Friday, 2 September 2016

Live each day like it’s your last – and, some day, you’ll be right ! ~ Rose Dorfman

This is a response to, more than a review of, Café Society (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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2 September

This is more of a response to, than a review of, Woody Allen's latest cinematic release, Café Society (2016)



There are, in Café Society (2016), quite a few familiar Allen(esque) themes (or concerns - a non-exhaustive list is assembling below), but is this a summation of them, and could it even (but one hopes that it does not !) serve as a swansong – in the way that, although Midnight in Paris (2011) was Woody Allen’s tribute to that city (and its past literary, artistic and social life), it was excessively lauded, and would hardly be a fit note to go out on… ?



After all, Midnight in Paris is not a film that dreams this much, with Gil’s (Owen Wilson’s) entry into another world proving as easy as waiting for an old cab with T. S. Eliot in it¹, and its ending, which settles for finding love in the ‘here and now’, not with a former lover of – was it ? – Picasso’s, who herself hankers for an earlier time still. Rather, it is a direction that was perhaps indicated by Magic in the Moonlight (2014), an Allen film that was unnecessarily disesteemed, and wrongly criticized for what is also an element here – even though that is what happened in the films’ common era – i.e. a younger woman marrying a man at least twice her age².


(Though equally, in Blue Jasmine, both Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) and Ginger (Sally Hawkins) retreat into – whilst they last – blissful forms of dreaming impossibly for, respectively, what cannot be sustained, and what is too good to be true, or there are the brothers³ in Cassandra’s Dream (2007) (Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor), who realise a dream at the start, but one whose consequences almost inexorably take them further and further from it.)


However, reading a summation of a career in film into Café Society is based on what... - as if Allen were the fictional director Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel), in Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth (La giovinezza) (2015), but envisaging, if not desiring leaving, his testament in making film-within-a-film Life’s Last Day ? Apart, of course, from the allusiveness⁴ of the line, quoted from Bobby's mother in the title to this posting, Live each day like it’s your last – and, some day, you’ll be right !, nothing more than the work itself, and its feel. (Yet, at the same time, Allen just cannot resist telling us – alongside the film’s ambiguous interpretations of the observation that Dreams are… dreams – about dreams as we know that he sees them, putting in a plug for those centred on NYC (East Coast ‘chic’) over ones about LA (a West Coast illusion, which Bobby, unimpressed by its film industry, describes as a ‘boring, nasty, dog-eat-dog’ existence).



Interlude - An alphabetical selection (some spoilery ?) of concerns (or themes) familiar from the Allen filmography :


* Affairs: many examples, from the hilarious parody of ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ in Love and Death (1975), to Husbands and Wives (1992) or Deconstructing Harry (1997)

* Central Park : Passim, but not least Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

* Confession being overheard by someone who should not know : Another Woman (1988), Everyone Says I Love You (1996)

* Dodgy relatives : Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989), Cassandra’s Dream (2007) [by no means the only point of contact between Cassandra and Crimes (sadly, via Match Point (2005))]

* Family : Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Radio Days (1987)

* Financial advice, (possibly) untrustworthy : Celebrity (1998) [as well as the funniest scene ever with a banana !], Blue Jasmine (2013)

* Gangsters : Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

* Jewish gangsters : John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo (2013), in which Allen plays opposite Turturro - though, with Jewish gangsters, the primary reference must be Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

* Jewishness : Stardust Memories (1980) , Oedipus Wrecks (in New York Stories (1989), with Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola)

* Night-clubs : Stardust Memories (1980), Radio Days (1987)

* Religious conversion : Love and Death (1975), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)





Just as in Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and the tales told around the table about Danny (Allen himself) that frame it (or in Radio Days (1987), in which - as in other cases - Allen narrates, but does not appear), an infectious dream of life inhabits Café Society, i.e. the film itself and in its microcosm in the night-club that Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg) agrees to help [Ben] run as its manager (but is somehow guilelessly unaware of how it is run⁵ (NB possible spoiler in the end-note), until he comes to be able to change its name from Hangover to Les Tropiques).



