this attracted.) Becky’s voice was bright, but breathy, with Rachel’s sharper than it had been, and ‘longer’, and they were accompanied by gentle, inflected violin, and quiet guitar, the song ending with a little flourish from the latter. We were told that we would hear a five-minute version of (6) ‘Mount The Air’, in which Niopha gave us turns and inflections on violin, and, when Christopher came in on guitar, he used a plucked effect. The song was unknown as yet, and so such a very short vocal was unexpected (just eight lines in A Dorset Book of Folk Songs (1958)).


The number (7) ‘Annachie Gordon’ is taken from the third album (the first released as The Unthanks), and although it is said, of he of the song’s title, He’d entice any woman, it is more about Jeanie, and her unwilling marriage. Intensely and painfully so, but (wherever the song is recorded as dating to**) one cannot take its romantic representations of love and death literally, on the other hand. Thus there is a bitter contrast between ‘When she and her maidens / So merry should have been’, and Rachel, empty, with lines such as these, and our feeling bereft and aghast at what unfolds :

The day that Jeanie married
Was the day that Jeanie died



For no discernible reason (not at this remove, anyway - despite having consulted the original document, before transcription), the review-notes here mention ‘Man is the Baby’ (in connection with The Unthanks’ live recording, at The Union Chapel itself, of The Songs of Robert Wyatt and Antony & the Johnsons). In fact, Becky quite clearly introduced (and, with a directness of tone, started the vocals to) something from the complementary part of that album, (8) ‘Sea Song’ by Robert Wyatt, stressing that, suggesting that she might sing it, Adrian had first introduced it to her. [She said so at both gigs, but, at The Union Chapel, was candid in admitting not then having appreciated the significance of the idea of covering the song.]

Both sisters were fully in their stride now [in both gigs, though one has forgotten, regarding The Union Chapel, which set it was in, or how many were then on stage – though, against this, an on-line set-list suggests that it was not played at all ?], but Rachel, in particular, brought rich yearning to the lyrics, which were overlaid on violin and harmonium. Later, there was what resembled a rumba bass-line from Christopher, who, when we went into an instrumental section, gave us a spooky, tapping bass-effect. At the end, the performance went up yet another notch, with the frankness and natural strength of Rachel’s voice.


In the first verse of (9) ‘The Gallowgate Lad’, there is the line Says she, quite dejected, I’s sad, and we heard the dejection feelingly extend to and with the held word ‘sad’, and the loss, because her Gallowgate lad*** has joined the militia. Forces of softly played violin, harmonium, bass and piano provided the accompaniment, until, with time, Niopha brought her line to fore, at first simple and free, then embellished. The rendition gave a real sense of desertion and desolation, and, at the end, the violin line came back in as a way of both acknowledging and departing from it.


More to come...



End-notes

* The Stables (@StablesMK) is at Wavendon, on the western outskirts of Milton Keynes.

** It appears (according to Wikipedia®) that the ballad is not known to have a basis in history (the place-name Buchan is mentioned, however, which is in Aberdeenshire), and that the original lyrics first appeared in North Countrie Garland (Maidment, 1824) and Ancient Ballads and Songs, Volume 2 (Buchan, 1828).

 Nic Jones recorded a version on his album The Noah’s Ark Trap (1977) (and so have various others, including Mary Black : for ease of comparison, the Wikipedia® web-page reports the text of the lyrics used in some of these versions).

*** Every stanza ends with a line that invokes him, with varying adjectives, e.g. My bonny bit Gallowgate lad.




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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This is less a review than a recommendation of The Tree (Drevo) (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

12 November

This is less a review than a recommendation of The Tree (Drevo) (2014)

For some, if a film is predicated on a situation that is full of tension , but largely unexplained (or is revealed, with the passage of time, only in small pieces, but not totally), it is then provocative of questions, asked noisily of their companion(s), such as ‘Why is he doing that ?’ or ‘What is happening now ?’.

