Wednesday 5 July 2023

Operas ruined (with one letter) : Th'Agent's efforts at demolition

Operas ruined (with one letter) : Th'Agent's efforts at demolition

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

4 July

Operas ruined (with one letter) : Th'Agent's efforts at demolition





















































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

Tuesday 4 July 2023

On watching Asteroid City (2023) - and not giving a damn about seeing it again

On watxching Asteroid City (2023) - and not giving a damn about seeing it again

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

4 July

On watxching Asteroid City (2023) - and not giving a damn about seeing it again






More to come...





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

Friday 30 June 2023

Conflagration, Catastrophe and Christopher Nolan (work in progress)

Conflagration, Catastrophe and Christopher Nolan

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

30 June

Conflagration, Catastrophe and Christopher Nolan (work in progress)









More to come...






















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

Friday 23 June 2023

Maria Bartuszová at Tate Modern : Show finishes on Sunday 25 June 2023

Maria Bartuszová at Tate Modern at Tate Modern : Show finishes on Sunday 25 June 2023

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 June

Maria Bartuszová at Tate Modern at Tate Modern : Show finishes on Sunday 25 June 2023














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

Wednesday 14 June 2023

Esurientes implevit bonis, et divites dimisit inanes : Jesus' parables of abundance or growth (good and bad) (work in progress)

Esurientes implevit bonis, et divites dimisit inanes : Jesus' parables of abundance or growth

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 June

Esurientes implevit bonis, et divites dimisit inanes : Jesus' parables of abundance or growth (good and bad) (work in progress)


This afternoon's live broadcast of Choral Evensong, on Radio 3, was from a very familiar Cambridge college chapel, led by Revd Dr Stephen Cherry, Dean of King's, and one reading (from The Old Testament) was from part of the story that Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber and famously adapted as Joseph and The Amazing, etc.



More to come...





































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

#RoystonStationSnaps : Another, er, project proudly brought to you by #UCFF !

#RoystonStationSnaps : Another, er, project proudly brought to you by #UCFF !

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

12 June

#RoystonStationSnaps : Another, er, project proudly brought to you by #UCFF !






More to come...






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

Monday 12 June 2023

'Censorship' and cinema : Some Tweets

'Censorship' and cinema : Some Tweets

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

10 June

'Censorship' and cinema : Some Tweets


More to come...






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

Tuesday 6 June 2023

Kris Drever Band at The Stables [Wavendon, Milton Keynes] (work in progress)

Kris Drever Band at The Stables [Wavendon, Milton Keynes] (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

6 June

Kris Drever Band at The Stables [Wavendon, Milton Keynes] (work in progress)


A great evening at The Stables with Kris Drever and his friends, Euan Burton (double and electric bass plus vox) and Louis Abbott (perc, drums, guitar and vocals), including a fair sprinkling from the 2020 album Where The Air is Thin !

In the first set, Drever and his band gave us some poignant or reflective 'takes' on 'Sanday' (and its origins), 'I'll Always Leave The Light On' (and its origins) and 'More Than You Know' - after the interval, there was noticeably less 'chat', and this, as well as the energy in the songs chosen for it, helped the second set build.)










More to come...



































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

Wednesday 31 May 2023

Some Tweets on #AI and da Vinci

Some Tweets on #AI and da Vinci

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

31 May

Some Tweets on #AI and da Vinci







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

Thursday 20 April 2023

An incomplete review of Hilma (2022)

An incomplete review of Hilma (2022)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

1 November

An incomplete review of Hilma (2022)




It could well be that Hilma af Klint had a crush on Rudolf Steiner, met him twice only briefly, but took female lovers (seemingly under the nose of her family and of society at large) : whatever Steiner's actual status in her life, he only appears to be in the film, along with numerous deaths, to give it its rhythms.

However, if what just a quick look at Wiki* suggests happened is correct, matters were not as simple as Hilma chooses to tell her story :

In 1908 she met Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the Anthroposophical Society, who was visiting Stockholm. Steiner introduced her to his own theories regarding the Arts, and would have some influence on her paintings later in life.

