Living safely - and playing dangerously

This is a review of The Philip Glass Ensemble at The Corn Exchange, Cambridge

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

15 November

This is a review of the concert that The Philip Glass Ensemble (PGE) gave at The Corn Exchange in Cambridge (@CambridgeCornEx) as part of Cambridge Music Festival (@cammusicfest) on Friday 14 November 2014

In April 2014, Philip Glass had graced Cambridge, not with his presence, but with his Cello Concerto No. 2, played by Matt Haimovitz (for whom it had been written) under the baton of Dennis Russell Davies

Some pictures from last nights amazing performance by Philip Glass Ensemble @GlassNotesBlog pic.twitter.com/ktVuYIkW0h
— Camb Corn Exchange (@CambridgeCornEx) November 15, 2014

Large (left to right) : Philip Glass, Andrew Sterman, Michael Riesman
Top right : Lisa Bielawa (to the right of Philip Glass)
Bottom right : (after Michael Riesman, left to right) Mick Rossi, Jon Gibson, David Crowell, Lisa Bielawa

The running order was announced from the stage, piece by piece, by Philip Glass.

It differed from that in the Cambridge Music Festival programme, both as to when played and - in some cases - what was included / substituted (as usefully confirmed by this image provided by Tweeter Rob Patchett - @Never0ffside) :

@THEAGENTAPSLEY @CambridgeCornEx This might be useful for your review....the set list from Philip Glass' keyboard. pic.twitter.com/6hZcdKkjr7
— Rob Patchett(@Never0ffside) November 17, 2014

1. 'Cologne section', CIVIL warS #2 (from 1984)

2, 3. Selections from Music in 12 Parts, from 1971 to 1974 : Parts 1 and 2 were played

4. Façades (from Glassworks - 1983) [moved from the second half]

5. 'The Grid' (from Koyaanisqatsi (1982))


Starting with pieces that concluded the first half, both were 'safe bets', with (4) Façades the equivalent of Arvo Pärt's Fratres, as an also much-arranged signature-tune, both seemingly simple : the plangent, lonely clarinet* (cor anglais ?) of Andrew Sterman being joined, and then replaced, by alto* (Jon Gibson).

However, with (5) 'The Grid', the ensemble was consciously not reproducing the full, familiar version, following the immediacy, rawness and rhythmicity of the carousel-like keyboard parts. Its celebratory tone made it a good place to pause.


Beforehand, we accustomed to the ensemble's set-up with (1) CIVIL warS #2, and its four keyboard-players, two (facing Glass) with double manuals, in the form of Michael Riesman (musical director) and Mick Rossi (along with Riesman, Glass, Sterman and Gibson, another composer).

Behind Glass was the unmissable Lisa Biewala, who was distinguished by having a head-level microphone (as was Sterman) - and, of the back rank of reeds and woodwind - Sterman was the one wielding piccolo, as essential to Glass' sound-world as Biewala's high soprano (or Gibson's and his doubling on flute in Part 1 of Music in 12 Parts).

Here, the ensemble seemed to operate as a collective, but with Riesman performing the bulk of the keyboard work, Glass adding in swirling effects, or what seemed like foghorn blasts. However, the balance changed with (2) Part 1, because (after sounding soprano voice and spinet-effect had set the tone) Glass was signalling changes within the fabric with a clear nod.

Either in its own terms, or as Glass determined (as might a leader of church music, indicating repeating a Chorus), Part 1 was the junior partner to the highly extended Part 2, developing almost like a séance, with the effect of Bielawa's voice multiplied**. It had less emphasis on variation, more on what – within the mesmeric patterns – could be detected to have changed with each nod, be it an edge to the flute-sound, a dropping interval, a single note, or a held note in the voice, or Sterman joining in with low, loud vocal sounds.

Glass had said that the beginning of (3) Part 2 would be apparent, and, in throbbing, pulsing keyboard rhythms, it was. In the world of film, some critics talk about 'a slow burn', and, just as much as Ravel's Boléro is one, so was Part 2, after repeating a falling interval that sounded like Je-sum, and then a three-note dropping flute-pattern.

With time, it became faster, and more intricately patterned. As each mood came and went, it was a juxtaposition of repetitions, with small changes such as the centrality of the flute giving way to alto, up and down the keyboards, or a quick pattern or dazzling / shimmering from the sax (David Crowell) - all bulking up to a sound that - in such relief - felt highly full, and, having won us over, ended with the trio at the back.



* * * * *


In the second half, Floe and Rubric (both from Glassworks - 1983) and Music in Similar Motion (from 1969) were substituted by the first three pieces that were played

6. 'The Building' (from Act 4, Scene 1 of Einstein on the Beach (four-act opera, first performed in 1976))

7. 'Raising the Sail' (from The Truman Show (1998))

8. 'Dance IX' (from In The Upper Room - 2009)

9. Act III, The Photographer [chamber opera, from 1983]


Before the major work in this half, (9) from The Photographer, a significant piece was (6) from Einstein on the Beach : Sterman’s solo part was clearly not written out (i.e. improvised), and Riesman was now directing the Ensemble.

It begins with swirling, short-valued notes, with which – in a stratospheric overlay – a second keyboard then joins, growing into a roar of sound, with another keyboard entry and soaring soprano. As Bielawa’s voice mounts, there is richness and dimension to the music, to which Sterman’s tenor sax adds : the overwhelming sensation is of intense wave-fronts, until, eventually, it dies away – almost as if after orgasm.

The number* from (7) The Truman Show, after beginning in a measured, chorale-like way, sets woodwind against a slow, sustained keyboard trill. Later, Bielawa gave us sampled tubular bells (momentarily, one wished for real percussion), chiming with stately octaves, which finally dissolve.

(8) 'Dance IX' is in sonata form (A – B – A), with A itself deriving from an alternating pattern of arpeggios, which bring in soprano and sax. After section A has recurred, Bielawa has a rising motif, with repeated notes, to reiterate : as the pulsing effect grows, the piece is, again, greater than its constituents. Then, with alto and flute to the fore, it ends with the sound of piccolo.


Just as (2, 3) Music in 12 Parts is said ‘to describe a vocabulary of techniques’, so (9) The Photographer used a fair few, starting by exploiting enhancement of the soprano voice plus a piccolo, then going up a tone and playing on the discord.

A new section begins instrumentally, and, as one detects a kind of keyboard buzzing, Bielawa makes long, sustained ‘Ah’ sounds, which are picked up by the piccolo, before further demands are next made on her : first, with descending intervals, and then leading to an intense vocal jabber, which alternates with short whelps that one might associate more with Siouxsie Sioux’s vocal style at its most vigorous.

