Hiding in plain sight

This is a review of High-Rise (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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18 March

This is a review of High-Rise (2015)

High-Rise is not a short film, but it seems to handle with unnecessarily great brevity – either because one has been overly tempted that one will find out (Curiosity killed the cat, after all), or because Amy Jump’s adaptation of J. G. Ballard least wants to tell (if not maybe Ballard himself ?) – what, after the very opening¹, the inter-title ‘Three months earlier’ has one most expecting, i.e. something like 'a story', or, here, an explanation :

We may well end up feeling that there is an allegory in train that is essentially contentless, because it descends to typifications of character and social impulses from which one may easily disinvest, although it is concerned, as if tasked to be so, to proceed linearly back to the opening - for us to understand anew (or maybe feel that we were misdirected into construing awry ?). In contrast, a film such as Metropolis (1927) (to which we will return below : Ballard must surely be responding to Fritz Lang) is expressly, unmistakably a parable, whereas this film seems to have pretensions to be something else, but progressively withdraws (from) them : whether that is adaptation or original, we may feel that we are re-visiting the territory of a film such as O Lucky Man ! (1973), but arguably less interestingly (despite a little energetic reference to Pierrot le fou (1965) thrown in for good measure).

The result is remarkably emotionless – sex on the glass dining-table, and even with Charlotte Melville (Sienna Miller) hanging over the balcony of the twenty-sixth floor, all of which one knows should feel daring, but is actually as exciting as the lack of affect with which why Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) asks, and is answered, why the sex is not continuing, after it has banally been interrupted. Dr R. Laing (we must be reminded of R. D. Laing), from the Department of Physiology, is described by other characters as Hiding in plain sight, and, in a semi-naturalistic way, his look, physique, make-up, demeanour are all used to make him seem a creature apart, later subverted by that Godardian gesture of absurdity. (And, somewhere in all this, do we find hints of Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim, and that Jesse Eisenberg in The Double (2013) deserves greater respect than the film seemed to merit when it was released… ?)

Maybe the fact is that Ballard’s novel does not exactly have a narrative, which is what this review appears to suggest (and Will Self confirms - please see the Post-script) : Ballard moves us randomly up and down the (initially) tripartite building with chaotic aplomb; his narrative is controlled by the dysfunctional elevators, blocked by the broken chairs, cupboards, desks that jam the stairwells.. If so, this is surveying the building, from top to bottom and around, as an environment for, and one that has given rise to, one excess after another – almost as if Plato had got it all wrong, with The Republic, and authored chaos. But is High-Rise any better than, say, choosing Samuel Beckettt’s short story Le Dépeupler (The Lost Ones), if his literary executors would even allow one, as the basis for one’s screenplay - what, one would have to ask, would making a film add to what that text describes (there are some quotations below) ?

In fact Carmin Karasic's The Lost Ones seems to exist, as an immersive installation and VRML work based on Beckettt's text

By analogy with the focus of this film (or indeed this question whether it was best left as a novel, without the burden of visual representation ?), it is as if, in The Matrix Reloaded (2003), Andy and Lana Wachowski had taken a brief, but important, moment, and instead had it dominate the whole film : one thinks of when Neo penetrates to their own character called The Architect². What film, one has to ask, would it have been if that scene, when Neo realizes that what he had thought beforehand (i.e. that getting there was the be all and end all - which, to have him make the attempt, it was expedient that he believe), had been handled that way : not as Neo's impetus to what, in the light of his accepting the reality that he did not achieve what he expected and acting on it to provoke what next happens, but as an occasion for a massively extended philosophical and existential enquiry between The Architect and him [there appears to be a complete transcript of that scene, which is worth those who are unfamiliar reading, at http://www.scottmanning.com/archives/000513.php] ?

In being drawn to microcosm, though with a narrower focus, Ben Wheatley’s (@mr_wheatley’s) A Field in England (2013) is most like High-Rise, but Sightseers³ (2012) and it both have a concern for story-telling (even the former, for all its psychedelic elements), which is largely abandoned here, except in appearance. For although High-Rise, in its own terms (let alone that of its predecessors), often does not seem very cinematically motivated, it does enjoy employing visual spectacle, and gives us moments or set-pieces that it luxuriates in, such as when ABBA is being played by a string quartet, or with Laing patchily applying the contents of a small tin (for which he has absolutely fought tooth and nail), but somehow perfectly painting the whole of flat 2505 – and skating over what might hold any of this together...

In the event, maybe the film just asserts that there is no story, that that is just how things are when the lives of individuals, in a melting-point, battle it out. (This is part of the reason, despite its very different tone and purpose, for mentioning Le Dépeupler (The Lost Ones) above, and seeking dominance is certainly highly relevant in A Field in England, of course.) In the concluding minutes of High-Rise, Wheatley employs a laconic voice-over, which formally assumes the role of being informative, but now seems oddly inessential, given a scenario where it is patent, because at such length, that people in this place have abandoned everything to pursuing their self-interest, at any cost.

When the device of voice-over is used, one seeks after the utility in doing so : here, it seems to be to underline what has already been imparted, which is a sense of inevitability about the upheaval, of resigned fixity in the face of societal disintegration and chaos. Concluding a number of meetings that the screenplay choreographs, the architect Royal (Jeremy Irons) and Laing casually chat about these things, over a dinner of sorts (and that, as mentioned above, is specifically where one is put in mind of The Matrix Reloaded, when Neo encounters The Wachowskis’ Architect, and learns that he effectively exists and operates at the level of a computer program, albeit an anomalous one).

Charlotte Melville, after all, told Helen Wilder that Robert Laing is definitely the best amenity in the building (a building that, we should note, Royal's right-hand man Simmons claims, when Royal wants to sack him, to consider to be his employer, not Royal). On one level, as that terminal voice-over wants to suggest, High-Rise is about Laing, and the very familiar theme of the mercenary instincts of someone who becomes attracted to power, scheming, etc. (e.g. obviously O Lucky Man !, but also Bel Ami (2012), though it scarcely bears mentioning alongside Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) [It is better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody]).

On a parallel level within the film, and in common with Metropolis, which gives the youth of rich parents (such as Joh Fredersen’s son Freder) a sky-top place of pleasure in which to while away their hours (unlike the toil of working life underground, and the hours of respite on lower levels up from the workplace), High-Rise has an almost absurdly and floatingly unreal roof-space garden⁴. It adjoins The Architect’s penthouse, and, in imitation of Marie Antoinette at Versailles (cake is even suggested as a food at one point…), represents the life of the elite. (* NB Spoiler * Even if it is an elite that ludicrously believes that it can regain power by the implausible step of lobotomizing one individual, who is the perceived source of trouble.)