Several years later, in 1920, she met him again at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, the headquarters of the Anthroposophical Society. Between 1921 and 1930 she spent long periods at the Goetheanum.


By contrast, Edvard Munch, whose hug seems to be presented as puzzlingly shocking - although there is Strindbergian-style sex in the next room to the laying-out of af Klint's father (yet, given the circumstance and the film's generally Freudian tenor, it may betoken yet another unannounced dream ?) – could clearly have acted as a supporter, if his being so demonstrative had not been found insupportable.




ENDS



End-notes :

* From the item on Hilma af Klint at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilma_af_Klint.




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

Tuesday 11 April 2023

Easter Sunday at Snape – A further enquiry into the nature of things with Solomon's Knot (work in progress)

Easter at Snape – A further enquiry into the nature of things with Solomon's Knot (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 April

Easter Sunday at Snape Maltings – A further enquiry into the nature of things :
Solomon's Knot in Bach's St Matthew Passion, BWV 244 (work in progress)


No more so than would The Full Monty, given by I Fagiolini at Emmanuel United Reformed Church, Cambridge, during Cambridge Summer Music Festival (in 2005 ?), have been as when those performers sang that selection of Monteverdi's Madrigale under the same title, but in another venue, than Solomon's Knot, with J. S. Bach's St Matthew Passion, in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, will assuredly be as they and it were at Snape Maltings (on Easter Sunday) – or, for that matter, in Weimar's Herderkirche (on Good Friday).

Partly, there is site-specificity at play / stake and involved, and, if there are not, as at Britten Pears Arts, side-aisles and a central block of seats, one simply cannot have one's four-part choirs face each other across the stalls and flood the hall with sound in both directions. This was a moment that, probably as one had not envisaged - as one saw it approach - that it could be, was both moving and effective – just, in fact, as so much else was in what we saw and heard, which we had perhaps understood before, but not, in and at the same time, deeply felt in this way before. Or, then again, which we had sensed, but not so fully grasped and found tangible in its questioning force.


There is such power in solo or lead musicians (whether instrumentalists or vocalists) not being tied to following a printed score, and, when York Early Music Festival ran three or four recitals of Bach's solo compositions for, probably, violin, keyboard and cello, it was Alison McGillivray who, for this reason, communicated most directly – likewise the great Alisa Weilerstein, during Aldeburgh Festival, in a recital in Blythburgh Church.


More to come...


























End-notes :

* Probably familiar to so many, who have not necessarily had a chance to set foot within the chapel, from the service of Nine Lessons and Carols at King's, with its processions and solemnity of ceremony (as televised and broadcast by radio) ?







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

Saturday 8 April 2023

An enquiry into the nature of things : Chamber music with Anna Dennis, Nicholas Daniel and Mahan Esfahani in The Britten Studio

Chamber music with Anna Dennis, Nicholas Daniel and Mahan Esfahani in The Britten Studio on Holy Saturday

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 April

Holy Saturday at Snape – An enquiry into the nature of things :
Chamber music with Anna Dennis, Nicholas Daniel and Mahan Esfahani in The Britten Studio


Such a lovely time to be back at Snape, for the first time after a few nights in Suffolk for Aldeburgh Festival in 2019 !

To some, things from former times may more aptly feel to be part of New Year (or Hogmanay), but Easter is – without needing to invoke the opening lines of T. S. Eliot's 'grumble with life' in which he said that he gave us 'The Waste Land' – just as good a time to remember the old and be inspired by it to undertake new things :

In Love & Endings (2022), at an early moment in to-night's programme, we heard Elena Langer's three settings (for soprano, oboe and harpsichord) of two anonymous texts and a poem by Mayakovsky, juxtaposing writing from the sixteenth century and in Middle English* with a head-on confrontation with love that has turned to enquiry, recrimination, but perhaps also resolution.


We had begun with what Handel gave us by way of a Sonata for Oboe, with harpsichord accompaniment – a diamond of a miniature in C Minor that makes us both think and smile – and were to come to a close with arias in which he had set texts by Brockes.

In these, and in arias from two Cantatas by [Johann Sebastian] Bach at something like a midpoint in the eighty-minute recital, the sensitivity of Anna Dennis and the clarity of her expressiveness and diction, were all that one expected from having heard her before (on one of those occasions, in another work by Langer).