Allen very deliberately gives us the fiction of the film itself, both how it is told to us visually (such that we know that it must all be there – all that information about the family, and who is who – for a reason, as yet unrevealed), and in the manner and style of his own narration, casual and urbane, and which even seems to make light of state or informal executions as if ‘one of those things’ that happen in life (the camera also does not dwell). (By contrast, Irrational Man (2015) had been in a different place altogether, and employed voice-overs by its interlocked principals, Emma Stone (Jill Pollard) and Joaquin Phoenix (Abe Lucas).)



Left to right : Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, Dianne Wiest


One can instructively look back to the effect of Allen’s voice-overs as Mickey in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), partly when narrating his existential crisis (and how, by happenstance, The Marx Brothers came to resolve it) to Holly (Dianne Wiest) - with whom former relations, as one of Hannah’s said sisters, had been stormy and unpromising : because they had been, both of them (as here), where they were, and who they were, at the time. In Café Society, Allen uses the voice-over as our relation to a cinematic world that allows us to enter into the sheer dramatic contrivance that a man can choose to unburden himself to his younger relative about what, initially unbeknownst to either, also touches him the other – which feels awkward enough in itself, and yet it is only when, artlessly, the other passes on that story (although told in confidence) that the set-up fully unfolds, and, as a situation that it is to be repeated, we see a fight to maintain composure…


Ellen Page and Jesse Eisenberg in To Rome with Love


Quite apart from letting us see him use the cast as an ensemble (please see below), a more recent film, To Rome With Love (2012), is another that deserves more attention than it received, not just for being very good fun (and good natured, as Café Society is, and not Irrational Man (2015)), but also to be credited for being what it is – the work of a director who had the versatility, after Annie Hall (1977), to make Interiors (1978) (with all the brickbats that Allen got for it), and then make Manhattan, but also Stardust Memories (1980) (again, unjustly criticized). (To Rome with Love came before Blue Jasmine (2013) took people’s attention again (after Allen, for some reason, had it with Midnight in Paris).)


Alec Baldwin and Jesse Eisenberg in To Rome with Love


In To Rome with Love, Allen has Alec Baldwin maybe trying to help the younger man that he once was (again, Jesse Eisenberg) not make, amongst other mistakes, that of being seduced when he thought that he was seducing : it is one strand, amongst four, of wonder, which are presented with a tacitly agreed impossibility, but with none on its own asking us to credit it with the whole film. Nor exactly does Café Society, but not likewise, because it coheres around its elements in the way that Hannah and Her Sisters does (though with a different note on which to finish...).



As The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) did [which was claimed by Allen, at the time of the first edition of Woody Allen on Woody Allen, to be the film of his with which he was most pleased], Café Society revolves the question of the connectedness of image and substance – as well as the related one, both seen here and in others of his films (especially Blue Jasmine), of looking the other way as to where wealth comes from⁵ (NB possible spoiler in the end-note), or regarding the person from whom one wishes to acquire it.

Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin in Blue Jasmine



Perhaps the main sense, in Café Society, of a summation (if not of a conclusion) of a career inheres in a characteristic that it shares with that then-disliked film from 1980, Stardust Memories ? A strong sense of Allenesque couples who, though not exactly feeling regret, wonder What if... ?


And cause us to wonder deeply - when we might, instead, wonder about ourselves ?


Time passes… Life moves on… People change…



End-notes :

¹ Of course, on another level, dream is transmuted literally into wish-fulfilment for Gil, presenting as real the history that helped bring him to Paris – and overlook Inez’ own infidelity – until he realizes that he is chasing rainbows.

² It was there in Manhattan (1979) – which people usually forget was co-written with Marshall Brickman (as was Annie Hall (1977), not to omit the hilarity and foresight that is Sleeper (1973)) – and, from there (via Husbands and Wives (1992)), right up to Irrational Man (2015).

³ As it happens, Ginger and Jasmine are sisters by adoption, but not Cassandra's Terry (Farrell) and Ian (McGregor) - who, in Tom Wilkinson, have an Uncle Howard - with his line in calling in family favours...