A still from Metropolis (1927)

God forbid, though, that Ben Wheatley, in filming this text, should leave us feeling cheated, as at the conclusion of Metropolis : no one need fear on account of appearing to be naively expected to embrace a resolution that, except on some symbolic level, hardly addresses the cause of all the disturbance and violence, by presenting a gesture and a form of words. (This highly unconvincing rapprochement that Fritz Lang gives us, as if it changes what we have seen, is mediated by Freder, between Joh Fredersen and Grot, the leader of the workers (and the foreman of The Heart Machine), who links their hands : we are told that There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.)

Ballard must have explicitly wanted to reject that sense of papering over from Lang, but High-Rise arguably gives us not something else, but just the opposite extreme, where passionate urges do not get controlled reasonably. His novel, and its impact as a piece of writing, may be one thing. This film gives us, without the coherence or explanation that some might want (unless one simply subscribes to the view that an account of incoherent actions, intentions and the resulting processes and patterns has an innate right to be incoherent in its own right), a picture of where the brutal and horrific have become commonplace.

So what seemed grim and desperate when first seen is then how things have developed to be, with the connivance of all, and are as they are. But maybe Beckettt (translating himself from the original French of 1971), and not Ballard (from 1975), deserves the last word – who says, of those occupying the ‘flattened cylinder fifty metres round and [eighteen] high’ in The Lost Ones⁵ :

Obliged for want of space to huddle together over long periods they appear to the observer a mere jumble of mingled flesh. Woe the rash searcher who carried away by his passion dare lay a finger on the least among them. Like a single body the whole queue falls on the offender. Of all the scenes of violence the cylinder has to offer none approaches this.


Post-script

In The New Statesman (@NewStatesman), Will Self (@wself), who knew Ballard personally, and was even consulted by Amy Jump for that reason, concludes his piece about film adaptations of Ballard’s work (‘What would J G Ballard have made of the new High-Rise film ?’) by saying (about High-Rise) that ‘It may not be everyone’s idea of a laugh-out-loud film but, frankly, who cares what everyone thinks ? I don’t – and nor, quite obviously, did Ballard.’ Earlier, talking about when he met Jump, Self says (NB Contains spoilers) :

All I can recall saying is that she and [Ben] Wheatley had their work cut out, given that the novel has no proper plot to speak of, being, in essence, a series of flashbacks from a scene neatly encapsulated by the book’s opening line: ‘Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.’


End-notes

¹ Playing the sprightly theme from the Allegro of Bach’s so-called Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 (in G Major, BWV 1049) [the link is to a performance of the Concerto, by Das Freiburger Barockorchester, on YouTube] deliberately sets up an incongruity at the outset with the grotesque manner of domesticity that we are shown. (Elsewhere, Wheatley uses material from one or two more of these Concertos as a method of effecting a dislocation between the pleasant civility of the music and what he shows us.)

² Planning the city in Metropolis, Joh Fredersen is another architect, and, of course, all of these take their lead from freemasonry’s tenets. (Both have a regal bearing, but Ballard’s architect (Jeremy Irons) is even called Royal.)

³ On whose screenplay Amy Jump also worked, with the film's stars, Steve Oram and Alice Lowe.

⁴ However, unless visual distortion (or some strange geometry) is at work, the extent of the walled garden is not matched to the footprint of the building (which, although it shifts across at the top of the tower, does not change).

⁵ The Lost Ones, pp. 7, 59-60. Calder & Boyars Limited, London, 1972.


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The intensity of poetry and of Bach Passions (work in progress)

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17 March

This is an accreting review of The Mirror (Zerkalo) (1975)

Words can’t express everything a person feels

Some people like the security of being told what a film means (or ‘is about’), especially if it is a difficult one (and, from when they first appeared there, Andrei Tarkovsky’s films attracted serious critical approval at Venice, and Cannes).

However, even if you really believe that a film such as The Mirror (Zerkalo) (1975) can be summarized in a couple of sentences, what appears on the film’s page on IMDb (@IMDb)) may not be they – where someone seems intent on imposing an interpretation as if it is definitive and conclusive of all :

-> As if anyone would watch an unknown Tarkovsky based on what @IMDb says - but something so reductionist and pat, set against the film ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 17, 2016

One would imagine, from what is claimed, that The Mirror coheres or coalesces around the scene to which it refers (and from which it infers much) : it is, indeed, in the nature of some film-making, as perhaps it sometimes is here, that one’s understanding of what one sees and hears requires being patiently provisional, of waiting five or ten minutes for what that shot or comment was really saying to be confirmed or disclosed. (In other types of film, some aspects may not be revealed right until the closing shot, and then all makes sense.)

Tarkovsky goes to say :

Like an insect on a tree, the artist lives off his childhood like a parasite.

p. 45 Interviews, ed. John Gianvito

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 1, 2016

By contrast, The Mirror simply does not give the impression that there is one way of understanding it, and that, with that as a key, all is plain sailing and can be directly comprehended : it does not ever resemble that kind of film, and offering this token to the world at large is no real invitation in, although it is not without an element of truth.


For, having been quoted as having described the film as about a man who is seriously ill, Andrei Tarkovsky said about it (in an interview with Ian Christie) :

People ask themselves serious questions at different times, and especially in the face of death. [...] But I want to emphasize that this film was not constructed in this way for dry, dramatic reasons. It is important to see our hero in an extreme psychological situation, so that we don't feel his illness is entirely accidental. And it is the kind of illness where we don't know if he will survive, although it is not important to the meaning of the film — if there is any meaning !

[‘Against Interpretation : an Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky’ (1981) (collected and edited in Andrei Tarkovsky : Interviews¹, p. 67)]

And here is Tarkovsky, again in very simple terms (and from the same source-book¹), saying what he made the content of The Mirror²:

Published by Irena Brezna as ‘An Enemy of Symbolism’ 1974. Collected by John Gianvito in Andrei Tarkovsky : Interviews (quotation, p. 112).

