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Maidstone Symphony Orchestra 12 October 2024 (Susan Elkin reviews)

Maidstone Symphony Orchestra

Mote Hall, Maidstone Leisure Centre

Conductor: Brian Wright

Pianist: Ariel Lanyi

This concert was a neat chronological programme starting with Brahms (1880) and ending with Prokofief (1944) taking in Rachmaninov (1927) on the way. Much of the work was dauntingly challenging so it made an impressive opening to the 2024/5 season.

It took a few bars for Academic Festival Overture to cohere properly but thereafter it was a pleasing performance. The big brass melody was very slow but the off-beat passages surged along. And all those frantic string scale passages down the final page were delivered with commendable clarity as the brass belted out Gaudeamus Igitur.

There are, of course, some beautiful passages in Rachmaninov’s fourth piano concerto, played here with stunning sensitivity by Ariel Lanyi but in general it lacks the easy appeal of the composer’s other three. For me – I am mildly synaesthetic – anything in G Minor is slate blue and the piano and horn duet work in the first movement was definitely just that, with Lanyi catching every mood. He gave us a schmultzy solo introduction to the Largo and Wright ensured that the muted, legato string work picked that up. And then it was seamlessly but dramatically (nice cymbal work) into the Allegro. Lanyi is certainly an electrifying player to watch: there are thousands of notes in many rhythms and moods in the last movent but he nailed them with panache.

Telling the audience that he thought it was time for something calmer, Lanyi then played Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor for his encore and it was delivered with great delicacy. You could see and feel (but not hear, thank goodness) him breathing the music so it flowed with elegant warmth.

There is certainly plenty for everyone to do in Prokofief’s fifth symphony, the scoring for which includes five percussionists plus timps, double brass, piano and harp. It’s not the most familiar of Prokofeif’s symphonies and it was clearly a new challenge for many of the players. I could sense careful counting amongst the furrowed brows. But it came off resoundingly well. Highlights included  fine underpinning from trombone and bass drum in the heavy statements in the first movement and the lightness achieved by the whole orchestra in the Allegro marcato. I also admired the compelling rhythms sustained by piano and tuba and the dynamic contrasts in the Adagio and the lovely playing of the clarinet melody in the final movement.  And excellent work from all those accomplished percussionists made the whole work feel pretty exciting.

Miss Julie

August Strindberg

Directed by Jon Fentiman

East London Theatre Company

Courtyard Theatre

 

Star rating: 4

 

Directors, adapters and translators are inclined to pull Strindberg’s 1888 play in all directions in order to make it “topical” and I’ve seem all sorts of whacky versions. This account of it places it firmly in late nineteenth century Sweden and allows the play to declare its timelessness without gimmickry. It is, after all, a visceral presentation of the power struggle between a man and two women, which is as relevant now as it was 140 years ago.

There’s an authentic in-period, big house kitchen in the Courtyard’s quite spacious in-the-round (seating on all four sides) space in which we first see Kristin (Lia Goresh) working diligently until Jean (Chris Agha) her charismatic, plausible, ambitious, pragmatic fellow servant – and paramour –  bursts in at the beginning of the play. Then Miss Julie, the daughter of the house (Maria Naterstad) arrives, apparently shallow, ruthlessly flirtatious, manipulative but vulnerable.

These three actors are skilfully directed to work intelligently together. Naterstad finds exactly the right level of confusion as she ricochets from being a troubled young women who wants a man to take charge of her life, and give her a purpose, to an imperious daughter of the landed gentry who expects servants to do as they’re told. She does playfulness, anguish, horror (especially at that awful, richly symbolic, moment in act two when Jean decides that she doesn’t need her tame finch), distress and sexual longing with real conviction. Why wasn’t I surprised to learn that she’s an East 15 graduate?

And Agha’s performance is splendid as he prowls round the space, saying anything to get what (he thinks) he wants from these two women. His voice, incidentally is richly edgy too – he sounds like a moderately educated, but bright servant who definitely comes from a different background from Miss Julie. Call it “estuary”, perhaps. It’s a perfect choice for this role. His heartbreak at the end of the play is devastatingly effective.

Lia Goresh’s role is smaller but she presents, as she must, an excellent contrast to Miss Julie. She makes Kristen into a moral compass at the heart of the play, sensible, firm but also desperately hurt as she sees her future slipping away.

Miss Julie was banned (good old Lord Chamberlain) in Britain for 50 years because it breaks through class barriers, and “worse”, presents graphic sex between Miss Julie and Jean – although the encounter is off stage. This version makes that coition as clear as possible by having a dishevelled Miss Julie come back on stage clutching her blood stained linen which she eventually puts in a receptacle where Kristen later finds it. It’s neatly done and succeeds it making the encounter feel sordidly transactional.