⁴ Although, naturally one cannot go far in Allen's canon without hearing words that echo our mortality – even here, with Bobby's sister Evelyn's husband Leonard (Stephen Kunken), i.e. his brother-in-law, also talking - in the puzzled, but semi-humorous, way that his characters do - about Socrates and 'the life examined'…

⁵ Put another way, as in Cassandra’s Dream (2007) (or Match Point (2005)), getting what one wants - but at what cost ?

NB Possible spoiler : And one could ask – and will ask on a re-watching – why again, exactly, was it that Bobby went to see his uncle, Phil Stern, in LA (given that, back in NYC, Bobby is given a warning that Ben should consider disappear to Florida – which maybe Bobby 'forgot' to pass on ?)… Florida is also where Ben (Corey Stoll) was also heard urging Bobby's and his parents to go, just after Bobby has arrived in LA : as if form's sake, his mother, Rose Dorfman (Jeannie Berlin), superficially is concerned where Ben's money comes from, but then seems satisfied with some casual excuse ?




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 22 August 2016

So-called mental-health services : A Venn diagram with three principal, but barely overlapping, sets ?

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23 August







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Saturday, 20 August 2016

Some remarks about Mulholland Drive (2001) (and Mulholland Dr. (1999))

Some remarks about Mulholland Drive (2001) (and Mulholland Dr. (1999))

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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 19 August

Some remarks arising from a screening of Mulholland Drive (2001) at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, on Thursday 18 August at 9.00 p.m. (and about Mulholland Dr. (1999))


Nowadays, Nicolas Winding Refn¹ seems to want to go by the cypher above (which, one learns, one may not rightly call a monogram)...




However, is he, by curating some films that have influenced him, for participating Picturehouses (@picturehouses), showing that he is not a worthy heir to Igor Stravinsky... ?


Whoever’s work they really were (or were then thought to have been), it seems that Sergei Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to turn some libretti and scores that he had from Naples and London, and which had been attributed to Pergolesi, into a ballet for his Ballets Russes. Again, whoever’s music Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (1920) was then thought to have been (or based on – and, not surprisingly, it does not appear that Stravinsky said otherwise), it has been known for at least the last forty years to be his adaptive reworking / re-composition of those originals (as well as being considered the first work of what is usually called his neo-classical period).









The relevance of alluding to Stravinsky above lies in a sentiment that, it seems (and in mutated forms), has been ascribed to, or adopted by, many since before T. S. Eliot, but which is here quoted of Stravinsky :

 Igor Stravinsky said to me of his 'Three Songs by William Shakespeare', in which he epitomized his discovery of Webern’s music : ‘A good composer does not imitate ; he steals.’

Twentieth Century Music²



In fact, does NWR, commending films to us such as Mulholland Drive (2001) (which is arguably Lynch stealing from his own t.v. film and other antecedents), really just show that he has not dared to steal, only to imitate ?

In other words, is the faulty notion behind Nicolas Winding Refn Presents... this one ? That it is as if Stravinsky had not only done very little with the Pergolesi materials to re-embody them as his own, but had also, and without good reason, allowed those facts to be known before their time.

 Whereas Stravinsky himself was too good a self-publicist¹ for that, and, first allowed the Pergolesi name ‘to stick’ by arranging the work (in collaboration with Paul Kochanski) for violin and piano, publishing Suite d'après des thèmes, fragments et morceaux de Giambattista Pergolesi (1925)³...
Postlude :










End-notes

 ¹ Interviewed by Danny Leigh (@dannytheleigh) for The Guardian’s Film section (@guardianfilm), in Nicolas Winding Refn: 'I bring the singular, the narcissistic, the high art', NWR told Leigh – seemingly inconsequentially, as Leigh’s next paragraph is about meeting him next in London, a year later – about a young man whom he found bleeding nightmarishly in urban Los Angeles, and whom, along with another man (already there), he attempted to help, but the man died (and He had never seen anyone die before) :

 He told me this story a few weeks later, still in LA. I asked if he had felt emotional. ‘No,’ he said. Nothing ? ‘Strangely nothing.’ The next morning ? ‘Nuh-uh.’ He sipped juice through a straw. ‘But later,’ he said, ‘I was happy. Because I got a fucking great idea for a scene.’


