Results tagged “Paul Levy measures the Angles” from Plain English

It's not every day that I'll take the trouble to go to Birmingham to hear a piece of contemporary music - or to do anything else, as the train fare is 20 per cent more than the fare from Oxford to London (though the distance is smaller), and as my wife refuses to drive in Birmingham because of its diabolical navigation difficulties.  Despite having to share our carriage on the return leg with a gang of totally hammered public school boys with cut-glass accents pretending to be proletarian lager louts - a charming, if baffling aspiration - it was worth the journey. For we were at the world première performance of "Rumpelstiltskin: A grotesque fable for our times" by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the score composed by David Sawer and directed by Richard Jones.

I've recently been to a performance in London where I imagine  the audience reaction resembled that of the audience at the Paris première of The Rite of Spring on 29 May 1913. Indeed, the second half of the evening was a performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring; but this was a double-bill, and it was the conclusion of the first half at which the audience sat for 30-45 seconds, too shocked (or embarrassed, claimed its detractors) to applaud. There was not a sound in the vast auditorium of the Coliseum at the end of  Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle until the stage lights went off altogether, and the house lights came up. Then there was a great deal of clapping and shouting - with the voice of a solitary booer carrying over the crowd. I, for one, was too stunned to make very much noise. 

Tired of commuting to London for my daily culture-fix, it was wonderful to drive only as far as Oxford last week for the opening of the 2008 Oxford Lieder Festival, www.oxfordlieder.co.uk. This is the brainchild and labour of love of Sholto Kynoch, a charismatic song accompanist and chamber musician (the pianist of the new Phoenix Piano Trio, who will be performing the Beethoven trios in 2010). Interestingly, for me at any rate, the opening recital of songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn was given at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building of the formerly all-female St Hilda's College.

Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children is a problem play, and the National Theatre's new production has had more than its share of troubles, with a press night postponed because the actor playing the second lead, the chaplain, either quit or was sacked, and replaced by an excellent Stephen Kennedy. This diverted critical attention, for a few moments, from the fact that this production, in a whizz-bang translation by Tony Kushner, is directed by Deborah Warner and stars her constant collaborator, Fiona Shaw. 

Nikolaus Lehnhoff's minimalist production of Tristan und Isolde at Glyndebourne depends for its effect largely on Roland Aeschlimann's curving abstract sets and Robin Carter's amazing lighting effects. Andrea Schmidt-Futterer's mediaeval/Japanese warrior/Ku Klux Klan (in the case of the demented-looking Act III shepherd) costumes are the least successful element; though they do have the merit, when combined with Carter's shadow-casting lighting, of concealing the fuller Wagnerian figure. This is the third outing for this production, which everyone says reflects Lehnhoff's early association with Wieland Wagner, whose 1964 Bayreuth Tristan provided the template for all future abstract-ish stagings. Though I've seen Tristan done in 1920s/30s costume, aboard a cruise ship (or ocean liner) and in a casualty department of a hospital, there's a great deal to be said in favour of a production where the setting is not determinate. Thought it's always risky, as a permanent abstract set courts boredom, it does allow us to think Wagnerian deep thoughts (or feel alarming feelings) about annihilation and the just-conceivable pleasures of the extinction of desire. 

Not all that long ago I was going to attempt to go to all the many performances of Wagner's Ring taking place all over the planet, and write a book about the experience. My publishers decided it was uncommercial (I still think they were wrong), but not before I had been to complete cycles at Adelaide, for the first Australian Ring and to a wonderful and wacky Ring in the famous opera house at Manaus, near the Amazonian jungles of Brazil.

The current revival of La traviata at the Royal Opera House could easily have been one of the great performances ever staged there. Richard Eyre has returned to direct his 1994 production, with its staggeringly wonderful, lavish sets by Bob Crowley (the sight of the elaborately grotesque yet beautiful décor of Flora's Act II scene 2 salon alone is worth the price of a ticket)  and magical lighting by Jean Kalman. Moreover, Alfredo is sung by the Maltese tenor, Joseph Calleja, who makes the transition from chest to head voice and back again so smoothly that there is not even a hint of gear-changing. Thomas Hampson sings Germont père at Covent Garden for the first time, and is a total wow, handsome both to look at and to hear. Violetta is a genuine diva, Renée Fleming.

Recently I've detected something curious happening in the dramatic and lyric theatre, a tendency to clarity, to narrative simplicity and straightforwardness. In a way it's the opposite of the Konzept school that has so long dominated performances in Europe, with directors of East German origin pushing their weight around the stages of the West. What we're seeing is a drive to tell the story using only - or mostly - the words provided by the playwright or librettist, to make the tale clear and lucid. 

Do all artists have a "late period," in which they exhibit power coupled with exuberance, occasionally even surpassing some of the work they made when younger? Or is this venerable fireworks display only achieved by great artists? The list is familiar (and assembling it a trivial pursuit) - Picasso, Rothko, Rembrandt, Titian, Poussin,  the Verdi of "Falstaff." On  the evidence of his latest show, my friend Howard Hodgkin, qualifies. 

Such excitement here in Oxford. About twenty-four hours ago the first female Professor of Poetry at Oxford University resigned the post she'd held for 8 or 9 days. Our Brit-land is a small world, and though I was not eligible to vote (I spent two post-graduate years at my Oxford college, but never took an Oxford degree), I seem, more or less, to know everyone involved in the fracas.