 Fortunately, for watching The Tree (Drevo) (2014), the screen was devoid of those obviously desirous of additional information : for it is hardly good, to that inherent tension, when viewers of that kind stray into a film that was never meant for them, and, to meet their need to know things and what it all means, feel entitled to make such enquiries (heard). (Or is it just that, fearing that they have overlooked the obvious, they unfairly credit those whom they are sitting with having gleaned what they did not gather – usually doing in a way that cannot be easily ignored, and all the while overlooking that it is the film’s character itself denying us all, and that the film-makers choose to withhold the wider context to what detail we may see ?)
In this case, the film opens very quietly, in a place that we do not maybe straightaway construe as being enclosed, but as on the edge of a sandy road in a quiet location : in shots that are jumbled as to their angle or content, we see the ground, white-washed walls, and an androgynous child on a bicycle, with tassles as seeming adornments, and in fairly aimless perambulation on it.

But it proves not be such an open space (or – though it is actually unimportant whether this is so – maybe it was, and evoked earlier times, which have been subsumed by the present experience ?). And there is a piece of symbolism – which may also literally equate with the central givens of the film – in the child discovering, and burying, a dead bird in the yard. Already we have a sense of the concerns that we will be handling.

 Possibly, that to which those miss giving full attention, when puzzling over what they learn from the unfolding of what is shown, and trying to make sense of it (in cultural, religious, or other terms), is that the three central characters (the youngest being protected from it by his mother and brother*) themselves also do not know what sense to make of it – it just seems to have become an unavoidable fact of their lives. They have tried, but they cannot easily live in that knowledge of that fact, and they do seek ways to subvert its application. This is precisely where the beauty of this brilliant piece of film-making lies, irrespective of seeing it as allegorical or symbolic (in recalling the film’s ending, one is reminded of the changed mood at the end of Kafka’s short story Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis).
For once, one cannot easily disagree with how IMDb (@IMDb) describes the film, in one sentence :

 The Tree is a chamber piece drama that vivisects family values, almost like in ancient tragedies determined by doom.


End-notes

* The otherwise undivided sections of the film, of unequal length, were each headed by the name of one of the three.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Sunday 6 December 2015

At Lunch 1 : More than two centuries of the horn in chamber music

This review considers Britten Sinfonia’s At Lunch 1 programme, given in Cambridge

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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6 December (Britten Sinfonia Tweet added, 22 December)

This review considers Britten Sinfonia’s programme for At Lunch 1, given at West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge, on Tuesday 1 December 2015 at 1.00 p.m.


At Lunch 1, heard at West Road Concert Hall (@WestRoadCH), was an intriguing piece of programming from Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) – past experience would lead one to expect no less ! It looked at the connections between, and influence or resonance of, Beethoven’s Horn Sonata* and Brahms’ so-called Sonatensatz (please see below), which was not published until 1906 (after his death) :

Regarding the origins of the latter, there is a lovely account (on the web-site of The Kennedy Center), of Brahms, at the age of twenty, meeting violinist Joseph Joachim (five years after hearing him perform Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Opus 61), Joachim spending time with him and effecting an introduction to Clara and Robert Schumann, and how the latter was to acclaim Brahms, and thereby make his name known, in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (in an article called ‘New Paths’, which appeared in the edition dated 23 October 1853).

 As a result of meeting the Schumanns, as well as fellow composer Albert Dietrich, Brahms contributed a Scherzo** to a collaborative violin sonata, in honour of Joachim, and which was then presented to him : Dietrich wrote the first movement, and Schumann the second-movement Intermezzo and finale. This Scherzo is the Sonatensatz (which may sound grand in German, but just means a movement from a sonata).


1. Beethoven ~ Horn Sonata*, Opus 17 (1800)
2. Edward Nesbit (1986-) ~ Lifesize Gods (2015)
3. Brahms (1833-1897) ~ Sonatensatz (1853)
4. Huw Watkins (1976-) ~ Horn Trio (2008)


First, though, the Sinfonia’s principal pianist Huw Watkins and guest artist Richard Watkins on horn played (1) the Beethoven Horn Sonata*, Opus 17 (1800), after the latter had introduced it*** and, as we inevitably had an unvoiced query, answering it by telling us that they are no relation (though they first met through his having played with Huw’s brother ?).