A central section steps back, with keyboard arpeggios and woodwind, before it builds in intensity over an ostinato in the bass, with parps on saxes. Upon a rallentando, repeated intervallic motifs set a backdrop for Bielawa, giving us an array of differing intervals. Over it all, Glass floats a sax for a while, then the bass comes in, with a tutti of shimmering effervescence.

There is an exciting feel to the finale, with the voice-sound first processed, then interrupted, alongside keyboard modulations. At the very end, the music goes up a gear – a joyous mood, exploring tonalities, and with the ensemble giving it all. A strong piece of performance, very well received.



10. Encore : 'Spaceship' (from Act 4, Scene 3 of Einstein on the Beach - 1976)


The piece (10) famously opens with warbling keyboard : to it are added voice and flute, piccolo plus sax, with Bielawa then appearing to be counting One Two Three / One Two Three Four, over and over. Next, Glass contrasts her high voice with somewhat ponderous bass notes, until a gradual slowing with piccolo and flute.

The end seems in variation form, at times with motifs / scales up and down the keyboard, before doing so stormingly – as if in delayed gratification. On a hiatus per tutti, the voice comes in much more quickly, finishing in a few bars.


Maybe it was there all along, but one became aware of dark purple spots that played upwards onto a screen at the back - as if evoking Rothko, and the parallel of colour field painting in these textures :

This concert, without images, nonetheless resembled a spectacle. One could have imagined clips projected above the ensemble, but instead they played onto our minds and souls.


It has since been seen that bachtrack's - somewhat picky**** - review of PGE's gig at Bristol's Colston Hall (@Colston_Hall), on Saturday 8 November, makes the same point about visuals, but comes to a different conclusion...


End-notes

* A real challenge to one's identification of different reeds, and lovely to hear them live ! The instrumentalists were not on platforms, so friends with balcony seats could see them better (than from the tiered seating), but were still unsure about the scoring.

** Courtesy of Messrs Ryan Kelly and Dan Bora on audio.

*** Radio 3 Free Thinking’s (@BBCFreeThinking’s) Matthew Sweet (@DrMatthewSweet) unfailing calls them ‘cues’.

**** There is clearly some disparity between the views of its reviewer, Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres, and those of Lou Trimby for Bristol 24/7, because the latter reports :

[I]t was clear that Ensemble were so familiar with the work performed and yet still passionate about it that there was little likelihood of them being anything other than note perfect. And note perfect they were.


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

In my Father's house, there are many rooms : A Festival review of Ingmarssönerna (Sons of Ingmar) (1919)

This is a review of Ingmarssönerna (Sons of Ingmar) (1919)

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

13 November

This is a Cambridge Film Consortium review of Ingmarssönerna (Sons of Ingmar) (1919) as performed at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) with live solo piano accompaniment by John Sweeney

If you missed it, the film is to be shown again on Sunday 16 November at 1.00 p.m.

Next in Cambridge cultural scene, Ingmarssönerna (1919) at @CamPicturehouse / The Philip Glass Ensemble via @CambridgeCornEx / @cammusicfest
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 13, 2014

Trish Shiel, of Cambridge Film Consortium, introduced the event, telling us that it was being projected from a 35mm print and that, to add in an English translation of the inter-titles (which are in Swedish), manual dual projection was being used - stressing that The Arts is one of a few cinemas equipped to mount such a performance.

She also said a few words about the film, its history, and its director, male lead and co-writer, Victor Sjöström, who later worked with Ingmar Bergman (who remarked of the film Where did Sjöström get the idea of composing these incredible sequences, these remarkable, exciting scenes ?). That said, nothing prepared for the pleasure of learning who played the principal female role of Brita (on whom, more below...) :

Realizing in Ingmarssönerna(1919) at @CamPicturehouse that Harriet Bosse, over whom Strindberg obsessed, was on the screen was a delight !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 14, 2014

The title of Ingmarssönerna (1919) has been translated as Sons of Ingmar, but they are more like 'descendants' than sons : suffice to say that it reveals little to say that, in thought if not in reality (whatever reality is, when one can feel oneself to be part of a line of men who have occupied the same land for centuries), Young Ingmar goes to meet his father, Old Ingmar, with a dilemma.

And, before he gets there, we have visuals of a ladder up to heaven (and down from that ladder) that give us all the evocations from Jacob's ladder to Jack's Beanstalk to The Tower of Babel. Quite a quaint sort of heaven, however, where only the directly ascending, male relatives are there (and, from what follows, they are unaware of what befalls those still alive) ?

Be that as it may, Young gets Old to come into a side-room and tells him a whole story, where the inter-titles, from time to time, remind us with an icon that this is still in heaven and still telling the background to the dilemma...


A risky stratagem for a film, one might think, to rely on the patience of the audience with such a lengthy narration, and which is hardly a strength of the structure here any more than it is, celebratedly, in Anne Brontë's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Yet, after the decision that is pressing on Young Ingmar has been explained, and when omens have been interpreted as guiding his way, the film distinctly picks up in energy and emotional pull, as the core story that was within that daring flashback now unfolds.

Harriet Bosse, playing in Strindberg (apparently in To Damascus)

Perhaps naively, we may imagine that, because film was in its relative infancy, a dramatic approach to contextualizing our mixed motives and feelings in life through this medium was necessarily novel. Put this in context, though, and this film's Harriet Bosse (as Brita) was, briefly, August Strindberg's third wife, and Strindberg wrote the roles of Eleonora in Easter (1901) and Agnes in A Dream Play (1902) for her (amongst others), the latter of which alone shows the psychological depth of theatre at the time :

Although Dream Play was not to be performed until 1907, that is a clear decade before the present film, so we can guess that Sjöström and Selma Lagerlöf - of whose novel Jerusalem this film adapts the first part (and Karin Ingmarsdotter (1920) the conclusion) - would have known some of Strindberg's significant plays, which date to when Lagerlöf was writing her work.


Though it is true to remark, say, that the preoccupations at the time of the United Artists, from Mary Pickford to D. W. Griffiths, were very different from that here**, one only needs to delve into an overview such as Francine Stock's In Glorious Technicolor: A Century of Film and How it has Shaped Us to realize that, just because these films now look old (physically, they are), we need not imagine their makers to be unknowing - any more than we should imagine that our grandparents knew nothing about sex.