² Twentieth Century Music : Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound, Peter Yates. Random House, New York (1967). Pantheon Books, p. 41.

³ Later, as well as an eight-movement Pulcinella Suite (revised in 1965), he produced arrangements, in collaboration with Gregor Piatigorsky and Samuel Dushkin, respectively, called Suite italienne for cello and piano (1932-1933) and violin and piano (1933).

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Beginning, not with the birds and the bees, but the psychiatrists and the psychoanalysts…

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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16 August

 An article in The Guardian (@guardian) sets out to tell us something that its writer thought of serious import, about, despite the elapse of seven decades, the static representation of ‘female shrinks'…



Perhaps, in its tag-line, the description ‘female shrinks’ might just have left it ambiguous whether psychiatry per se is what was really meant here.



However, the words below the tag-line, which introduce the piece, and its opening words (both as quoted¹), plainly use the word ‘psychiatrist’ : yet Dr Constance Petersen, in the person of Ingrid Bergman², is repeatedly and consistently defined by reference to the professional term ‘psychoanalyst’.

 So, sadly, referring to 'psychiatry', in this article now, is not exactly interchangeable with talking about psychoanalysis – even if it might once have been in the mid-1940s, with a lesser emphasis on medication ? – and is probably almost on a similar level to calling an astrologer an astronomer (or vice versa)… ?


More to come, where we may actually review the film, or come onto the question whether films ever really represent – or set out to represent – psychiatric practice…








When Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote Good Will Hunting (1997) (and both appeared in, the latter as ‘Chuckie’ Sullivan), can we any more just take at face value that Dr Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) really is literally to be taken to represent even some sort of maverick psychologist ?


 Can we do so any more than view Dr Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) in Spellbound (1945) as really being a practising psychoanalyst of whatever age, who has never been in love before, but falls for John Ballantyne (then in the mistaken guise of Dr Edwardes) within a matter of hours ?




This piece may have ended abruptly, but see also Whatever you mean by calling something ‘sexism’, take a look at Spellbound (1945)
End-notes :

 ¹ Respectively, Seventy years separates the Hitchcock’s film with [sic - on both counts] the DC blockbuster, but the social attitudes towards women psychiatrists they exhibit have barely altered, and A sexless female psychiatrist, devoted to her work, encounters a fascinating mentally ill man. Suddenly, she is awakened to the joys of love and devotes herself to her patient, abandoning her profession in a sensual ecstasy of criminality. Women psychiatrists : they’re driven mad by love.

 ¹ If, just if, Alfred Hitchcock had ever meant us to forget for a second that this was Ingrid Bergman on screen, would he have cast her – and not someone relatively anonymous – to be utterly convincing as this psychoanalyst, who breaks (as far as one can judge, but somehow actually gets away with it) all the professional rules in the book ? !




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Monday, 8 August 2016

Tale of Tales (2015) [Il racconto dei racconti] : A few Tweets from Saffron Screen...

Tale of Tales (2015) [Il racconto dei racconti] : A few Tweets from Saffron Screen...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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8 August

Tale of Tales (2015) [Il racconto dei racconti] :
A few Tweets from Saffron Screen (@Saffronscreen)...






Salma Hayek as The Queen of Longtrellis [an unnecessarily literal translation, from her title in Basile's Neapolitan text ? - which we never hear]










Post-script :













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Thursday, 4 August 2016

Watching Carlo Gesualdo, who is the transgressor ? : Breaking the Rules

The Marian Consort, Gerald Kyd, and Carlo Gesualdo at Jesus College

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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3 August
An evening with The Marian Consort, Gerald Kyd, and Carlo Gesualdo (Prince of Venosa), in the chapel of Jesus College, during Cambridge Summer Music Festival, on Monday 18 July 2016 at 7.30 p.m.