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 1, 2016

For example (as he told his later collaborator on Nostalghia (1983) and Tempo di Viaggio (1983)) :

[…] And my father came home very late one night. [...] He wanted me to go to live with him in the other house. [...] That night [...] I was asking myself what I should say the next day if they asked me who I wanted to live with. […]

[‘Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky’, Tonino Guerra (1978) (ibid., p. 47)]

At the same time, Tarkovsky says how he battled the film, or the film him :

The picture was simply not working out [...] Editing the picture I thought about dramatic composition. Only having made twenty edited versions did I realize that I had to try and paste together my material according to a completely different principle, without any regard for logic. This was the twenty-first version. And this is the version that you have seen on the movie screen.

[‘The Twentieth Century and The Artist’, V. Ishimov and R. Shejko (1984) (ibid., p. 128)]

Everything will still be ahead. Everything will be possible.

In its entry, IMDb (@IMDb) also appears to give prominence to the fact that Tarkovsky chooses to use Bach’s St Matthew Passion, BWV 244, whose aria Erbarme dich was to appear so sensitively in The Sacrifice (Offret) (1986) (the last film that he was able to make of those planned, on account of terminal cancer).

However, there is a very long section from the opening Chorus of the St John Passion, BWV 245, addressed to the Lordship of Jesus, which is just one of the many elements to the film : dialogue ; his father Arseni's poetry being read (three or four poems) ; scenes and sets (and their juxta- and interposition) ; sound-design / scoring for symphony orchestra ; archive footage (e.g. of nuclear-tests, or armaments and munitions being dragged, with much effort and by different soldiers, through shallow waters) ; existing compositions such as those works by Bach³.

The passage used from the St John Passion opens the work : maybe one is used to recent recordings and performances that bring out the contorted dissonance of the oboe-line, but Tarkovsky’s choice does not have that bite. If it did, would it fit better for us with the screen-time over which he has it play, perhaps feeding into the moments shown, by the superposition of the tension of the Passion story, in the way that the fevered mind or confused imagination may mix things together ?


Cinema, in contrast to literature, is the film-maker's experience caught on film. And if this personal experience is really sincerely expressed then the viewer accepts the film.
I've noticed, from my own experience, if the external, emotional construction of images in a film are [sic] based on the filmmaker's own memory, on the kinship of one's personal experience with the fabric of the film, then the film will have the power to affect those who see it.

[‘Dialogue with Andrei Tarkovsky about Science-Fiction on the Screen’, Naum Abramov (1970) (ibid., p. 35)]

[...]


Perhaps The Mirror might have been what Tarkosvky had in mind when he said to Gideon Bachmann (during the 1962 Venice Film Festival) that he was seeking a principle of montage that will allow me to expose the subjective logic — the thought, the dream, the memory — instead of the logic of the subject.

Though those twenty editorial versions that he alluded to above (in talking to Ishimov and Shejko) do not suggest that he was instinctual in making this film... If, as Tarkovsky himself says in that interview, he had to cut loose from ideas of dramatic composition and any regard for logic, then maybe we need to consider ourselves encouraged by these words about our response to the film (immediately preceding what Bachmann quotes):

One doesn’t need to explain in film, but rather to directly affect the feelings of the audience. It is this awakened emotion that then drives the thoughts forward.

[‘Encounter with Andrei Tarkovsky’, Gideon Bachmann (1962) (ibid., p. 11)]

End-notes

¹ Andrei Tarkovsky : Interviews, edited by John Giavinto. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson (2006). Other quotations will appear above, as indicated.)

² To Ian Strick, He admitted, with regret [as to the 'autobiographical aspects' of The Mirror], that the film had lost him a lot of friends. 'It was rather silly ; they reproached me for being too personal in telling my own story. But, if I show things that I didn't understand when they happened, how can I explain them now ? [...]' [‘Tarkovsky’s Translations’, Ian Strick (1981) (ibid., pp. 71-72)].

³ During the opening credits, we also hear Das alte Jahre vergangen ist, BWV 614, from Das Orgelbüchlein (BWV 599–644). (Does one also think that one hears Mozart's Requiem Mass ?)

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Two now-celebrated film directors talk via an interpreter

This is a Festival review¹ of Hitchcock / Truffaut (2015)

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6 March

This is a Festival review¹ of Hitchcock / Truffaut (2015)

Two film directors, both of whom later turned out to have been near the end of their careers (and lives), agreed to meet for week-long interviews, the younger man [François Truffaut] asking questions, via an interpreter [Helen G. Scott], of the older [Alfred Hitchcock] : the result of their meeting was not only deepening friendship, but also Truffaut's book Hitchcock², of whose existence and history Hitchcock / Truffaut (2015) is right to remind us.

Frontispiece of Truffaut's Hitchcock

Hitchcock / Truffaut is a documentary that is worth watching for what it tells and shows, though not always for how it chooses to do so (please see below). Also, more importantly, because one could easily tease out its various strands³ [which are identified in the end-note] and ask whether one or more could have been given more weight - with the others as subsidiaries, or not included at all.

Since Leeds International Film Festival asks one to rate everything from 1 to 5 (5 being the best), one agrees to slot into that snapshot way of thinking, and - as there had been better films – one eliminated giving it 5, but then it had to merit 4 (as it certainly was not 3). In fact, it is deserving of being scored as 4 just to hear Martin Scorsese talk with masterful intelligence about Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960), which, whatever its aims may have been, is the heart of film : his analysis makes us delightfully aware of the cinematic stature of both Hitchcock and of him.

Our new release (in cinemas today!) distills & contextualises 27.5 hours (!!) of interviews b/w Hitchcock & Truffaut pic.twitter.com/7RFZEYObnz

— Dogwoof (@Dogwoof) March 4, 2016

What this Tweet says may, indeed, be what publicity for the film wants to tell us, and, in some senses, we do get a good feel for how all those interviews went – as well as how some of the ironic photography came about, including that used for the poster (in the Tweet above). (If we want to know what resulted from all that interviewing, though, one reads the book itself², of course [and the film does not much tell us how, or how much, the interviews - as conducted and recorded - were 'tidied up' for publication].) On other levels, hearing simultaneous translation prominently taking place at some length can, for those with some ability in French, be confused and confusing, just in the way that watching a film in, and with sub-titles in, one’s own language can be a distraction (even without any discrepancy between them...), if one is needlessly drawn to reading the latter, rather than listening to the voices and what they are saying :

As the whole point of using the footage was to give that sense of the interviews in progress, Helen G. Scott translating simultaneously into French needed to be audible, but it might have been better suited to Hitchcock / Truffaut’s purposes to adjust the volume of her voice, and that of the two men, for its English-speaking audience : relatively speaking, did we actually need to be able to concentrate on (a) Hitchcock and on (b) what Scott translated Truffaut asking or commenting to him (and less so on (c) her translating Hitchcock’s words for the benefit of Truffaut, and on (d) what he said for her to translate for Hitchcock) ?