Solo horn commences the sonata, which, in its opening, has strophic writing for the piano, with and around which the horn-player can then be both lyrical as well as declamatory (supported by the pianist). The writing of the Allegro moderato briefly gives us a moment of sadness, but Richard Watkins also brought out the score's considerable subtlety, and we could appreciate how the use of structure in the piece poses no obstacles to our appreciation of the instrument**, but is facilitative of its sound and of our embracing it.

 The very short Poco adagio has the effect, in the minor key, of more explicitly using the form of call and response, from the horn to the piano, and of so serving as a transition to the Rondo finale, marked Allegro molto, and which is characterized by lively triplets in the piano part, to performing which Huw Watkins brought great delicacy (as to the whole).

The mood and expressiveness of the movement do vary up and down, but, if a little ponderously, it builds to a climax, and then – on the verge of seeking harmonic resolution – the players are faced with the hesitancy with which Beethoven’s writing presents them. Needless to say, they enacted the emotion of this delay to perfection, and could then bring the work to its due conclusion.


If one had more time and concentration, novels such as this one would follow up Cambridge English graduate and novelist Ali Smith's excellent The Accidental


Edward Nesbit introduced his work (2) Lifesize Gods (2015), newly commissioned by the Sinfonia in conjunction with Wigmore Hall, and (as he no doubt was to do at Wigmore Hall (@wigmore_hall) - please see below) confirmed the programme-notes in telling us that the title refers to Ali Smith’s novel How to be both, and her character Francesco del Cossa’s himself being commissioned (to make a fresco), but without adding more context – one guesses that one has to refer to the novel. He said that the first movement was very short, had been worked on this time last year, and used repetitions of bars, chords, or even notes, whereas the second had been through-composed.
In that opening section, one was aware of a sense that, amongst these repetitions, there was a trapped space between the aetherial writing for violin (the Sinfonia’s leader, Jacqueline Shave) and that, of a ‘light’ and disembodied character, for horn (Richard Watkins). As it developed, there were further contrasts, and momentum built, but it did not break free long. In the violin part, though, there came an impression of an air, or of a gig, and the direction became less restrained, even fantasy like, as the back of the movement felt to be broken open. Nonetheless, hesitation, and the recurrence of the repetitive elements, led us to an end.



 The second movement definitely felt inspired by dance, and there were to be reminders, first of Stravinsky, and then of Messiaen. Also, the motif of call and answer that had been part of the Beethoven sonata, as well as Nesbit's using, at one point, a massive suspension of the sound of the horn over quite staccato piano and a light pizzicato : grasping a sense of the whole, or of its structure, proved fairly difficult, however, and not conducive of attempting to take more notes. Lifesize Gods was well received, and Nesbit took a bow.




Come (3) the Brahms, and, despite a description of it as good fun – and harmless (by William Murdoch, quoted on the web-site of The Kennedy Center), those who know and love his writing for chamber combinations such as violin and piano, or cello and piano, will concur with the Center, in going on to say that, although written when Brahms was still very young, the music bears his characteristic qualities : rich harmonic vocabulary, insistent rhythmic vitality, a sure sense of motivic growth and full textures.


 As Sinfonia leader Jacqueline Shave joined Huw Watkins as duo partner, one largely decided just to relish the Brahmsian flavour, so no note was made beyond :

* Vibrant, and at his spirited best

 * Was this completed by Brahms elsewhere ?


Continuing with this attitude, one abandoned the idea of making review-notes for Huw Watkins’ striking (4) Horn Trio (2008), and fully engaged with the work, and later, to sum up the experience, simply Tweeted :
End-notes

 * Apparently (according to Wikipedia®), the score bears the title Sonata for Piano with Horn or Violoncello (Sonate pour le Forte-Piano avec un Cor ou Violoncelle), and thus listing the keyboard instrument first…

** Brahms’ contribution to the sonata, whose manuscript score had been kept by Joachim, was not released for publication until just before Joachim died, and the complete sonata was only published in 1935 (although Schumann had incorporated his part in it into his Violin Sonata No. 3).</

*** History has never stood in the way of a good story about Beethoven’s score being unready for a first performance (e.g. what was famously reported by Ignaz van Seyfried, about the solo part’s incompleteness, when the composer played his own Piano Concerto No. 3 (in C Minor, Op. 37), and he had the job of turning what pages there were).