Without giving away the main story, there are so many reminders here of other works. For the subject-matter, though it has its particularities, is universal :

* Schumann's last acts outside the locked door of the asylum

* Cocteau's La Belle et La Bête*** (1946)

* Shakespearean pairs such as Much Ado About Nothing's Beatrice and Benedick

* Even Chaucer's long-suffering Griselda**** (in The Clerk's Tale)


In the screening, what made the impact was the subtlety of Bosse's expressiveness, the action going on in the eyes and the look of her face (when not, very demonstrably, throwing herself on her pillow, or the ground), and one need only reach back in time to what she might have been like on the stage. Now, though, one is haunted by Sjöström's long-jawed face, and, in the context of the film, he is having himself be La Bête, with a largely down-turned, hangdog mouth, until he finds out who he is.

Which is where the story closes, not concerned with the expected resolution, but with a reverie of the kind that James Thurber gave us for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013), when we gained a name for that type of character / behaviour :

Since this is just the first part of the story (seemingly re-made, according to Amazon®, in Jerusalem (1996)), though it stands complete in itself (despite the puzzling absorption in Ingmar's being elsewhere), one might detect a hook here, from Sjöström, for Karin Ingmarsdotter...


In introducing the screening for those unfamiliar with silent film, Trish Sheil had rightly pointed out that the painting of the scene in the accompaniment is part of what makes such films different - as is knowing that it is the accompanist's skill to give that portrayal whilst keep pace with the unfolding of the film.

In his inspiringly colourful accompaniment, John Sweeney (who gave us Hitchock's Blackmail at Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF) 2012) organized himself around themes for the various moods and evocations of the film, from anxiety to tenderness, or to depict energetic behaviour as against reflectiveness - and, likewise, using unsettling rumbles alongside bell-tones (the high and low registers of the keyboard).

Sweeney had a very warm round of applause at the close, and had provided us with an excellently enjoyable musical experience to match the emotional range of the film.

And now there is a follow-up piece about the effect of inter-titles in the film...


End-notes

* Which, thanks to marketing manager Jack Toye's Tweet from the second screening, looks frighteningly complicated :

Joe & I are using 3 projectors @CamPicturehouse for the SONS OF INGMAR @CFilmConsortium 35mm screening today!! :)X pic.twitter.com/ptDdYD3k7H
— Jack Toye(@jackabuss) November 16, 2014

** With, for example, Pickford continuing to play the role of a young girl / woman when she was very much older - just as, here, Bosse and Victor Sjöström are too old to be taken literally for Brita and Young Ingmar (Bosse was 41 at the time of the film's release).

*** In Young Ingmar, a similarly gruff and hidebound figure, desiring wisdom, but finding himself locked in by duty, and Birta, against her will, in the equivalent of La Bête's domain : even requesting Birta's hand, his vacillating nature intervenes, and his heart is never quite in it.

**** The magnanimity of You'll have to forgive me for all the pain that I have caused you, Ingmar and I wanted to ask your forgiveness, although also the exposed feeling of O, dear God, I will be saved of nothing ?, when he insists on reading her letter.


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

A review in Tweets : The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and King's College Choir

A review, in Tweets, of the opening concert of Cambridge Music Festival 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)

12 November

A review, in Tweets, of the opening concert of Cambridge Music Festival 2014 (@cammusicfest), given at King's College Chapel (@Kings_College) by its choir (@ChoirOfKingsCam) and The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (@theoae) under Stephen Cleobury, with soloists Elin Manahan Thomas (soprano), Susanna Hurrell (soprano), Tim Mead (counter-tenor), James Gilchrist (tenor), and Ben Appl (bass)

A lovely afternoon with Richard @AAMorchestra Egarr's @harmoniamundi two-disc Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), then Bach at @cammusicfest !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 13, 2014

A photo from rehearsals earlier this afternoon for our concert of Bach now underway in the Chapel! pic.twitter.com/IbDqqhEJZS

— King's College Choir (@ChoirOfKingsCam) November 12, 2014

The @cammusicfest concert at @Kings_College Chapel gave us the aetherialaria Auchmitgedämpften, schwachenStimmen(BWV 36) - as in Heaven
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 13, 2014

Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major (BWV 1047) at @cammusicfest : the Andante had the simplicity of the truly divine, woodwind and strings
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 13, 2014

At @cammusicfest, James Gilchrist's vivid interpretation of Cantata IcharmerMensch, ichSündenknecht(BWV 55) shared another Erbarmedich
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 13, 2014

Some glorious playing throughout @theoae's performance this evening at @ConcertsatKings during @cammusicfest, not least from leader Ken Aiso
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 13, 2014

Joyous finale to the all-Bach @theoae / @cammusicfest concert at @Kings_College Chapel in his Magnificat(BWV 243) : the sense of a whole ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 13, 2014

-> The vocal soloists, singly and combined, worked well, the men and boys of @ChoirOfKingsCam were strong, and @theoae assured good feeling
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 13, 2014

At @yorkearlymusic, another chance to hear @theoae on Friday 12 December : remembering their energetic bass, and lively organ, oboes, flutes
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 13, 2014

Though, in fact, the organ, which Bach uses superbly well in the Magnificat, would have been played by an Organ Scholar of @Kings_College...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 13, 2014

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

Football without a ball

This is a review from Cambridge African Film Festival of Timbuktu (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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9 November

This is a review of Timbuktu (2014), which screened on 1 November 2014, the Opening Night of the 13th* Cambridge African Film Festival (CAFF / @africacambridge)

At Cambridge African Film Festival, Timbuktu had a hard act to follow in Dankumba (2011), a work that made a feature of the staged nature / staginess / choreography of encounters, as well as of the sheer cinematic joy of a well-composed shot, which says so much just in the way in, and with the care with, which it has been constructed.

Dankumba was being shown in tribute to Bakary Diallo, a Malian director who had died, en route home, at the age of 34, and, although we had kindly been provided with a translation of the dialogue, having one seemed hardly necessary. For the telling was in a sequence such as the presentation of a pair of feet on a colourful mattress, the feet reaching out for the floor, and the body rising erect above them – of course, a twelve-minute film has a different objective and approach, but it still made one hungry for shots assembled how these had been.

A desire that Timbuktu (set in and around that city in Mali**) satisfied to begin with, for example, in some beautiful views of the light on the water (or, as a blindfolded man is being led down into a valley, varying the perspective), but this narrative style, for which Dankumba had made us ready, was not to prove the main one, and did not essentially belong to this setting. Yes, the film utilized the technique of introducing us to elements and challenging us as to whether and, if so, how they would relate to each other, and doing so for as long as some arthouse films might (if not quite as Norte, the End of History always did, though one was in other ways reminded of it).