Prelude :


This piece of writing – by way of an account or review of the music-event Breaking the Rules at Cambridge Summer Music Festival 2016 – should have been fully written up and finished much nearer the time, and so would have been more detailed¹ (and less impressionistic), but it is what it is…

The Marian Consort


With Breaking the Rules, it took no more than a flick-through the Festival's promotional booklet to establish that The Marian Consort (@marianconsort) were, as a creditable ensemble, working in tandem with an actor (Gerald Kyd), and that their collaboration was likely to provide an unusual experience, with a Cambridge college chapel as the back-drop...


Moreover, Cambridge Summer Music Festival (cambridgesummermusic.com / @cambridgemusic) has a tradition of such interpretations of composers in relation to their lives and works, one example being a one-man show around a decade ago where, in the chapel of Clare College (@ClareCollege), we heard a performer embodying Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (C. P. E. Bach), and playing his work, and with - to close, as the light outside faded - a composition by his father, Johnann Sebastian (J. S. Bach), his Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, BWV 903.

Taken from The Full Monteverdi - LIVE SHOW 2004-2007


Or who can likewise forget I Fagiolini, with their theatrical Full Monteverdi, giving us the experience - right in the midst of us - of the love and passion of Claudio Monteverdi's madrigals ? [This at a regular Festival venue, Emmanuel United Reformed Church (EURC) : you can read here about director John La Bouchardière's film, made with I Fagiolini (@ifagiolini) and its music director, Robert Hollingworth.] Or that, in 2011, before presenting her programme Beloved Clara in 2016 - with its insights into the lives of Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms - Lucy Parham (@LucyParham) had brought us, amongst other things, a tea-time talk with Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3’s) Sarah Walker (@drsarahwalker) about Liszt’s Women, also at EURC, and complete with an element of piano performance ?

Lucy Parham



An account of the performance / event :

One heard afterwards, from asking one of the members of the ensemble’s technical crew, that previous venues had been Brighton Festival (@brightfest) and Lichfield, and thus gathered that – for all – the experience must accordingly be a very site-specific one : at this venue, lighting the chapel of Jesus College had apparently been a joy, and from the nave one had been able to see the colours and shades of the chapel itself, thus giving energy to the different parts of Kyd / Gesualdo’s story.

Therefore, one assumes, variations to moves and to cues – and to where and how to project the moving images that were also such a part of the evening – must also have been determined in situ to suit the architecture (and how it is laid out at floor level), with cast and crew then practising and, as they had, making them highly cogent. (To an extent true, of course, with any ensemble that is prepared to explore the physical and / or acoustic properties of a place - including when The Hilliard Ensemble performed with Jan Garbarek in St Paul’s (@StPaulsLondon) or the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge (@Kings_College), with the former processing separately to a central point, and the latter wandering where he might, and weaving magic between their vocal-lines on alto (or tenor).)


Straightaway, The Marian Consort (@marianconsort) impressed both with the beauty that one could discern in the individual voices, and in the quality of the ensemble - working around and alongside their collaborator Gerald Kyd, and fitting themselves to this oft-used performance-space (the nave and transepts anterior to the chapel proper of Jesus College (@JesusCollegeCam)).


Sometimes as a choir à 5, rather than the full à 6², they were in a sharp and tightly defined relation to the words of Kyd (as to timing, ambience, etc.) and his demeanour as Carlo Gesualdo – or, at least, a version of him (or versions ?), as scripted by writer Clare Norburn (@clarenorburn) (please see below). This was assured performance, even more so in an unfamiliar context, and where, on the evening, they had to match the tone and mood of Kyd’s role.



That said, there are ways, and ways, of performing Gesualdo’s work, some of which seem to find it less necessary to prepare the ear for, or assimilate, his dissonances / use of dissonance : for example, when The Delphian Singers performed, in the chapel of Clare College (@ClareCollege)), for Easter at King’s 2013³ (@ConcertsatKings)) – as if what Gesualdo does were so extreme that it must be accentuated, and cannot be allowed to resemble that of his (longer-lived) contemporary, Claudio Monteverdi... ?