This is a worthy and thoughtful production of a fine play: well worth catching.  And, incidentally, this was my first visit to Courtyard Theatre. Now that I know where it is, I’ll be back.

 

 

Princess and the Hustler

Chinonyerem Odimba

Directed by Sara Amanda & Lande Belo

Tower Theatre

Star rating: 3

Chinonyerem Odimba’s 2019 play sets a family story of tentative reconciliation at the time of the 1963 Bus Boycott in Bristol. The Bristol Bus Company’s refusal to employ “coloureds” triggered a four month boycott which led to a climbdown and the first black bus conductor on a Bristol Bus. It influenced the  first race relations legislation which came  two years later.

Mavis (Ebony Skerritt), a first generation immigrant from Jamaica, has raised two children on her own having been abandoned by her husband, Wendell (Steven Burrell) who now reappears with another daughter, Lorna (Lakeisha Louise)

The first half of the play focuses on the complexity of these relationships. Mavis’s ten year old daughter, Phyllis or “Princess” (Hannah Morgan-Johnson) is delighted to have a sister. Her almost grown up son “Junior” (Aaron Mante) resents the intrusion and soon gets involved in demonstrations in the city, to his mother’s horror.

Meanwhile there’s Margot (Lucy Moss) Mavis’s friend upstairs, the only white character in the play, who represents the face of quietly pernicious, casual racism which all the others have to deal with continually.

The second half of the play is tighter although the ending is clumsily drawn out with, among other things a dramatically superfluous recitation of the names of black women who have triumphed against prejudice.

Skerritt and Burrell are both fine actors who play off each other well but they are working far too hard with their accents. Of course these people would have had strong Jamaican accents, in a way that their children born in Britain wouldn’t and that is well observed. On the other hand, this is a drama and if clarity gets lost in the voice work then it falls at the first hurdle. I missed at least a third of what Skerrit and Burrell said, especially in the first half.

Moss – whose character is tarty and forthright but vulnerable and lonely – adopts a forced, rather unconvincing Bristolian accent. She too is overworking it  and sounds, I’m afraid, irritatingly like Pam Ayres when she’s hamming it up. It is, however, clearly enough delivered and Moss makes this rather sad woman pretty convincing. The warmth and love is amongst the other characters. It’s Margot, ultimately, who’s the outsider.

Morgan Johnson finds plenty of childlike glee, temper and distress in Princess who is having to deal with prejudice at school but whose dream is to become a beauty princess. Louise creates a different sort of child in Lorna, distressed, torn and trying to make the best of things.

And there’s a fine performance from Mante who presents, initially, a school boy disobeying his angry mother and then develops his character into a brooding, troubled young man, passionate about the bus boycott and longing for the status quo to be restored at home. He gazes meaningfully into the distance, reacts tellingly to what others are saying and speaks with rich conviction.

The 1960s clothes (costume design by Laura Coulton) are delightful. Mavis appears in several very pretty, flattering outfits and I wore a dress almost exactly like Margot’s pink one, short length with flared sleeves, to my 21st birthday party. The ambience is spot on.

Conductor: Edward Gardner

Thoughtful programming by the London Philharmonic Orchestra brings together three works written in different countries within 32 years of each other in the first half of the 20th century. Moreover, to an extent they were all the product of political tension, anxiety and anguish.

Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem (1940) reflects his pacifism and disquiet about the escalating war. Commissioned by the Japanese government and then rejected, it was first performed in New York in 1941. In this performance, conductor Edward Gardner brings out the grief of the first movement and ensures that muted trumpets and xylophone sound as sinister as they should in the second. And the way he lets the 3|4 rhythms just die away at the end is very moving.

 

 

Patricia Kopatchinskaja arrives on stage barefoot, wearing a strange cover-all lacy dress, eccentrically holding her  violin and music aloft as she walks through the orchestra to play the very challenging Shostakovich A minor concerto (1948). Music on stand and eyes glued to it, she starts the rather subdued, brooding opening Nocturne, which expresses, one assumes, some of the composer’s worries about working in Stalinist Russia. As the piece continues, she becomes more and more animated, almost animalistic, hunched fiercely over her instrument, leaping up and down and, at one point, almost colliding with Gardner on the podium.

She is intensely dramatic to watch. It’s very unusual to see a performer actually out of breath as she is at the end of the second movement and she is evidently exhausted at the end. Her sound, though, is terrific, with impressive dynamic range and a pretty spectacular cadenza, during which Gardner neatly turns the page of her music.

And so, after the interval, to the glories of Sibelius’s 5th symphony (1915), probably the best known and loved of his seven. The orchestra has now reduced forces: we don’t need all that percussion or harps, tuba and keyboard players for this work. Familiar as the piece is, Gardner takes the first movement at a speed which makes it sound fresh and never allows it to become maudlin or sentimental.