Whatever may be true, of exactly when (and in what way) the sonata for horn virtuoso Giovanni Punto came to be written (and, so, whether calls for an encore were compromised by Beethoven’s having only written out the cello part, not his own), we may never know. However, it is maybe just as much part of a myth as the one about Mozart (not borne out by autograph scores), and perpetuated by Amadeus (1984) in its way, that his compositions were written straight out perfectly.




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday 30 November 2015

Russian Connections - and our connections to musical life and musicality

This is a review of a recital given by cellist Joy Lisney at Kings Place, London

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

30 November
This is a review of a recital given under the title Russian Connections by cellist Joy Lisney with her father, pianist James Lisney, a debut for both in Hall One at Kings Place, London, on Monday 30 November 2015 at 7.30 p.m.
Igor Stravinsky (in collaboration with Gregor Piatigorsky) ~ Suite Italienne (1933) (an arrangement, for cello and piano, of numbers from his ballet-score Pulcinella (1920))


In the Introduzione, one straightaway realized what, sometimes, is the great and overt immediacy of Joy Lisney’s playing, and the richness of the interpretative means open to her in furtherance of that aim. Apart from this untamed opening, which was fiery in its own right, and no longer merely pleasant pastoral fare, lifted from Pergolesi, it could also just be the way in which she gave us that prominent held note (in the Serenata), or the muscularity, spontaneity, or sheer inventiveness with which she performed the third-movement Aria. Come the next movement, and her emotional dialogue with the work had her letting rip, giving the Tarantella full throttle.

 Predictably (despite a listing of five movements in the programme-notes, but with a dance predicated on wild abandon, even madness), no one had counted that there had only been four, so James (@jameslisney) and Joy Lisney (@JoyLisney) had to wait for keen applause to subside¹ before we could hear that Stravinksy does not intend the suite to end on that high-point, but with a Minuetto e Finale. Here, just as some sculptors say that they find the form within the block of stone, Joy seemed to be sensing the music within the instrument.

 So, she responded to a definite pulse in the piano part, to which her part adds pizzicato notes, and energy was released as and into figuration, passion and the unplanned (though one reference that Joy and James had clearly picked up, in preparation for the event, was a little toreador mention). This was very good communication and listening, with James clearly watching for cues of Joy starting a phrase or coming off at the end of a long, bowed note, and fitting in with the inspirational nuances of the moment, and necessarily the piece was well received at Kings Place.


Benjamin Britten (dedicated to, and first performed by**, Mstislav Rostropovich) ~ Suite for Cello No. 3, Opus 87 (1971)

 Joy Lisney gave us a few comments before presenting us with this most challenging, and assuredly insufficiently well-known, work for solo cello by Britten. She mentioned the Rostropovich connection, which is a fascinating fact of life to be reminded of, at the personal level between composers and muscians (and at the time of so much political distrust), how one is aware of more than one voice at some points, and, in this respect, how one could hear that Britten had been influenced by Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello (BWV 1007–1012).
The suite is in nine parts, but performed without a pause, with – for being sure of the work’s progress – all that that entails. In the opening, marked Introduzione : Lento, one was quite aware of the intense theorbo-like resonance that Joy achieved (i.e. that instrument’s long, open bass-strings), and how this had the effect of rooting it in a ground-bass : not unlike with an undisclosed jazz standard (where one might not quite be able to put one’s finger on it, but know that one hears something 'in disguise'), Joy had also said that Britten has written variations on themes, but that he only clearly gives them to us at the end².