Presenting the material, just as it was, and expecting the viewer to accommodate to it was one thing that deprived the film of being rated 5. Another, already alluded to (above), was that of director Kent Jones insufficiently deciding, and being clear about, the relative importance of the five or so strands within the film³ [identified in the end-note], and it has been said that Scorsese’s contribution is vital to its appeal and worth. (It does not quite fit in the last of these broad strands, as, unlike some of those interviewed (one just happens to recall Wes Anderson⁴), Scorsese was working in film at the time, and got to see Vertigo through being in film circles, since it was not available otherwise.)

The end-note⁴ has just mentioned that Hitchcock / Truffaut seems too keen to prove to us that it has people who make comments (under one or more of its strands) whose opinions actually matter, and (above) that it seems too undetermined, in what it ends up saying, about what is important : at the danger of overpraising Scorsese’s words, he was actually seeing films such as Vertigo alongside, and without needing the insights of, the Truffaut book. So the film has us stray, without being either sign-posted or having a justification, into valuing Hitchcock’s direction (and his work of preparation for a shoot) as if it is somehow just part of the thesis that the book importantly benefited both Truffaut and Hitchcock’s reputation.

Finally, no doubt it did, but that does not, in and of itself, prove to make a good reason to order the book, expecting from it a good filmic read. Historically, the re-valuation of Hitchcock that it achieved may have been overdue, but it does not mean that the exchanges between the men come off the page (as against in the live segments of interview that we see) with vivacity, or even that some of the territory into which either man wishes to take us may be of interest (except to them) : by contrast, in the Faber & Faber series that may owe it its origins (where film directors are interviewed about their work), a title such as Woody Allen on Woody Allen⁵ takes more time on each film, by usually devoting a chapter to one (whereas five or six are looked at in each of Truffaut’s chapters).

As the sub-title suggests, Faber & Faber's Hitchcock on Hitchcock : Selected Writings and Interviews (1995) offers something different

As against the Truffaut book, cinematographer Stig Björkman’s conversations with Allen have been more closely edited, for its chapters to be flowing and thematically arranged within them, of which one has far less sense with Truffaut's Hitchcock. Although Truffaut did produce a revised edition, Björkman and Allen have had the luxury, since the first UK edition⁵ (it originally appeared in Sweden, in 1993) of re-visiting the work with the passage of time and the appearance of new films. It survives the test of being readable and informative now, whereas – for all the significance of Truffaut’s – maybe it does so not have so much to say now... ?


Post-script :

To dilate, as an antidote to the above, on considering Hitchcock / Truffaut in wider terms [from ‘Actors are cattle’: when Hitchcock met Truffaut, Stuart Jefrries writing in The Guardian (@guardian)] :

'In the book of the interviews,' says [Kent] Jones, 'Hitchcock came over as stilted and formal, which you can hear he isn’t.

Thanks to critics such as Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, Godard and indeed Truffaut (all of whom who would become the iconoclastic hipster directors of the Nouvelle Vague), cinema for the first time became, as director Olivier Assayas puts it in Jones’s film, self-conscious. For the first time, it reflected on itself as art rather than dismissing itself as mere entertainment. The Hitchcock-Truffaut interviews were part of that revolution.

End-notes

¹ Seen, during Leeds International Film Festival (@leedsfilmfest) 2015, at Hyde Park Picture House (@HydeParkPH).

² Hitchcock by François Truffaut, with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott : Secker & Warburg, London, 1968. (First published as Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock : Robert Laffont, Paris, 1966.)

³ * Contains spoilers * :

(1) How Truffaut (and his peers) came to esteem the films of Hitchcock, and for Truffaut to approach him with his request

(2) Their correspondence leading up to Truffaut’s visit

(3) The interviews themselves and artefacts of those sessions

(4) The resultant book Hitchcock / Truffaut** and the effect that Truffaut desired from it, i.e. for an appreciation of Hitchcock’s films as works of film-making, not merely as entertainment (not least of all what made them work as ‘thrillers’ in the first place)

(5) Plus some 'talking heads' - other directors, or writers or critics, few on the screen long enough for their contribution to amount to more than bulking out the numbers.


⁴ If, as one is glad to do, one knows films of Anderson’s, there is another form of distraction, but this time on the screen : not only do we have this director (or writer, critic, etc.) identified by a caption (which is always useful, and can easily be taken in), but, in another part of the screen, a short list of films, publications, etc.

The tendency, then, is is to wonder why this film has been mentioned, but not this one (rather than focusing on what Anderson is saying…). So who is this film for that, there and then (rather than built into the credits ?), it needs to be sure of establishing the credentials of those who are shown saying how important Hitchcock or this book of interviews is ?

Stylistically, there is a like tendency, which comes out strongly at times, towards having too much archive / documentary material in view at once : we do not simply have a text on the screen for us to be allowed to read [such as Hitchcock’s quite gracious response to Truffaut - although that actual letter was accepting, but short]. Rather, at the same time as highlighting passages in it, the visual-design of Jones’ team over-busily has it transit across the screen, as well as changing the focus, and shifting us on, by moving other pieces of original material into play : almost akin to some Harry-Potter-like notion of an interactive museum, where, as the Hogwarts portraits do, the exhibits have a life of their own – perhaps entertaining or enchanting, but not an aid to concentration (or low anxiety) ?


⁵ Faber & Faber Limited, London, 1995. (It was originally published as Woody om Allen.)


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Great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia (The Winter's Tale*)

This is a review of Wreckers (2011)

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26 April

This is a review of Wreckers (2011)

* Please be aware that, without giving the plot, there may be significant detail revealed *

Great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia

In context, these words - in the opening lines of the first theatre production where I was so involved in the mechanics of the text and how it was delivered that it amounted to immersion in the play's world and language - do many things all at once:

* They introduce Camillo to us straightaway (and by name), because the speech is addressed to him - he has a difficult and all-important decision to make just scenes away, and we need to know who he is

* Established at once, in these words, is that we are in Sicilia, but that Bohemia and it, where Camillo has come as part of an embassy, are - the person speaking to him thinks - poles apart

* So we know immediately that we are in a royal court**, and that it is with the lives of such people and those, such as Camillo, who are employed by them that we shall be concerned

* But my last point is my main point: wherever Bohemia and Sicilia may be (and I had very little conception at the time of that production where they are - after all, I think that finding Illyria on the map might prove rather taxing), they are not here

* It is a depiction of things happening that is openly declared to be somewhere else


Dictynna Hood's first feature (Wreckers (2011)) is, itself, almost immediately and unequivocally established as being set somewhere specific. That place is not specified (except by how David and Nick, who grew up there, speak, if one had an ear for that accent (and there is a credit for the person who worked with them and others to make them sound from that area)), but it is not Bohemia or Sicilia, but rural England.