In some ways, though, Timbuktu (2014) seemed not so much to dissect its subject by doing so, or usefully open it up, but to give the impression of fragmenting one’s involvement with the principal storyline, and, in consequence, of making a disconnection from it. Maybe that was deliberate, but, if so, it was done in a way that hardly suggested artfulness : even when the film returned, at the very end, to the opening motif, of men in a military four-wheel drive, who determine to chase a gazelle-type creature to tire it out, that gesture – of evoking a highly applicable image (that might have encapsulated all that went before) – failed to bring it together.

Four Corners (Die Vier Hoeke) (2014), set in Cape Town and also being shown during CAFF 2014, was reviewed here when it came to Cambridge Film Festival earlier in the year. Unlike this film, where the very simplicity of the core story mirrored that of Norte, the End of History***, the extreme relatedness of everyone to everyone else in a small group meant for a feeling of contrivance.

Here, partly for reasons already given, one feels at a distance to Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed) and his fate (not least as one wonders what, given what happens, it would have been anyway, before the new regime). Unless, of course, the expectation was that one would have read up about the film in advance (an assumption that can make for the incautious construction of documentaries and feature films alike), and it would not need any context beyond that of Abdelkrim’s (Abel Jafri’s) armed men coming into the mosque, at the time of prayer, and being challenged by l’Imam (Adel Mahmoud Cherif).


Not that one did not see, very brutally in at least two cases, lives being disrupted and disjointed by the unflinching imposition of laws and rules in the name of a regime of divine justice and obedience, but they almost seemed not to be part of the same narrative. Beyond establishing quite straightforwardly that the regime actively prohibits – amongst other things – smoking, women with bare hands, adultery, music, football, the film does not integrate the cases of severe punishment into the central story (e.g. that of the beautifully voiced Fatou la chanteuse (Fatmoumata Diawara)) :

It is almost as if the scene of Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) being whipped, in 12 Years A Slave (2013), were introduced not to further Solomon Northup’s story, but just as an unrelated piece of barbarity – in the way that we have the football, studiedly bouncing down the steps in a personified spirit, momentarily reminding us of many a film where an object becomes 'conscious' (e.g. The Yellow Balloon (1953), which Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) references in his A History of Children and Film (2013)).

Not that we do not have a victim, who, when brought before a tribunal, is told that admitting that he knows that football is banned itself justifies a penalty, but there is no consistent message, because the jihad is also shown mocked, by showing a religious enforcer, who is confused by some youths who parade before him a game of football – with everything but a ball****…

A number of films set in the time of unrest or war, ranging from The Book Thief (2013) to René Clément’s La bataille du rail (1946) (or, more controversially perhaps, in Argo (2012)), make use of various features (in common with Timbuktu, and in no particular order) : the perspective of the ultimate victor*****, humour, and representing the enemy / opposing or occupying force as clodhopping clowns.

(Of course, one says ‘in no particular order’, but it is the rational assurance, after the fact, of the first that allows one to do the third.) Here, then, there were other moments (than the game without a ball) of punctured authority, such as when Abdelkrim takes the wheel of a vehicle and succeeds (on this attempt, at least) at doing little more than making it kangaroo or run off course. Or when his secret habit, banned by his own organization, later proves patent to his driving instructor (who says that everyone knows) : in both cases, the driver deflates his pomposity. (No doubt in retaliation, Abdelkrim picks on other things : Your Arabic is so bad.)


Yet some laughter in the screening was a little hard to cope with, as it was not made in response to such a moment of comedy, but felt as though characters were being laughed at, not the situation found amusing in a way that did not target them. At the same time, one element of the film was, clearly, highlighting the buffoonery of the occupying militia, perhaps to heighten the effect of more violent or brutal behaviour – if so, and even if true to when La Police Islamique took control, perhaps ill judged ?

By contrast, at least, with Half of a Yellow Sun (2013), where, in the Q&A with director Biyi Bandele earlier this year, it was clear that the audience had been confused as to whether the characters themselves were meant to be risible.


At root, mentally shorn – as it all too easily was – of its offshoots of incidental action, Timbuktu showed us the typical hypocrisies of a repressive power, whether interpreting party dogma or a religious text to its own end, or when the interview with Abdelkrim (and the amount of 'blood money') seems more important than the trial.

We saw defiance, some of which was struck down in ways that repel us, and some indulged because of a connection with the person who offered it (as in the case of the eccentric Zabou (Kettly Noël)), but little to tell us why the occupation began (or why it could or would end ? - admittedly, perhaps, putting us in the ignorance of the time, as to whether all this would last).

At one level, the film appears to deal in actions that, as one was aware at the time, threatened to overshadow Mali’s rich history and culture, especially its tradition of music, but, on another, it leaves one ignorant as to these actions and where they came from. If it spurred us to find out more, that might be something - rather than our simply consuming the content / story of Timbuktu...


End-notes

* Every festival now has to be the nth ‘edition’, as if no one can be trusted to understand that calling something the nth particular Film or Music Festival means only that, as the nth, there have been n - 1 such events before, not that its ranks nth out of all of them…

** Not that, to be frank, one gets any sense of the real scale or historicity of the city. In addition, where Satima and Kidane live (with their daughter Toya, and her son Issan), the stretch of water where Issan runs into problems with Amadou, and Timbuktu itself are three important exterior locations : one has little notion how they can relate to each other.

*** Or even of Oklahoma, centring on ‘The Farmer and The Cowman should be friends’ ? (Here, there is a cow called GPS – just look at The Jersey Herd Book to see where that fits in the pantheon, with a beast called Salisbury Musical Flashlight…)

**** A motif that, not uniquely, occurs in Sieniawka (2013), as premiered at Cambridge Film Festival 2013 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF)

***** Assuming that there ever is a victor, as such, in an occupation or invasion.


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

Remember me, but forget my fate ~ Dido and Aeneas, Henry Purcell

This is a review of Mr. Turner (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)

7 November

This is a review of Mr. Turner (2014)

Probably too much has already been written, spoken or just thought about Mr. Turner (2014) since its win for Timothy Spall at Cannes (as well as for cinematographer Dick Pope), and its nomination for the Palme d’Or. (And maybe it has not attracted much attention, but the scoring of the film is so intelligent, just even with the simple falling motif on alto sax (four saxes are credited), picked up by the strings.) So the unaccustomed aim here will be (relative) brevity :

The simple truth is that Spall, Pope and director Mike Leigh, amongst others, have collaborated on an excellently cinematic piece of work. Whether or not one wishes to interpret the composition of shots as somehow mimetic of Turner's painterly art and / or vision, the quality of them, and the care behind them, is profound : unlike some films, incidentally using this medium (as a way of reaching an audience with a story), the film is indissoluble from the story.