Along with listening out for Bach’s voice, this description informed one’s listening, and, from the first, had one trying to assimilate often fragmentary elements of tonality and melody. In the Marcia : Allegro, perhaps there seemed to be a little hint of Shostakovich (and, later, Bartók ?), and the tone-quality of a pizzicato gesture that, in octaves, now resembled the fretted strings of a theorbo / lute, as it chimed alongside another line of music. Soon, in the Canto : Con moto, it was more like that of a guitar (or a plucked lyre), and Britten sounds to be in dialogue with Bach's Suite No. 1 (BWV 1007).

Probably having already reached Dialogo : Allegretto (via the Barcarolla : Lento), it certainly seemed a just description of what could be experienced – the competing demands of the poles of the player’s physical athleticism around the strings, and the expressiveness of the instrument and the texture of the composition. In the rapt space of Hall One, and at a crux where the material was ceasing to be difficult (and to become more open), one could see that Joy was self-aware as a performer, and fully alive in the act of being one, as she asserted what she found in this suite.


As one can safely state, without the need to give many more examples, Joy demonstrated in the concert-hall both the very great expressive possibilities in this work, and the variety of means through which she could give rise to them. (Likewise, one is trying here to outline the scope of a work that is best, as on the night, heard live – which, of course, is just as true of the Bach suites. That said, it assisted a little to have noticed the words Moto perpetuo earlier, and, knowing that one was hearing one, be able to place roughly where one was.)

 More explicitly than earlier (what Britten had written had been more like hints at parts before), we heard the very lowest register openly talking to the top string, and then addressing an even higher, fluting / piping one. This progress towards integration of disparate voices not only put one in mind of the extreme fragmentation of musical lines in some of Bach’s writing for solo violin, but also indicated the sense of cohesion that presumably gives the performer the conviction to propel this piece across a fully felt trajectory to its conclusion.

 Reminiscent of summative or restorative concluding movements in Bach’s writing for solo cello, there was a soaring, folk-dance quality to the final Passacaglia : Lento solenne (which, again, reminded fleetingly of Bartók). In the event, Britten ended not with rejoicing, but throaty, breathed, very quiet utterances, and one long sostenuto. After a long time of reflective appreciation, the audience burst into applause for this highly impressive playing.




* * * * *


 At the end of the recital (but relevant to mention now), it was intended as a compliment to Joy’s playing and to James’ and her choice of repertoire to say that it had been a very varied programme – except that even a definite form of spoken words can bear a range of meanings in a recipient’s mind. Or the fact that some might say so, but one could validly interpret that they were thereby imputing something negative³, without being direct ?


 Completed in November 1901, the main work in the second half was written 70 years earlier than that with which we had concluded the first, and so the two short arrangements (by Piatigorsky again) of Tchaikovsky that preceded quietly helped bridge the gap with something as different as the Britten (which were Valse Sentimentale and None but the Lonely Heart (Op. 51, No. 6. (1882), and Op. 6, No. 6 (1869), respectively)) – suffice to say, long, lyrical lines, and a sense of yearning.



Sergei Rachmaninov ~ Sonata for Cello and Piano in G Minor (1901), Opus 19 :

 1. Lento - Allegro moderato
2. Allegro scherzando
3. Andante
4. Allegro mosso


The opening Lento of the Sonata for Cello and Piano is exploratory, elegiac, and one heard that Joy was both giving an awareness of the music reaching, and saying that it cannot, on the scale of the whole, yet be felt to be reaching too far. Particularly here for piano, under James Lisney’s adept hands, Rachmaninov’s writing felt very typical of his Piano Concerto No. 2, so it fits well to find that he was composing it at this time (between autumn 1900 and April 1901, his Opus 18, in C Minor) : in terms of chordal progression, and the way in which the cello part develops, one already gets the sense that its voice is more modest, or at least that it feels more difficult for it to be as exposed as the piano part.

Though excellently weaving their roles together, James reflected standing, as if in orchestral terms, more in relation to an ensemble and to tutti passages, with the cello having the work of finding the most fleeting, innermost tenderness, and of giving a real emotional turmoil, especially in freer passages. When Rachmaninov intimated nearing the movement’s end, still he gave us more gradations of feeling, and led us, not yet into a coda, but to James giving us the principal theme on piano. In this way, and in service of the form of the composition, the duo had brought us to where the sonata felt more relaxed, and with a little glimpse of serenity, before a coda that – when it came – held off.