Before returning for the Bach, Dennis left Nicholas Daniel and Mahan Esfahani, both of whom had stories to tell about their involvement or engagement with Sven-Ingo Koch, to perform his Die Frage nach der Dinglichkeit (2018), a Ding an sich in relation to which Daniel had attempted a characterization, but whose power and resistance to classification were apparent. As when performing the Langer, Bach and Handel with Dennis, there was also no doubting the respect for and artistic accommodation of each other's role, or the very high quality of interpretation for which one comes and looks to Britten Pears Arts.


Perhaps, by contrast, wrongly responding to the six solo harpsichord pieces by Michael Berkeley that he collectively described as a haiku as if they were witticisms**, and which made one remember that Debussy saved his 'titles' and intended them to appear after each piece in his Préludes. (There is no way that Berkeley's Snake, for solo cor anglais and which he heard next, is programmatic as such, even if he has responded to the tenor of what Lawrence's probably deliberately petit-bourgeois narrator reports thinking about what he sees.)


Of the two concluding Brockes settings, their order reversed - to fit better - from the printed programme, one praised the sweet and tender nature of eternal quietude, and one, to end, unmistakingly found God's handiwork in a rose.

We, with the quietness of thoughts of another at sea, words that asked what were fitting tones for a joyful marriage or the highly conflicted thoughts of the person to whom Berkeley gave voice in reading Lawrence's poem, had truly engaged with the question what makes something what it is.

Happy Easter !


Since posting the above, #UCFF has seen that The Guardian also carried this contemporaneous review by Andrew Clements : 'Anna Dennis / Nicholas Daniel / Mahan Esfahani review – poetry and animal magic'


End-notes :

* The first, without being by John Donne, strangely and pithily full of explicit desire ; the second, thinking of the seasons and of life in relation to their patterns, and of how there is both a consistency and continuity of experience, and a time in life for each thing that it brings us (echoic of Ecclesiastes).

** From a row or two back, a comment reinforced the literalism with which the audience seemed to have responded to 'The Fly', suggesting that it had been swatted in the final gesture.




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

Saturday 31 December 2022

The Real meaning of Live : Kathryn Tickell, Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy and Norma Waterson broadcast live from Robin Hood's Bay on Radio 3's Music Planet

The Real meaning of Live : Kathryn Tickell, Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy and Norma Waterson broadcast live from Robin Hood's Bay on Radio3's Music Planet (Tweets in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

New Year's Eve 2022

The Real meaning of Live : Kathryn Tickell, Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy and Norma Waterson broadcast live from Robin Hood's Bay on BBCRadio3's Music Planet (Tweets in progress)






More to come...






































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

Wednesday 28 December 2022

It's amazing how many film fans hate films : A little Twitter-dance around that comment

It's amazing how many film fans hate films : A little Twitter-dance around that comment

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 December

It's amazing how many film fans hate films : A little Twitter-dance around that comment

To Roland and Ruthie






Maybe that's it... ?







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

Tuesday 20 December 2022

Werner Herzog, by Zoom from L.A., at Bristol's Watershed : Sunday 18 December at 3.00 p.m. (report in progress)

Werner Herzog, by Zoom from L.A., at Bristol's Watershed : Sunday 18 December at 3.00 p.m.

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

18 December

Werner Herzog, by Zoom from L.A., at Bristol's Watershed : Sunday 18 December at 3.00 p.m. (report in progress)












































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

Tuesday 22 November 2022

Tweets about Radio 3's Night Tracks, n years on...

Tweets about Radio 3's Night Tracks, n years on...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

St Cecilia's Day (22 November)

Tweets about Radio 3's Night Tracks, n years on...

The Meaning of Live : Stephen Cleobury, RIP
















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

Friday 11 November 2022

Some Tweets on Oil, Sunflowers, etc. : An accreting series

Some Tweets on Oil, Sunflowers, etc. : An accreting series

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

11 November

Some Tweets on Oil, Sunflowers, etc. : An accreting series

For some, The Great War seemed to end on 11 November 1918



















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