Just as, in Mr. Turner, we see the artist having confidence in his work* (declaring that he is leaving it, as a collection, to the nation : the collection that, indeed, we have at Tate Britain (@Tate)), Leigh likewise has every reason to be pleased with what this film looks like and says.


Whether the details of art history (or of biographical fact) are correct is for others to debate (to the extent that we can know). Others, for example, can research Turner's known relations with his father or his niece, or observe on what basis we can say what did happen with that daub of red paint at the summer exhibition (?) at The Royal Academy. The fact is that, with Spall (and others), Leigh has - as he said himself to Radio 3 Free Thinking's (@BBCFreeThinking's) Matthew Sweet - someone who can be seen to be sketching, applying paint to a canvas, scumbling.

Leigh has no need for Spall to be Turner through and through, researched ad infinitum, but a man such as we see could have happened to be such an artist, a man embodying an economy of means and words, who was J. M. W. Turner.

In fact, it is actually of no importance to the worth of this film whether there ever was a Mrs Sophia Booth in Margate - she could be conflation, or pure invention, for all that it matters. Even more vigorously and vividly than Daniel Auteuil does Marseille in Marius and Fanny, Leigh creates this Margate, the industry on the foreshore, the close quarters on land, the sails from the front windows : we believe that Turner would choose such a spot, such scenes, such a woman (as Marion Bailey becomes, in Sophia).


It is almost, in a rather Becketttian way**, as though Leigh creates the creating Turner as his creature, in which aim Leigh is in no way about what Ralph Fiennes worked to achieve with Dickens in his The Invisible Woman (2013). That film seems to tell his lack of moral courage and to rehabilitate him sympathetically in our eyes at the same time ; although Mr. Turner does share an era with when Dickens' illicit relationship took place, the mores here seem to be quite different.

Spall may be 5’8”, but the sense that Leigh’s framing and Pope’s camerawork give is of the presence of the man, his bulk in the scene, as what balances it and makes it complete*** - just as we see him, discovered as we follow two local women along a canal path at the start, working from the perfect point on the opposite bank for the view that he wants.

Or, for example, when Turner is on his way (to Chelsea ?), we are confronted with an assemblage of people, who are there for us to view as he strides past. The assurance in the construction of this film matches Turner’s confidence about what he was giving the nation :

In Mr.Turner (2014), via @CamPicturehouse, Mike Leigh's assurance is very impressive : beautiful restraint in employing scenes and gesture.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 5, 2014

Although it was tempting to use another quotation, No good deed goes unpunished, this review is titled with one from 'Dido's Lament' (from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas) : not for nothing does Leigh have Spall, feelingly if obviously not expertly, sing along to Miss Coggins' (Karina Fernandez's****) playing this number. As Turner reaches for the words (finding, as happens with even the best-learnt text, synonyms that fit the scansion), he is virtually writing his own epitaph.

So much to love about 'Mr. Turner', but that scene with the Purcell on the piano: strangely sublime. And the Sun, of course...the Sun.
— Simon Barraclough (@EssBarraclough) November 5, 2014

Content with himself, as he strolls around the Academy show, being acknowledged, making comment, he is most of all a man who has a position that he knows - or knows himself by his position ? Having a daguerrotype made - and then persuading Mrs Booth to do the same with him - he is not the obedient subject, but exercising his intellect to understand the mechanism and the medium, rather than accepting what is presented, and how that is done.

And, there, Leigh cannot resist giving him prescience for our modern obsession with making / distributing images.


End-notes

* We also see that it could have been far from facile to maintain that belief, because of trends in fashion / art such as that which began just with the initials ‘PRB’, before The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ventured its name…

The young John Ruskin (in a scene that some view as unforgivably disrespectful of him) cannot venerate Claude as Turner does, but seeks to worship Turner in his stead - the key point, other than that Ruskin is young, is that Turner's estimation of his own work does not depend on no longer valuing what went before : he likens Sophia to a representation of Aphrodite, he respects Claude for painting the sea 'from the land'.

** Thinking of the late 'novels', Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho.

Quick - leave him !

*** Not in the same way, exactly, as in the montage that closes Calvary (2014), but the closing shot is of absence, of grief. And, when we see the dying Turner, it has been arranged so that Sophia Booth, to his right, is in a shallow depth of field, and is the one in focus.

**** Another Leigh regular, along with Lesley Manville (Mrs Somerville) and David Horovitch (Dr. Price) - as was Spall himself, in the mid 1990s.


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

An Education revisited - or Why did they include that on the DVD ?

This is a follow-up piece to a review of An  Education (2009)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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2 November (updated 4 November)

This is a follow-up piece to a review of An  Education (2009)

* Contains spoilers *

The advice is always to hand in your working, as well as your answers, at the end of Maths exams* (probably applicable to those in Physics, too).

We get to see the film-makers’ working (having been shown it by distributor E1 Entertainment) on the DVD of An Education (2009), which was, as it were, ‘educational’ – but only in how not to tell a story (or how to undermine the story that you have just had the likes of Mulligan, Molina and Pike tell on the disc).

In this case, it is less that one bothered to film these false steps (i.e. the deleted scenes) in this BBC Films’ production, or even scripted them in the first place : for one should be in little doubt that, when Sam Mendes says (on Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3blog’s) Night Waves (now re-labelled as Free Thinking – @BBCFreeThinking)) that another ending for American Beauty (1999) tempted him, there probably was one.

Yet, even if it was not, at the time of the original VHS release, generally the fashion to put ‘Bonus Features’ or ‘Extras’ at the end of the video-tape, one may wager that Mendes would not have allowed that other ending (if it had survived) anywhere near the DVD re-release (in July 2006) – quite sufficient that he should mention it on air some six years later…

More than any of this, it was just the misjudgement embodied in including this material as a ‘Bonus Feature’, as if it ‘might interest’ the viewer who had just watched An Education – although, almost necessarily, this critique is from the viewpoint of having seen the film as released, and treating that assemblage of scenes as having ascendancy over those that were wholly rejected (or which here appear in a different, usually longer, form).

That said, maybe one can already program modern DVD-players to add in or cut out scenes, so that one has (and can store the settings for) the viewer’s cut at will, an idea with which – in connection with an unfinished version of this posting – Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) was horrified quite a few months back at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) (when he brought A History of Children and Film (2013)) !