At the start of a movement marked Allegro scherzando, we heard the electricity of the raw, vital bass-line, with Joy expressionistically sawing the note, and, again with a hint of serenity in the midst of what else Rachmaninov is about here (including echoing the cello in a rumble on the piano) : there is tension to be found in this C Minor scherzando, amidst a part for cello that Joy gave a vocal character, and with one for piano that seemed both near and attentive.

 In the year of this sonata, Rachmaninov also wrote his Prelude in G Minor (which, with nine others (as No. 5), was published as his Ten Preludes (1903), Opus 23), and one again has a sense of those kindred works. Moving away from the tension in the writing, he sets the cello off onto a statement, but soon enough brings it back to where it was : throughout the movement, Joy kept us gripped with the sensation that, in musical terms, she could help us glimpse whatever it might be to which the work was pointing, whether regret, yearning, or loss. In this way, Rachmaninov felt quite Schumannesque, alluding to what parts of the surface of the work want (at this stage) to deny.


The Andante has us hear the piano alone first (again, in Rachmaninov’s familiar idiom), and which is then above the cello-line when it enters – whose endeavour, under Joy’s hands, was building the beauty of the given theme, although there continue to be moments when we hear piano solo. If there is a sense of being on a scale where the music is reaching to be elsewhere, restraint is still being exercised, but we had a gradual feeling that the mood was easier, and more restorative, as the parts meshed and engaged with each other :

 Partly that impression comes from their greater interchangeability as to which was in the higher register. Although the piano is placed briefly above the cello near the end of the movement (following, together and separately, some quietly insightful keyboard writing), it ultimately ends with them on a soft par, but with the final notes from piano solo.


In talking about the opening movement (above), it was mentioned that the composition of this sonata was contemporaneous with that of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (in C Minor), which is famous not least both through his status as a concert pianist⁵ and its place in the soundtrack to David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) : it is worth saying that it was not used for nothing by Lean, so to remind us that Rachmaninov makes it easy for us to build (our own) narratives around getting to such exuberance as we are to find in the closing Allegro.

Having kept us waiting (even if the very opening of the sonata is a subtle foreshadowing ?), what he presents us with here is the biggest melody in the piece (along with, in the light of it, the cello’s continuing apparent path of adaptation of its part to its circumstance). James had some coy downwards arpeggios preparatory to, and then providing contrast to, Joy’s searching in and exploring the lusciousness of this material – and then, of a sudden, Rachmaninov signals a change, with a decisive gesture from the cello, and with marching rhythms written just for the piano.

 With an earnest tone set, and as the cello voice begins some gentle arpeggios, one senses that it is still in need of, and responding to, a form of encouragement, and it becomes further in accord with the piano-writing : in the growing self-realization, vigour develops, and Rachmaninov, rhythmically and in energetic terms, creates feelings of being on the verge of ending, and so of resolving what is happening with the theme.

 From the piano first, a few reflective notes end up being all that the cello requires in order to lead to and address the full implications of the main theme, but, having done so, there is a need for a few quieter moments, as of breathing and mentally working through feelings. After the cello has joined in with a soaring peal, and the march-like figure has recurred, we revisited that more tranquil status, but the certainty and enthusiasm of the conclusion was secured now – as was the very great applause with which this performance was received, with a number of people in the audience standing to show their approval !




 The compellingly framed performance of the sonata closed this debut evening at Kings Place, full of energy, invention and passion.


End-notes

 ¹ Also, having heard this happen before, when they gave this work another time (and Joy approached it as a less adventuresome performer than now), it almost deserves the health warning : when the piece sounds as if it is over, hold back, as it does not conclude there !

² Joy has talked on her blog more about the Russian Connections tour, and the repertoire, the composers, and other connections. The first performance was at The Maltings, Snape, on 21 December 1974.