Which is part, of course, of what makes it so disturbing - just fleetingly, just at times. That feeling is reminiscent of, but also very unlike, Pinter's vision of what could be happening in everyday scenes set in unremarkable streets, maybe does happen. The things that we don't know about, or - more like it - pretend that we don't guess at or are not interested in.

And this is a village in Britain, where (although they would always claim not to be nosy) everyone knows everyone else's business: we are even told, in (I think) a scene on a street in the village itself that a man was known to sleep with his daughter. This place where even incest is something that, although not exactly witnessed, isn't anybody's business to report (just to be aware of), is where a drama plays out that involves Dawn and David, their neighbours, and their not entirely welcome visitor Nick, David's brother (or are we even so sure of that?). So, Dictynna Hood seems to be saying (and I mention this topic, not becase it is what happens, but because sexuality and the urge to have sex, to procreate, is shown to be a strong force).


Slight diversion (but not really)

The veneer of our society is of such a kind that, if an unheard-of businessperson and his or her colleagues and / or business associates or would-be clients, go to a live sex show, then So what? It's a free country!. These claims, perhaps less made now, about freedom, and the reality of when such private matters suddenly become public, do clash, however:

For it would be better for that businessperson not to become a Cabinet minister and continue to do such things, or not to have concealed (as best he or she can, by any means he or she has at his or her disposal) all trace of ever having done them (now or in the past), because politicians, in the UK at least, are meant to be above reproach. (Even if the reproach sometimes comes from members of the press who would have no objection to personally doing whatever they state they are condemning.)


Back to the film...

I hinted at Pinter, but it is an edginess of its own that Dictynna has shown us here, one that inhabits these people, their behaviour, maybe where they live. Much is not spelt out, although (and there may be doubts whether what he says is true) it seems that Nick has some sort of experience of post-tramatic stress, the brothers have lied (but which one?) in a way that attributes their actions to the other and vice versa, and that there are immense and largely unadmitted feelings of jealousy, anger, rage and hatred.

They are almost, without in any way diminshing from how they are drawn, characters who step forward momentarily as if an everyman or -woman, an archetype, and then step back into being the sorts of people that we may find it hard to admit that we are ourselves deep down, in this England where there is still a show of respectability, and what goes on in the bedroom - and who is in the bed - is best not known or talked about.

This sense, quite a subtle one, of one standing for all makes this a powerful and resonant film, and I just hope that I have the chance to see it again, ideally on a big screen.


End-notes

* I have posted already that it is often enough wrongly called A Winter's Tale.

** Not The Royal Court!


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Spotlight on a winner of Academy Awards in 2016

Some film-references and an accreting list of comments about Spotlight (2015) :

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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29 February

* Contains some spoilers *

After some film-references (not to be much explored), an accreting list in not much order of comments about Spotlight (2015) :

Whatever its merits or competitors, if Spotlight (2015) is Best Motion Picture of the Year and Best Writing, Original Screenplay, well... !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 1, 2016

* L’enquête (The Clearstream Affair) (2014)
* Mea Maxima Culpa : Silence in the House of God (2012)
* Philadelphia (1993)
* Philomena (2013)
* Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)


* Howard Shore’s score was inventive and employed a range of instrumentalists – however, at one point, it may have inappropriately suggested a positivity (to the progress of the investigation) that was not in keeping with what, at that point, was being investigated

* Dramatizing the telling of a true story – at best, we forgive such dramatic retellings for the voice that they have given to someone whose trust has been abused and his or her own voice silenced ; at worst, why not a dramatic reconstruction (for those whose choice would not be Mea Maxima Culpa (2012)), rather than having to adapt character and content to fit the inflexible standard notions of the elements of a drama ?

* Misdirection A : With the help of the score, in spy-film mood, to suggest that corruption or ill-will on the part of one or more of those higher up at The Boston Globe might have prevented earlier researches into these issues, but then let that dissipate with a curiously thin explanation, covered by newly arrived editor Marty Baron's (Liev Schreiber's) worthy speech about the rewards of having hindsight¹

* In contrary motion, and questions of billing apart, that purposive importing of notions of suspicion and intrigue is at curious odds with no one much, other than Baron, seeming to have a grasp of what about a story makes it in the public interest, and with how both the methods of investigative journalism and yet a lack of knowledge of worldly ways is portrayed

* As a screenplay that is now acclaimed, it is fine that we have three Christmases established : the latter cases give a sense of time and scale, but the first five minutes or so - which make quite sure that we do not miss the decorations - are hardly necessary, even in a linear narrative, to provide a historical perspective or tell what happened in that time-period

* Generally, the film fails too much just to tell², and chooses instead to show, and, at the same time, it tends to have characters talk, or even arrange to meet, when what is said (in legal terms) is solely for the benefit of an audience of supposed lay people : the characters would know not even to spend the considerable time involved to ask for what, answered in terms of principles of client confidentiality or professional legal practice, is bound to be refused

Probably the best total contribution was made by Howard Shore's inventive and versatile score ? The least by journalists bemused by the law.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 1, 2016

* Of course, one cannot judge how this would appear to those who have not practised law (or banking procedures, in L’enquête (The Clearstream Affair), to those not versed in finance), but surely no such journalist would register surprise at the lack of evidence in the courts of settlements made without proceedings having been issued³ : if agreements could not be made between claimant and defendant without everyone knowing what they were, there would be no point to them

* Misdirection B : A little as with Professor Snape in the Harry Potter films, and as part of generating the sense of suspicion that was mentioned above, we hear that someone’s heart had been in the right place after all (except not only that, if someone is asked to do what he has already done, one would imagine that he would simply say so, but also that he has no reason to claim instead that he cannot, which is falsified by having done what he did)

* Spotlight is about an obviously important subject being covered up, but this award-winning screenplay has its infelicities⁴, and, though it is approach that can work in the right place, does just allow significant characters, such as Marty Baron and Eric Macleish, to occupy some twilight part of the film, from where they are engaged when needed, but then sent back off to the wings

* Yet we spend more screen time, ‘on the beat’, with others, whose contributions seem tangential or to lack a corollary⁵, and who and whose professional roles are sometimes sketchily drawn : even if that were how it was, it even seems something of a surprise that the journalists do not write up the story as a team, but that it falls to Mike Rezendes, working on his own (quite apart, in a film about the lawyerly influence on public life, our seeing Baron, without attorneys checking it over, making the decision about what to print)

* As for real intrigue and a committed journalist who is personally laying everything on the line, though, it cannot compete with L’enquête and how, in a film that is more than twenty minutes shorter (this one is, in places, less well paced), it makes its far, far more complicated networks of transactional and interpersonal information at least as digestible - except that the latter is a French-language film, which still wrongly rules it out for this sort of consideration, and so much more !