Even so, there is barely anything here that one would have wanted to keep, albeit some are decisions that would easily not get made until editing – too much time with the school-friends has been wisely relegated, because Jenny’s (Carey Mulligan’s) interaction with them there either adds nothing to the whole, or overstates what we already know / infer : when they are in the window of the café, one asks ‘What do you do all day, Lady Muck ?’, to which one of the answers is ‘Helping to look at some flats’. Or when the three meet for a post-mortem on Jenny’s romance, and, again, we learn what was better not mentioned, but passed over - or guessed at.


Yet the possibility that we probably least want to see filmed is that of David being ahead of Jenny at the end of the street in Oxford as she cycles with a male friend** – and, when she has asked the friend to wait and approaches David on foot (please see transcript, below), his seeking to make her accept his apology / explanation, and inviting her to resume a relationship with him (as if she is likely to agree, even in principle) :

On one level, the scene wants at once both to impart the fact that David has been in prison (You probably know I’ve been away), and to suggest that it is realistic that he would already be at liberty during Jenny’s time at university : Jenny tells him that she knows, because of a piece in the local paper that her mother sent to her, that he asked for 190 other offences to be taken into consideration : One hundred and ninety ! You must have ‘liberated’ most of the antiques in The Home Counties !

To be able to credit this scene, we would have to believe – as, for good reason, Jenny no longer does, having met David’s shocked wife Sarah (played by Sally Hawkins in a quick scene*, who was shocked at Jenny’s age) – that she, out of the others (of whom Sarah makes Jenny and us aware), has been special to David (Peter Sarsgaard).

Which is what the film has us believe only so far, then chips away at it, first with his convenient lying (about visiting C. S. Lewis), and his morals in ‘liberating’ an old map, and managing to justify himself to Jenny afterwards in terms of mere pragmatism (that he cannot buy her drinks, etc., otherwise).

As a closing moment, this request (whose refusal the deleted scene shows him simply accepting) asks too much of us, i.e. that David should really have cared about Jenny, for him to be making this approach, this speech – although it is consistent with what he says to Danny (Dominic Cooper) at Walthamstow, when he has been challenged about his intentions : to look at Jenny, and see that she is different.


Even if it happened in Lynn Barber’s memoir, on which Nick Hornby based the screenplay (and which might now be worth checking…), we are better off not having David appear in Oxford, or our hearing what happened to him. Not to make a better ending, but because it seems consistent with the scene with David’s wife Sarah Goldman, which, in the film is shorter (and without a child in a pram, or Jenny listening to everything that Sarah has to say), but carries the same meaning :

David’s involvement with other women (at least one of whom, even in the included version of the scene, he has made pregnant : You’re not in the family way ? – that’s happened before) has clearly enough been a repeating pattern of offering himself as available, when he is not, but not (as Sarah views it, again in that longer scene) being able to go through with it, because he loves his children**. (As Sarah says, answering her own question about whether Jenny knew about the house, child and her, They never do.)

For the film as made, with Jenny’s voiceover about getting to Oxford (and having had to make out to a boy who wanted to take her to Paris that she had not been), physically - though not necessarily emotionally - distances us from what she has gone through : even the closing shot does not retain the splendour or triumph implicit in a crane-shot, and then drawing out, but just slowly backs up to a wide shot and a blackout (as against a slow fade, after a significantly long hold).


The original memoir would, one imagines, have been in the first person. However, in the film, Jenny has not been at much distance from her own story before, or outside it, and has only been seen telling it to others in the fairly immediate moment – or, indeed, trying to avoid doing so, after finding the letters in the glove compartment***, and having required David to take her parents and her straight back home :

At this point, and despite being unfairly urged Don't be like this (which echoes his words Please don't be unkind in the deleted closing scene - please see below), she had put him on the spot with When were you going to tell me ?, and seems to take at face value when he replies Soon… it just never seemed like the right time. He tries to divert onto the good times, to justify asserting I can get a divorce – everything will turn out for the best. The truth, though, is that he drives off, when she requires him to speak to her parents and his wife.

The effect of giving Jenny a voiceover implies exactly the opposite of having her meet David, an accommodation with a past about which she feels very differently from when he tried to manipulate her with it there : Which, in this alternative world that we are shown, she has to express to David, who conveniently obliges by turning tail, and she goes back to her life in Oxford.

For this version to be on the DVD, David’s approach to Jenny has to be plausible and worth showing, neither of which it is, when he seems to invest no real energy in convincing a woman who now can have no reason to listen to him, let alone believe him – and David has always been seen to talk around the people whom he knew that he could persuade, because he knew how, not that he thought his powers to be unfailing.


Characterization of the first twelve deleted scenes

1. After Mulligan has whispered to Sarsgaard ‘That was scandalous’, regarding his manipulation of Molina’s mood and morality (approval that suggests a greater level of complicity / endorsement), closing business with his putting his hat over her eyes.

2. Pike and Mulligan, clearly having swapped hats, and the former initially lying on the bonnet of the car, and casually (as her character is) being quite candid about how little there is to do in the places where Sarsgaard and Cooper (Danny) stop.

3. A kiss in what initially looks like a railway compartment, but, as we draw back, is a private booth (where one can hear the 45 of one’s choice).

4, 5. Mulligan and her school chums caught smoking (when they thought themselves out of view around a corner), and then brought before Thompson – ‘Not surprised to see you’ (to Mulligan).

6. Curling around the café, in a pan, to the picture-window where Mulligan and co. are sitting. After she has put one of them right that the literature question that she is looking at asks for two examples (and the light quip from one friend that the other is excused, for being ‘rubbish at maths’), they turn to asking her about her (post-school) life : ‘What do you do all day anyway, Lady Muck ?’, to which Mulligan answers (not altogether convincingly) : Um (Pause.) I’ve been… trying on dresses, helping to look at some flats – I’ve been reading a lot, too.

7. In through the door of the kitchen, where Mulligan is being tutored, by Colman (her mother) in how to make afternoon tea, and we realize that Sarsgaard is there : he is asked, again, where the flat is, and eventually answers Down near Russell Square – two minutes’ walk from the Underground.

After Mulligan jokes about putting the tea-cosy on her head, Colman leaves. When questioned about where he is living now, Sarsgaard, after saying that he has only stayed there a couple of nights, states – when pressed – that Mulligan must think him very odd (You do seem to float around…), but I live at home […] – just [with] my mother, my father’s dead […].