The Discovery of Bomarzo at Aldeburgh Festival (Solomon's Knot and Mira Calix)

After all, Monteverdi cited and spoke highly of Gesualdo⁴, and Solomon’s Knot, performing in The Discovery of Bomarzo - at Aldeburgh Festival (#AldeburghFestival / @snapemaltings), in collaboration with Mira Calix (@miracalix) - gave a concert without an interval that, amongst others, included works by both, but did not draw attention to Gesualdo’s use of dissonance any more than to that of Monteverdi [an excerpt can be seen on Solomon's Knot's (@solomonsknot's) web-site at www.solomonsknotcollective.com/the-discovery-of-bomarzo.html] :

At Aldeburgh, Gesualdo was represented by pieces from The Fifth Book of Madrigals (1611), and one from the Sixth (published in the same year). However, Glenn Watkins⁴ (op. cit., pp. 36-60) spends a chapter in considering the arguments and evidence for the composer's assertion that they had been written fifteen years earlier (i.e. when Gesualdo was in Ferrara (please see below)), and so not as a reaction to events to which notoriety has attached (please also see below). (Likewise, The Gesualdo Six (@TheGesualdoSix) perform a programme with Ligeti’s Nonsense Madrigals interspersed with madrigals by both composers (including The Sixth Book of Madrigals, but do not manage the dissonances in a different way, so that Gesualdo’s then sound extreme.)





The script for the performance did not seem over-developed (i.e. not 'too highly polished', since slickness can lie that way), and its raw humanity, and that of Kyd as Gesualdo (‘K/G’) - obliged to re-experience his music through his life, and his life through his music - fed each other : if we must search for emotional or literary parallels (and it is absolutely not necessary to know them at all to watch and understand Breaking the Rules), there is an affinity with much of Beckettt’s work, but, most nearly, an echoing of the structural interplay of Words and Music (Paroles et musique), his work for radio, as to the function of the musical portion and its integration into the operation of the text.

On another level, when in mid-speech (although we never did know when K/G might summon music - or, vice versa, it summon him away from us, and significantly often to the period when he was in Ferrara (please see below), K/G also felt like an imagining of one of the souls to whom Beckettt's beloved Dante had assigned a role in the Inferno. Not, though, the passive repetitive patterns of Beckettt at his most discernibly Dante-esque, in Play (not least since Gesualdo was not, at this time in the evening, the adulterer), but in the narrative energy of his trilogy of novels - or that of Winnie in Happy Days (Oh les beaux jours). (Even just a very little of Hamm’s superficially self-contented story-telling style in Endgame (Fin de partie) ?)

At The Lammermuir Festival 2016, Gerald Kydd with The Marian Consort in Breaking the Rules (photograph by Robin Mitchell, for the Festival)


Although, at the time, it may have seemed dramatically ‘unhelpful’ for K/G to ask, nigh at the outset, who we were to judge Carlo Gesualdo, [what we conveniently call] History does nothing but judge him - for ‘Murther’ ou des autres dissounances. (Sometimes with the most unlikely accomplices !) Yet, if, after an accusation against The Marian Consort’s and his explicit audience, we thought that going back and re-creating the so-called fourth wall was not easily done (a term also ill suited to theatre in the round), we had not reckoned with writer Clare Norburn's understanding of the effect of K/G's presence, or his dynamic within this work, and with live singers - present almost as part of the action, or of his psyche.


At that point, and for all that one knew (not then having reference to a programme), the evening might have run to one long unbroken act. Over the course of the second half, one also proved to have wrongly figured that K/G wanted to keep from us an account of what happened to his wife and her lover – he did tell us towards the end, and how it had not been a casual discovery, or acts that had been committed in the heat of anger.