Seen on the opening night of Cambridge Film Festival 2015

Post-script :

In his review, writing for The New Statesman, Ryan Gilbey comes up with other cogent reasons why the film does not work, starting with :

If we sympathise with the heroes of Spotlight, we have delivered some indefinable blow to institutional child abuse, just as anyone who paid to see Twelve Years a Slave (an earlier Best Picture winner) was also purchasing an invisible 'I Hate Racism badge. If we support The Big Short, we have done our bit to avert the next economic collapse, or at least to ensure we can discuss it with authority when it comes. But good intentions are not always synonymous with great film-making.


In The Hollywood Reporter, concluding his review, Todd McCarthy sums up :

In the end, this material can't help but be interesting, even compelling up to a point, but its prosaic presentation suggests that the story's full potential, encompassing deep, disturbing and enduring pain on all sides of the issue, has only begun to be touched.


End-notes

¹ Although one might infer a submerged plot-line about the effects of hierarchy on having the courage of one’s convictions ?

² At the same time, we hear the Spotlight team talking about what they are working on / what they are being asked to postpone doing, but we are not bothered with more than the necessary traces of the substance of what that is, since we would simply gain nothing by knowing : the film can trust its judgement there, but errs elsewhere with this issue of having to have people say what we do need to know.

³ Or (though this question did not arise), equally, to imagine that the judicial system, where cases have settled out of court, will show the settlement reached.

Head Moonbeam : Also gives opportunities for characterization and tension to develop, leading to a bogus impasse ?

Moonbeam : On expenses !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 5, 2016

⁴ For example, as a matter of tone (whose key does not match), rather than a moment of humour, when the others go down to the basement and, asking what the smell is, they are directed to a dead rat – as if someone would wish to start researching without removing it ? Or why Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) is both asked by Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) whether his surname is Italian (it does not sound remotely so) and, with some disbelief at the answer, where he is from.

⁵ Such as the retired priest, and just on the door-step, being garrulous about having molested (but, he says, not raped) boys in his flock - before being shut up from within.


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The best of duo partners (Part I) : The music is almost an excuse to hear them play

Part I of a review of Maxim Vengerov in Recital, with pianist Roustem Saïtkoulov

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21 February

This is the delayed¹ Part I of a review of Maxim Vengerov in Recital [Part II is reviewed here], which he gave with pianist Roustem Saïtkoulov at Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden, on Saturday 20 February at 7.30 p.m.

The first part of the recital that Maxim Vengerov gave at Saffron Hall (@SaffronHallSW) with pianist Roustem Saïtkoulov comprised two sonatas for violin and piano. [Part II is reviewed here.]

They were written in the first two decades of the nineteenth century and within fifteen years of each other (although Schubert was more than a decade, and his work was not to be published until 1851, which, if it is the publication-date that we notice, might make us fail to realize that he lived his live almost entirely within Beethoven's life-time).



Programme (Part I) :

1. Franz Schubert (1797-1828) ~ Sonata for Violin and Piano (‘Grand Duo’)

2. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) ~ Sonata No. 7



Franz Schubert (1797-1828) ~ Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major (‘Grand Duo’), Op. Posth. 162 (1817), D. 574

1. Allegro moderato
2. Scherzo : Presto
3. Andantino
4. Allegro vivace

In the Sonata’s opening Allegro moderato, the tone of Roustem Saïtkoulov’s playing was open, as if of song accompaniment. The writing for violin, meanwhile, was developing into complexity, with expressive cadences, and with Maxim Vengerov using a great variability of string-tone between, say, feeling free or sweet, exuberant or jolly. With the repeat, ease was the overriding sense, leading into a hint of nostalgia, and then new (agitated) material, with loud piano gestures. Momentarily, the duo chose to hesitate over the recurrence of the original theme, and then brought the movement to lively and uncomplicated close.


A horn-like motif, as if acting as a fanfare, opened the Scherzo (and was to make further appearances, following boisterous gestures the next two times). Schubert next variously gave us (punctuated by use of the fanfare) a passage built around repeated and syncopated notes, and a sinuously flexible line for Vengerov, whilst the piano had a sort of trotting pattern : that sound had already reminded of another composer, and, when the horn-call had come back triumphantly, the piece then duly transformed, in its ending, into a piece of Beethovenian theatre.


The third movement had a song-like opening from Vengerov. That theme was ultimately to be passed to Saïtkoulov, but a feature of this Andantino was trills on piano, violin adornments, and modulations. Those modulations, when the theme was on piano, led to harmonic uncertainty, and then it was passed back for a mood of mellifluousness that alternated with one of earnestness. More modulations, and trills, first on piano, came before the movement concluded, but with a slight feeling of irresolution.


Having once read Jo Kirkbride’s programme-notes, one necessarily listened with awareness that it was youthful Schubert. The Allegro vivace opened with what seemed to be a variation of the start of the work, with a ‘jogging’ passage connected to it (a little like the earlier ‘trotting’ figure ?). Just before a theme was passed to the violin, one was aware that the piano part was reminiscent of Schubert’s later style in keyboard sonatas.

Generally, this movement seemed more mature than the others, with a feeling of equal partners, and it had energy and dramatic tension, from performers and composer : Schubert’s piano-writing is sympathetic, and both Saïtkoulov and Vengerov brought a lightness of touch to this finale, but coupled with expressiveness. Schubert ends the piece with enthusiasm, but it is unannounced, in the usual ways, in the writing, and so catches us somewhat short.


As with the Sonata that we were about to hear, this was playing engaged on a passionate purpose, with sympathy and communication between the players, and much appreciated by those who had been listening at Saffron Hall.