8, 9. Inconsequential scenes, with Colman at the foot of the stairs (That’s what David sees, lots of nice places / You won’t be bored, you know – he’s not boring.), and outside the house, Sarsgaard kissing Mulligan, and sweeping her off her feet.

10. Extended scene with Hawkins (after No, don’t tell me… Good God, you’re a child !, and just before the moment when Mulligan walks away), where a longer speech from Hawkins catches her :

You didn’t know about any of this, presumably – no, they never do. Did he ask you to marry him ? Yes, of course he did. You’re not ‘in the family way’, are you, because that’s happened before ? […] (Brings out pram.) […] That’s why he never goes through with anything – he does love them. […] He’s four months old […] Perhaps you can remember a night, four months ago, when my husband seemed… a little distracted. […]

11. By the river / weir, distractedly smoking, then throwing the cigarette-packet away into the water.

12. Mulligan with her friends, around a table at the back of the café (where she had been waiting for them) – I’m sure my uncle knows someone who could kill him, if that would help – There was lots I didn’t tell you, plus a moment of attempted profundity : That’s the thing about our lives, isn’t it – it’s so easy to fall asleep, when there’s nothing to keep you awake….


(Transcript of the last deleted scene


13. Mulligan cycling, Sarsgaard in distance, and, as is revealed in a wide, tracking-shot, the Bridge of Sighs in the near background. Concentrating, though, on the dialogue (rather than the shots) – and what a quantity of dialogue for a scene that was not used (the whole sequence is 3 minutes 25 seconds) !

Mulligan : Good God !

Sarsgaard : Hello, Jenny.

Mulligan : What are you doing here ?

Sarsgaard : Uh (Pause.) I came to see you.

Mulligan : I think, in this case, ‘Better never, than late’.

Sarsgaard : Please don’t be unkind. (Pause.) You probably know (Pause.) Um… I’ve been away. (Pause, nodding.) So, I couldn’t come before—

Mulligan : Yes, my mother sent me a piece from the local paper. You asked for 190 other offences to be taken into consideration. One hundred and ninety ! You must have ‘liberated’ most of the antiques in The Home Counties !

Sarsgaard : I wanted to make a clean start, for a new beginning – (Slight pause.) together. (Pause.) I came to tell you… I’m going to speak to my wife about a divorce.

Mulligan : Don’t you understand what you did ?

Sarsgaard : Jenny, I do, I really do, and I know that… my behaviour… must’ve… been – confusing. (Pause.) Um. (Pause.) We never sat down and had a chat about it all, the ‘why’s and the ‘wherefore’s – that can wait. (Slight pause.) The important thing (Pause.) is – (Pause.) you’re still my Minnie Mouse (Pause.) – and… (Pause.) I love you. (Long Pause. She looks across at her friend, waiting.) And we had fun, you know you had fun.

Mulligan : (Long pause.) Yes, I had fun. (Long pause.) But I had fun with the wrong person. (Pause.) And at all the wrong times, and I can’t ever get those times back. (Pause.) But I’ve got my own life back now. (Pause.) Look, David – I’m at (With a boast.) Oxford.

Sarsgaard : (Snorts.)


End-notes

* Not surprisingly, in reviewing How I Came to Hate Maths (Comment j’ai détesté les maths), Mark Liversidge (@MoveEvangelist) remarks as much.

** Admittedly, this argument conveniently uses the content of one deleted scene to prove that another deleted scene has no merit, but the upset to Jenny in finding out that David is married is, in its own terms, so great that, having gone further and met his wife, she is likely to believe that he has taken her for a ride.

*** In truth, there is no clear reason why she looks in there or now, and not only now, but not before.


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La Bretagna all'Italiana - or La Serenissima in Cambridge (Part I)

A review of La Serenissima's concert, performing with Mhairi Lawson at Trinity College, Cambridge

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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27 October

This (over)lengthy review is of a Cambridge Early Music concert given by La Serenissima, with soprano Mhairi Lawson, in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, on Monday 13 October

The programme for the evening was entitled La Bretagna all’Italiana, and La Serenissima (@LaSerenissimaUK) was led (and introduced), as ever, by violinist Adrian Chandler (@AdeSerenissima), with Mhairi Lawson (soprano), Gareth Deats (cello), Robert Howarth (harpsichord), and Eligio Quinteiro (theorbo) – the ensemble’s full complement of players, on which Adrian calls for Vivaldi concerti and the like, is given on the beautifully presented web-site, at http://laserenissima.co.uk/about/*


Introductory

For the purposes of this review (NB This gushing overdue posting is just for the first half), Adrian Chandler is styled ‘Adrian’, because one simply must do so after having been to The Eagle on a couple of occasions with Gareth (and Robert ?) and him…


The first of which was after those three, as a trio, gave their Pisendel recital during one Cambridge Summer Music Festival, material founded in the original ‘Per Monsieur Pisendel’ album (which now has a tempting-looking sequel – Santa, please note !) : an intriguing story, fascinatingly told by Adrian between the pieces (and in the CD booklet), of the expert violinist who turned composer with the help of Antonio Vivaldi, one Johann Georg Pisendel, who rightly deserves – as La Serenissima believes – to be better known.

At Trinity, @LaSerenissimaUK was in reduced format, but nothing else was smaller : musicality, energy, freshness, plus MhairiLawson's voice
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 13, 2014

On that occasion, La Serenissima was not, as it has sometimes done, giving an all-Vivaldi performance (though he is ever present), and that was a link with this recent Cambridge recital – along with Adrian’s continuing search for rarities, star works by other composer / violinists (Pisendel being but one) that we may not otherwise (tend to) hear.


Opening half

Programme

1. Due Canzoni da Battello ~ Anon. (c. 1730)

2. Sonata Scozzese ~ Francesco Maria Veracini (1690–1768)

3. A Scots Cantata ~ William Boyce (1711–1779)

4. Sonata II in D Major (‘Manchester’), RV. 12 ~ Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741)


Mhairi Lawson began by singing two (1) Canzoni da Battello – and two further ones began the Closing half (write-up in progress), all thought to date to around 1730. At this time (and from the late seventh century until 1797), Venice was still a Republic : Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia – or just La Serenissima, from where the band takes its name**.

In the solo violin introduction to Si la gondola avere, Adrian brought out a sweetness of tone, which heralded richness in Mhairi’s voice, itself a contrast to the robust, yet delicate theorbo, before a close with violin again. In the second piece, Cara Nina el bon to sesto, Mhairi gave us more lightness, and the overall impression, with theorbo accompaniment, was less formal than in the opening song.