Nowadays (please see the Tweets below), and ignoring that this was in the late sixteenth century (and that the Gran Corte della Vicaria did not find that Gesualdo had committed a crime), the concentration seems to be on the fact that he killed these people at all⁵ (not, which appears to have been what sensationally exercised people at the time, the manner of it). So there are casual comments on whether Gesualdo’s dissonances reflect his remorse, in the course of Elin Manahan Thomas introducing a concert, otherwise excellent, of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European instrumental music by Il Giardino Armonico.



Whatever the reason why we hear it (and probably believe it - and all that it implies - just because we do), it is a much-told story, originating from the composer’s friend Ignaz von Seyfried, that when he acted as page-turner for Beethoven at the premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 3, von Seyfried saw almost nothing but empty pages. Too often, the stories that are readily told about composers, not least Gesualdo, are actually to the exclusion of the music and of meaningfully engaging with it. (Likewise, we hear time after time that Ralph Vaughan Williams professed agnosticism, but does that information get in the way of hearing his musical or other concerns in Job : A Masque for Dancing (1931), or Pilgrim’s Progress (1936) ?)

K/G (Gerald Kyd as Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa)

With excellent collaborators in The Marian Consort and Gerald Kyd, Clare Norburn’s (@clarenorburn's) act of Breaking the Rules is giving us a prolonged period to listen to the account that K/G chooses to give of himself and his life – all brought into the context of his music and of, musically, how he harks back to two years in the mid-1590s, when he was in Ferrara (whose elite musical world has since been adeptly treated of by Donald Macleod and his team on Radio 3’s Composer of The Week (#COTW)).

As we hear K/G, and also the music, what seems to have taken root most in his memory and feelings is his time at the Court of Ferrara, and the music that he composed there / then (please see above, concerning the date of composition of his last two books of madrigals), at the same while as enchanting him, imbuing him with a vivid sense of loss : as Norburn herself observes (in a full programme-note), Gesualdo’s ‘flowering as a composer is linked to a series of visits he made to the cultural hothouse of the day, Ferrara, which brought him into contact with other musicians and composers'.




Norburn gave us the moment in time when the piece is located. As well as in the programme, the piece itself sets out, in the guise of K/G, an understanding / interpretation of the significance of Gesualdo's earlier life. As she comments :

 Like most second sons, his intended path was to enter the priesthood and cardinalate [...]. At the age of seven, his mother died and he was sent away to Rome to be brought up by Jesuits. When Carlo was 18, his brother died and his path suddenly changed. Suddenly he was expected to marry and carry on the family line.

Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales (around the age of 13)


One York Early Music Festival (@yorkearlymusic) considered the musical responses to, and historical consequences of, the death of Prince Henry (one of which was to bring Charles I onto the throne in Henry's stead, in succession to James I, Charles' and his father). As with the early and unenvisaged death of the Prince of Wales (19 February 1594 – 6 November 1612), Gesualdo’s brother Luigi, three years his elder, had been due to succeed and become Prince of Venosa⁶, but Luigi died in 1584 : Charles and Carlo had both been brought up with a different future in mind for them, and for their elder brothers, and Breaking the Rules took time to explore the effect that it had on the latter.

Following Henry’s death, the musical tributes alone, which include settings of ‘When David heard’ by Thomas Weelkes and Thomas Tomkins (thus making comparison with David’s grief at the news that his son Absalom has been killed in battle), were effusive. How difficult, Norburn and K/G suggest to us in this challenging work of drama, to be the one who has not been brought up to rule (or have a spouse), and yet be looked to do those things (knowing that the death of another, one's brother, brought it about and / or that no one had intended one to have that status)… ?







Postlude :








* * * * *












End-notes

 ¹ Which is to say, not relying overly on memories that had been meant to be recorded in words on the night, rather than becoming vague with time first...

 As it was, it was always going to have these opening two or three paragraphs [their relevance, now, seems unclear], which were roughed out then (although then used, in between, in reviewing Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon (2016) (@tnd_film)) :

In other words, is the faulty notion behind Nicolas Winding Refn Presents... this ? It is as if, counterfactually, Stravinsky had not only done very little with the Pergolesi materials to re-embody them as his own, but had also, and without good reason, allowed those facts to be known before their time.