Beethoven and Schubert in Maxim Vengerov's @SaffronHallSW recital :

Do we think of Schubert as later (though he barely lived on 19m more) ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 21, 2016

Beethoven ~ Sonata No. 7 in C Minor (1802), Op. 30, No. 2 :

1. Allegro con brio
2. Adagio cantabile
3. Scherzo : Allegro
4. Finale : Allegro ; Presto



Beethoven gives us, in the opening Allegro con brio, a pair of note-clusters that, with their contrasting note-values, balance a third, longer one, and Vengerov and Saïtkoulov clearly relished this rhythmic material. The composer’s assurance in writing and handling it was matched by theirs in bringing it to us, and, in co-curating the performance with him, and so a march-like passage felt rendered quite anew when it returns.

To some extent, elements of music inevitably, if well imprinted on the first occasion, will feel fresh when the composition has it repeated, by virtue of the differing context. Yet this was all part of the performers’ nuance and intonation, to have us take in themes in passing : at another point, we would be able to notice that Vengerov used under-statement before the material reappeared – both men were clearly feeling alive to the sensitivities and revelations in the Sonata. So, musically, the group of three vigorous down-strokes on violin need to fit where we hear them, and, if they do (as they did when Vengerov played them), they do not resemble gratuitous loudness (or even aggression ?), but make musical sense.

When that martial utterance comes back one final time, before a gloriously confident end to the movement, does it now seem to pre-figure what we hear in the so-called 'Eroica' Symphony ? (The Symphony No. 3 in E Flat Major (1804), Op. 55, was completed within a year of its publication*.)


When Roustem Saïtkoulov opened the next movement (marked Adagio cantabile), Maxim Vengerov was observing him keenly, during the introduction for solo piano : one had the sense that he wanted to absorb, with all available senses (not just that of sound), how this was being played, and, when he made his entry, it was with a most beautiful tone on violin, and phrased for the light piano chords.

There was the intonation and feeling of close duo partners, with Saïtkoulov performing figures, below Vengerov’s playing, and of an overall effect that, as the writing is, was balanced, with grace amidst a sense of solemnity. Just as with those three lively down-strokes from Vengerov in the Allegro con brio (please see above, in the penultimate paragraph), so Beethoven puts two massive rumbles into the piano-writing (in the form of pairs of very abrupt scales) : maybe curious in itself at first, but, with delicate violin following and adding to it, there was a devotional feel to how we heard violin with piano.


By now, although we still had two movements to be heard, they are (in a typical performance) shorter in length, put together, than the preceding Adagio cantabile. Yet music is not, of course, to be ‘sold by the pound (or kilo)’, and so, just as the emotional centre of a work may be found in a relatively short Adagio (because of what has come before it, and prepared for it), so the effect that these last movements can have will be built and be sustained by our experience of the earlier part of the Sonata.

The Scherzo movement opens with what, to Western ears could be an erratically accented dance-line (maybe in homage to the its fellows and its Tsarist dedicatee² ?), from which players and Beethoven extract thematic material. At times, with Saïtkoulov following Vengerov, it sounded imperial in nature; at others, perhaps more like a hymn of thanks – radiant and glorious.


Of course, it is not actually that the Scherzo is any more brief than is typical with any other movement so marked, but that the Finale is no longer. However, with rhythmically inventive writing and playing, and more use of syncopated off-beats, almost everything (please see below) about the tone and structure of the movement is predicated on its doing as we expect :

Beethoven makes a fugal use of a form of the theme, and we could see and sense the satisfaction of both men, in this music and in the performance, as they built from this point. Despite indications to the contrary, in a moment of almost stasis near the end, with violin and piano moving strophically, a Presto coda, signalled by Vengerov, was to bring the Sonata to a close, and to very much applause and sincere appreciation from Maxim Vengerov and Roustem Saïtkoulov on stage at Saffron Hall.



The link here is to the review of Part II of the concert


End-notes

¹ By way of explanation for this Part (Part I) of the review not appearing when intended :

Whatever depression is, for me it's more like a cat : it graces me by lying on my lap, and though I have things to do, I give in to its need

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 28, 2016

² The publication of this set of three Sonatas, Beethoven's Opus 30 (dedicated to Tsar Alexander I of Russia), had been in May 1803 (they had been written between 1801 and 1802).


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The last Prelude and Fugue, and onwards : Reich, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Bach celebrate (with) Louis #Andriessen

A review of Britten Sinfonia at Milton Court for / with Louis #Andriessen (Part I)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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18 February

This is the first part of a review of a concert given by Britten Sinfonia under Andrew Gourlay (and with soprano Allison Bell), as part of a BBC Louis Andriessen festival at The Barbican Centre, presented by Tom Service at Milton Court on Saturday 13 February at 3.00 p.m.

Soprano Allison Bell sang in #Andriessen's Dances (1991), the only work in Part II of the concert (which is reviewed here)

Programme (Part I) :

1. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) (arr. Louis Andriessen (1936-)) ~ Prelude No. 24

2. Bach (arr. Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), compl. Andriessen) ~ Prelude and Fugue No. 24

3. Stravinksy ~ Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914)

4. Steve Reich (1936-) ~ Duet (1993)

5. Andriessen (arr. strings, Marijn van Prooijen) ~ Miserere (2007, arr. 2015)



It has to be said that, even with the benefit (and delight) of having heard Peter Donohoe (@PeterHDonohoe) play Book I of Das wohltemperierte Klavier entire (at The Stables at Wavendon, Milton Keynes (@StablesMK)), there are still pairs of Preludes and Fugues that one feels that one is less confident of knowing well¹ :

So it is that, although recordings of Book I abound (and are listened to, e.g. by Glenn Gould, András Schiff, Richard Egarr, Keith Jarrett, etc.), those Preludes and Fugues from around No. 19 onwards never quite get as much attention / exposure as they might, or should – from that personal perspective, therefore, hearing the original work first might have helped one listen out better for what first Andriessen, then Stravinsky, had done to Bach's structures and textures…



Bach (arr. string quartet, Andriessen) ~ Prelude No. 24 in B Minor, BWV 869, Das wohltemperierte Klavier (1722, arr. 2006)

1st violin, Jacqueline Shave ~ 2nd violin, Miranda Dale ~ Viola, Clare Finnimore ~ Cello, Caroline Dearnley

(1) In the part for cello, we apprehended serene, stately movement beneath that of the other strings, and, as we resumed da capo, there were moments of tenderness. When, later, the writing for cello could be perceived to have a step-wise character, the other string-parts had a fluidity to them, and there was an excitement to the music’s build and fall.