Neither of these Canzoni is attributed (please see next paragraph), and they typically have texts in Venetian dialect (as Adrian tells us in his programme-notes). Since he is necessarily mentally and historically rooted in Venice, Adrian provided much detail in the programme, but one also wanted to heed these short numbers – and their lyrics, fleeting as the may-fly, for there was little or none of the ruminative word-setting that we know from Handel or Bach. (And one knew that one could read over his notes later, in serene tranquillity !)


Afterwards, Adrian told us that these pieces survive, both in collections in manuscript form (in libraries, music colleges, etc.), and because they made their way into three volumes published, in London, by John Walsh (in the 1740s). (The notes tell us that there are occasional, usually sole, compositions that give Hasse, Pergolesi or Lampugani as their author.)


Adrian introduced the (2) Sonata Scozzese by outlining how Veracini migrated to London from Florence in the 1730s, and, through playing in the Entr’acte of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, came to write this piece, with its Scotch snaps, and its variations on Tweeside.

Scored for the quartet of instrumentalists, the sonata is led by the violin (rather than its having a solo part), and opens with what sounds like Scottish intonation, before becoming more Italianate – quite an extended movement, reminiscent of the dance.

Formally, there is an Adagio between the Allegro moderatamente and the final Scozzese, but it appeared to be run together with the latter, and was – not least in comparison with the Allegro – fairly brief. The Scozzese is marked Un poco andante e affettuoso – Largo – Un poco andante e affettuoso :

Before the Scots tune was stated, the movement was characterized by deft down-strokes in, and hesitancy about, the violin-writing, and it then developed with the feel of ‘The Pipes’, and with the bow skating on Adrian’s strings. In the Largo section, a little akin to that in Vivaldi’s Concerto No. 4 in F Minor***, Op. 8 (RV 297, ‘Inverno’ (‘Winter’)), there was an inward, reflective mood given by the solo violin, before we moved back to the opening theme proper at the work’s close.

In and through hearing these pieces, and seeing – if quick enough – Adrian’s agile finger- and bow-work, we witnessed how a variety of techniques and effects for violin are part of this repertoire. As, in different ways, no doubt Béla Bartók places demands on his soloist in, say, his Violin Concerto No. 2 (BB 117) – or Johann Sebastian Bach in his Partita No. 3 in C Major (whose works in this set of Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, BWV 1001–1006, partly inspired Bartók’s own Sonata for Solo Violin, Sz. 117, BB 124). However, of course, delving around in and then interpreting eighteenth-century (or earlier ?) treatises on string-playing is all part of the groundwork for what we hear in performance…


Mhairi stepped up again from sitting at the side of the chapel for Boyce’s (3) A Scots Cantata – maybe, when Tom Stoppard was giving us Vienna in a craze for things Scots in his adaptation On the Razzle, that seemed a little unlikely (albeit a century later, in 1842). However, it is clear from what is in this programme that something Caledonian was afoot in London in the first half of the eighteenth century****, which the local and (as Adrian puts it) ‘imported’ composers strove to serve.

Having duly referenced the recent vote ‘north of the border’, Adrian observed that the form is essentially recitative / aria – twice. Although being Scottish may have made Mhairi’s construing her text easier, it was the least of her qualifications to perform this piece when singers’ meat and drink is conveying meaning through a tongue that is likely to be unfamiliar to much of the audience – and many may relish settings of, for example (for this is not), Burns without being able to understand every nuance.

Even so, these central words (set in the second section of recitative), probably deliberately, pose no problem to following what is happening :

These tender notes did a’ her pity move, with melting heart she listened to the boy;
o’ercome she smil’d and promis’d him her love; he in return thus sang his rising joy.

Jeanny’s reaction, then, is the pivotal moment, the impetus for Jonny’s vigorous rejoicing in the second aria, where the scoring for voice dwelt on the phrase ‘dear enchanting bliss’ as the undulating accompaniment held the tune.


Regarding why the work that closed the first half, Vivaldi’s (4) Sonata for Violin and Continuo, RV 12, is numbered amongst what are called The ‘Manchester’ Sonatas, Adrian was quick to say that Vivaldi never came to England, but that the third largest collection in the world has ended up in that city, in the Henry Watson Library (for reasons that his notes and he went into…).

It opened tenderly, with a Preludio – Largo, but became spiky and quasi-military, before seeming to resemble the counter-tenor aria ‘Erbarme dich’ from Bach’s St Matthew Passion***** (BWV 244). Next, the Corrente – Allegro, full of energy from the off, with accents and a rising scale. Later, a falling figure and highly fluid solo writing in this movement left one feeling full of excitable emotion.

The following Giga – Allgero repeated and developed its initial phrase, progressing a bit as an eight-bar blues might. Yet what was most noticeable, other than Vivaldi’s typical employment of a driving violin style, was his use of ornament and emphasis. Throughout the movement, Gareth and Adrian were in visual interplay to give and receive cues, a noticeable feature of the close ensemble of La Serenissima (as well as seeing pleasure shared on Gareth’s face in reaction to some turn, or phrasing).

To close, the Gavotta – Presto was firmly in il prete rosso’s rhythmic style, and seemed to revisit the theme from the first movement. Not beyond being crafty with our expectations, and after laying a false trail as to where he was going, Vivaldi used the note that he had set up to springboard a coda in conclusion of the piece.


Audience reception and interval

Music this good (score and playing) is infectious ! One need not just have judged the effect of this performance by the applause, for the CD stall – with Adrian taking almost no break before signing – was very busy, and with an impressive range of titles (at least one per year since the group started).

Adrian was heard to say about a very good relationship with Avie Records, and that, in almost all cases, La Serenissima itself owns rights to the recordings, and can thus keep them in circulation (i.e. it could prevent titles being deleted).

Some time soonish, a companion posting will attempt to complete a write-up of the second half without being so novelistic...


End-notes

* Through elision, a URL that looks for all the world, on a quick glance, as though it is for some dubious suppository that involves lasers ?!

** Unless one has been there, it is hard to describe how glorious it is.

*** From, of course, a set of twelve concerti in all, Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione (The Contest Between Harmony and Invention), Op. 8 – of which, Concerto No. 7 in D Minor, RV 242, is known as Per Pisendel.

**** From the Internet, it seems that Boyce was not alone in setting this material, for we have one Signior Lorenzo Bocchi’s composition, ‘The Tune after an Italian Manner’.

***** Asked in the interval, Adrian could not place Ebarme dich (which one dared not try to hum / whistle), but said that it must be coincidence, on the basis that he understands that Bach did not know the Vivaldi piece.


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