³ In terms of a ‘traditional’ way of putting concerts together, maybe so, but it is not for nothing that some value the approach of ensembles such as Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) : at lunch-time the following day in Cambridge (at West Road Concert Hall (@WestRoadCH)), for the first of this season’s one-hour At Lunch series, three members of the Sinfonia gave us Beethoven (from 1800), a new commission (by Edward Nesbit), Brahms (from 1853), and a work (from 2008) by the orchestra’s principal pianist Huw Watkins (@WatkinsHuw).

⁴ If we consider that Britten was established as a composer by 1935 at the latest, and since Rachmaninov lived until 28 March 1943 (and, probably not helpfully to his survival, was working to the last), the men do actually have a significant overlap to their composing lives.

⁵ Although they have wrongly and for too many decades been disregarded – along with many of his works – he had toured with that work, his third concerto (in D Minor, Opus 30), and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43.




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Sunday 29 November 2015

Less like themselves, more like they want to be

This is a review of The Dressmaker (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

30 November
This is a review of The Dressmaker (2015)


It is almost as though The Dressmaker has been pinned to fit around this one fact : Sunset Blvd. (1950) premiered in Australia, on 25 August 1950.




For want of a better word, the film is set in Dungatar, in 1951, but nothing in the flash of music, the gestures, the stance, remotely desires more than to draw our attention to the fact that there is unfinished business in this implausible, symbolic place – symbolic, because its very set-up is pat in the way that that of films such as High Noon (1952) always was, so that there can be nothing behind its implausibility, if not symbolism. (Here, the paraphernalia of the wild west, and all the stock sights and spectacles of the age’s saloon-bars, have been rolled into one figure.)

Symbolism, but not of any subtle or interesting kind, because it wants to revisit an earlier time of colourless grey, bit by irritatingly nagging bit. As if picking the skin of forgetfulness off an obliging old tangerine, and miraculously penetrating to – although with no means to do so beyond being back there – what had been misremembered, misunderstood, misrepresented. At best, Kate Winslet, in the person of Myrtle Dunnage (‘Tilly’), says to her mother (‘Mad’ Molly, played by Judy Davis) : I need you to remember me, mum, so I can remember.




That, too, is just a gesture in the direction of a symbolic level for the rehabilitation and restitution of Tilly’s mother (and, a few times, Molly duly disbelieves why her daughter is there). By contrast, in the best of Ibsen, this notion of what really happened can be revelatory, electrifying, and rarely for good, and many a time Hitchcock made true film capital through showing us something on screen that, although it was not the mind’s obfuscations in dream, desire or trauma, mimicked them (e.g. Spellbound (1945), Vertigo (1958), and Marnie (1964) :

Here it is just entertainment, with an audience of would-be psychic explorers, but in titters at Hugo Weaving’s again wearing women’s clothes : he did so devastatingly as Nurse Noakes in Cloud Atlas (2012), and without either exploiting or mocking, as this role does, those who share this interest. The likely audience for The Dressmaker will be unlikely to gravitate towards Dogville (2003), or to do so to their taste, whereas those who missed it and have only witnessed the work of Lars von Trier in more recent works of excess such as Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac Vol. I (2013) and Vol. II (2013), can seek a worthier film there.


This is a film that never tries to do what Dogville does, but really feels like [it wants to be] Wes Anderson, but without Wes, and which is definitely written in a way that wishes that it could be even bad Wodehouse, but which just never will be : it desires to have older people ‘behave badly’, but does so in that stock way that Ronald Harwood uses for Billy Connolly’s character, when he adapts his stage-play as Quartet (2012), rather than is done more inventively, for Judi Dench, in Philomena (2013).

Whatever Rosalie Ham’s novel may be, it seems newly published (in paperback, but there is evidence of an audio-book on CD from 2003...), and does not appear in hardback until April next year.
Some reviews from Rotten Tomatoes (@RottenTomatoes) :

 Peter Bradshaw (@PeterBradshaw1), for The Guardian, gave it one star, and closes his review by saying Surely Winslet can find better roles than this.

For Little White Lies (@LWLies, where they score things differently), the marks are not much kinder, and the review by David Jenkins (@DaveyJenkins) is headed 'This lop-sided couture western staggers on long past what should've been a short, sharp run time'.




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