Bach (arr. strings, Stravinsky, compl. Andriessen) ~ Prelude and Fugue No. 24 (1722, arr. 1969)

(2) A little as when Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) played Mahler’s arrangement, for chamber string orchestra, of Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor (‘Death and The Maiden’), D. 810, there was not an impression of a much fuller sound, though it appeared capable of being more sweeping in its effect, and gave a ‘larger’ crescendo.

In this version, the sadness came out in the theme that Bach takes for a fugal subject : its intensity was not lessened by a group of instruments playing the long opening trill (the Prelude also contains trills). Its motifs, and the use of falling intervals against contrary motion in the other parts, are suggestive of mourning, and, as the culmination of Bach’s educational enterprise (we know that, in class, he used playing it through as one), it is almost necessarily far removed from the Prelude and Fugue in C Major, BWV 846, with which Book I begins.


As to the impression given, especially of the Fugue, by making the arrangement, one factor has been mentioned above (i.e. the relative unfamiliarity of items towards the end of Book I), but, even compared with Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080 (which is still sometimes thought recondite), does this material seems harder to shape ?



Stravinksy ~ Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914²)

The quartet was made up exactly as for the first piece in the concert :
Jacqueline Shave and Miranda Dale, Clare Finnimore, and Caroline Dearnley

The work had no titles for the movements until 1928, when, alongside his Étude pour pianola, Stravinsky arranged them for orchestra (under the title Quatre études), and they became called, respectively, Danse, Eccentrique, and Cantique : the stridency of the first of these was characterized by vigorous pizzicato notes on cello (Dearnley), and an emphatic part for first violin (Shave), with occasional prominent strokes from second violin (Dale).

Stravinsky opened the second Piece by employing a heavily accented and slurred sound (as of his notion of an eccentric³ ?), but then there was an abrupt change of tone and mood, more extreme, in its rhythmic freedom and energy, than even much of Bartók’s writing for string quartet. When the initial material resumed, there was less jollity about it, and less slurring.

The last Piece was very different again – and one wonders what, in arranging it for large orchestra, Stravinsky might have changed. It began with a few gestures, which conjured to mind, perhaps, a waste space, before developing into what resembled a hymn (or someone praying).

Yet we were to keep reverting to those more stark gestures, as if to a distillation of his Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) from the previous year – and a work of whose influence on him Louis Andriessen was later to tell. Towards the end, the part for lead violin had a fugue-like subject, and, amidst these unlikely fragments, to the credit of the Sinfonia’s string-players (as well as of the composer), there was warmth.

Appreciative of a sensitive performance (and it could be that this felt like the first substantive piece ?), the audience at Milton Court called the players back for applause.



Reich ~ Duet (1993)

When they were leaving the concert-hall after the first part of the concert, one heard a couple of men talking in a way that showed that they did not realize that they had already heard Reich’s Duet.

Even for those who did not have the programme, as maybe they also did not, it was clear enough, not just because Tom Service (@tomservice), for the BBC (@BBCRadio3), had announced, and talked about the pieces in, the running-order of the Louis #Andriessen Immersion Day concert (through to the composer’s own Miserere) : for one thing, it was not as if it did not, in aural terms, resemble Steve Reich's style, but, for another, one imagines that (as with Music for 18 Musicians) he would have specified where on the stage, and so in visual terms, the duo should be – the familiar Sinfonia violinists Jacqueline Shave (leader) and Miranda Dale (principal second violin) had been facing each other across the performance-space.


This was a completely other sound-world from that of Stravinsky (as heard from 1914), with its use of echo / delay, i.e. in the person and playing of the performers, and sustained notes. Reich then added in patterning, in the form of rhythms from the double-bass (Roger Linley) and, for this piece, a third cellist (Rowena Calvert), deploying a flat bow to tap the strings.

For those who had been listening to Ligeti recently (because of Britten Sinfonia’s At Lunch 2), utterly different from the effect that he sought – open sounds, but with dissonance introduced, and the interaction of the parts of Reich’s duetting pair of violins, conspiring to throw the equilibrium off balance. With a light, open texture, the Sinfonia brought the work to a close.



Andriessen (arr. Marijn van Prooijen) ~ Miserere (2007, arr. 2015)

Interviewed by Tom Service, Louis Andriessen told us (wanting, as he said, to avoid giving us a lecture’s worth on it, as he had formally done elsewhere recently) that he had written Miserere for Amsterdam Sinfonietta as a requiem - as at, and for the fact of, their final concert : he had done so at a time when funding for the arts had been in the hands of people whom he described as ‘gangsters’, and this ensemble (and four others ?) had lost its grant.

However, another and happier aspect to its genesis, at the outset, had been a simple figure, written as a birthday present for his sister, and which #Andriessen said that even he could play on piano. The work had originally been written for string quartet, and Andriessen approved of the present arrangement (for string orchestra), which had been made by the Sinfonietta’s bassist, Marijn van Prooijen.


Alas, it had been intended that the review-notes, on which the comments that follow are based, would be amplified, with the piece (fresh) in one’s memory : nothing wrong with the intention as such, as an effort (as with Andriessen’s Dances, in the second half) to detach oneself from the activity of formulating immediate and specific responses, and, rather, making a comment on the overall impression⁴...

At first, the work fell into sections, with contrasts occurring between the sections. Then, as Andriessen had said to Service by way of an introduction to his composition, it becomes more ‘disquieting’, and less ‘conventional’, which we heard as the texture felt itself to be twisted (or tortured ?). When that feeling did subside, there was a quality of expansiveness to the writing, which was a little reminiscent of such moods in Copland (or Sibelius ?) – till, at the end, it had richness, as of Britten.


Part II of the concert is reviewed here



End-notes

¹ As, say, with a concert that includes complete Rachmaninov’s Preludes, Op. 23, nothing can alter the fact that some are celebrated (e.g. No. 5 in G Minor, marked Alla marcia), and so one less easily relates to their neighbours, heard in between.

² Although it was completed in 1914, it appears that it was not published until 1922 (and Stravinsky had revised it in 1918).

³ Assuming that Stravinsky did not conceive of that description after the fact, although Book II of Claude Debussy’s Préludes had first been performed in London in 1913, of which No. 6 (L. 123 / 6) is marked Dans le style et le mouvement d'un Cakewalk, and sub-titled (at the end of the piece) Général Lavine – eccentric.

⁴ If, of course, it had happened - whereas, it had then seemed natural, just after hearing Allison Bell (@bellAsoprano) sing, to write up notes for the second half.


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