 Whereas Stravinsky himself was too good a self-publicist for that, and, first allowed the Pergolesi name ‘to stick’ by arranging the work (in collaboration with Paul Kochanski) for violin and piano, publishing Suite d'après des thèmes, fragments et morceaux de Giambattista Pergolesi (1925). (Later, as well as an eight-movement Pulcinella Suite (revised in 1965), he produced arrangements, in collaboration with Gregor Piatigorsky and Samuel Dushkin, respectively, called Suite italienne for cello and piano (1932-1933) and violin and piano (1933).)


 ² Partly determined by the number of parts and / or getting in position for the effect of 'a voice off', from the choir. (The seating, in the chapel at Jesus College, was in the nave and transepts.)

³ Conducted by Toby Young in the programme Drop, drop slow tears, with Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsories (as well as works by Kenneth Leighton and James MacMillan), on Wednesday 27 March 2013.

⁴ In The Gesualdo Hex [W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., New York / London (2010)], by Glenn Watkins, we read (p. 56) :

 Monteverdi countered [being charged with taking contrapuntal licences and making use of unprepared dissonances] that the older prima pratica of Ockeghem and Josquin des Prez hadplaced a premium on the beauty of the contrapuntal writing. The new seconda pratica, however, which he specifically attributed to Gesualdo and a small group of composers beginning with Cipriano de Rore and ending with Giulio Caccini, held counterpoint and rhythm as subordinate to the text [...]


⁵ Although, from the same period, do we take for granted in Shakespeare (from Othello to Leontes’ bloodthirsty jealousy in The Winter’s Tale), or in the execution of Anne Boleyn, that (real or imagined) infidelity came at a high price ?

 ⁶ On the death of his father, in 1591 (and a year after he had killed his first wife, Donna Maria), Gesualdo became the third Prince of Venosa (and the eighth Count of Conza). (Prince Henry, dying ten months before Gesualdo, was thus his exact, if younger, contemporary.)

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday, 2 August 2016

Some bollocks about 'saving' the @BBC £150m...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

3 August
















Postlude :






 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Sunday, 31 July 2016

Poetry in a Tweet : Poem for The Dispossessed

Poetry in a Tweet : Poem for The Dispossessed

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

30 July





© Belston Night Works 2016


End-notes

* A companion-piece to 'You *tease* !' ~ 60-word story...




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 28 July 2016

Cambridge Summer Music Festival (#CSMF16) : concerts with a first-time visitor to Cambridge

Cambridge Summer Music Festival : concerts with a first-time visitor to Cambridge

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 July
Some Tweets about four concerts, in three days, at Cambridge Summer Music Festival (#CSMF16), with - and chosen by - a first-time visitor to Cambridge


A follow-up to A quick overview, by Tweet, of I Fagiolini’s programme 'Amuse-bouche' at Cambridge Summer Music Festival...



 1. Benjamin Appl (baritone) (@BenjaminAppl), standing in for Louise Alder (soprano) (@louisealdersop), with Gary Matthewman (piano) (@songpianist) at The Fitzwilliam Museum (@FitzMuseum_UK) ~ Monday 25 July at 7.30 p.m.










Interlude (general grumping) :






Resuming with Appl (@BenjaminAppl) and Matthewman (piano) :







2. The Piatti String Quartet at ‘Little St Mary’s’ (The Church of St Mary the Less [Wikipedia®]) ~ Tuesday 26 July at 1.15 p.m. :




3. The Academy of Ancient Music (@AAMOrchestra), directed by Pavlo Beznosiuk, in The College of St John the Evangelist, St John's College (@stjohnscam) ~ Tuesday 26 July at 7.30 p.m.










4. #Gallicantus at The Round Church ~ Wednesday 27 July at 9.30 p.m.












Also from #CSMF16 : A quick overview, by Tweet, of I Fagiolini’s programme 'Amuse-bouche' at Cambridge Summer Music Festival...




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