High spots include the brass fanfares, bassoon solo and the strings’ incisive “knitting” in the first movement. The Andante gives us nicely nuanced dynamic and tempo changes. And Gardner more than catches the grandiosity of the final movement in which the main motif is rising thirds, played and developed across the texture. And excitement builds clearly as we head through the rich mellifluous melody towards the six climactic chords at the end.

Reviewed on 4 October 2024

This review was first published by The Reviews Hub:https://www.thereviewshub.com/patricia-kopatchinskaja-plays-shostakovich-southbank-centre-london/

I recently a few happy days staying with a friend in Cornwall. A former teaching colleague, she is a drama specialist who, like me, became a professional writer when she left teaching. She has written many hugely successful resources for schools and is a published novelist. As you can imagine, she and I never stop talking from the moment we get up until the minute we say goodnight. I probably have more in common with her than with anyone else I know. We know the same plays, read the same books and listen to the same music.

Anyway, knowing she’d be intrigued, I told her about the 5* (in my opinion) production of Our Country’s Good which I had just reviewed at Lyric Hammersmith and took her the programme because I knew she’d be as familiar with the play as I am with my back garden. That led to her asking if I’d read Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) because it is about the penal colony in Sydney, the birth of “westernised” Australia, and the repression of native Australians so there’s some overlap. I hadn’t. So she gave me her copy.

It’s beautifully researched, raw and heartbreaking. William Thornhill is a lighterman on the Thames. He comes from a very poor family but gets a break as an apprentice and marries the boss’s daughter which is a strong love match. Then a mistake leads to arrest for theft and a death sentence which is, at the last minute, commuted to deportation. Sal goes with him and their second child is born at sea. Because she is a free woman, Will is assigned to her as her servant once they reach Sydney so they can live in relative, if impoverished, freedom and start an inn business in their makeshift hut.

Sal is counting the days, months and years before they can return to London but Will yearns for something of his own – and land is nearby and available cheaply. Except that it isn’t because it is already occupied by people who’ve been there for millennia living quietly and competently in communities, catching the occasional kangaroo by enticing it into new plant growth and then expertly spearing it.

The main focus in this novel is the clash between the two groups and it’s utterly heart-breaking. It’s presented from the point of view of the white settlers, with their understandable but – to us in the 21st century – unjustified sense of entitlement. They are terrified of the “blacks”, their spears, shameless nakedness and what looks to them like insolence. Grenville, however, makes sure that we can also see exactly what these native Australians are seeing and thinking and makes the reader long for someone to start breaking down the cultural barriers and finding ways for the two groups to communicate. There’s a wonderful moment when Dick, one of the Thornhill children, is spotted in the river playing naked with the black children. But of course, his mother calls him in. Neither of the Thornhills are bad people. They just want the best for their children and there’s a huge gulf caused, by language, culture, custom and, of course, the obvious point that invaders are never going to be welcome anywhere. And that’s what these emancipists were. On the other hand, it’s a huge country and there was probably room for both communities to live peacefully side by side but it would have needed empathy and a recognition that of course  black people have rights too but here we are 200 years later still having to say it.

Some of the brutality in The Secret River is so appalling that it made the soles of my feet go clammy – my personal physical reaction to anything really shocking. And of course, we all know that the invaders got their way in the end and Australia developed as a British Colony. Whether it remains in the British Commonwealth or not, it is always going to be a “Westernised” country in which, tragically, the indigenous Australians are marginalised. You can compensate and offer sanctuaries and repatriation schemes but you can’t rewrite history.

Read this telling novel and reflect.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Eurydice

Sarah Ruhl

Directed by Stella Powell-Jones

Jermyn Street Theatre

 Star rating: 2

Sarah Ruhl is an accomplished playwright but the trouble with trying to retell a myth as famous as this one is that many people – most notably Monteverdi and Gluck – have done it so well before that there isn’t a lot left to say. Moreover if you modernise it as Ruhl does, presumably to highlight the relevance, then it gets narratively, and irritatingly, inconsistent.

The story, of course, is that Eurydice is in love with musician, Orpheus and marries him. Then she dies and goes to the underworld. Distraught, Orpheus eventually strikes a bargain with Hades, God of the Underworld, that he can lead Eurydice back to life but if he looks back at her as they walk out then she will die for ever. He cannot resist looking so it all ends in tears.

This production gives us a fine central performance by Eve Ponsonby who finds a nice blend of wide eyed innocence and devastated anguish and manages to make it pretty convincing. Keaton Guimaraes-Tolley more or less matches her as the  other-wordly Orpheus playing pleasing little melodies on his guitar – more current than a lute, I  suppose.

The play feels padded out and is actually too long at 80 minutes. Why do we get a scene in the underworld in which Eurydice’s father teaches her some Greek derivations such as “ostracise” and “peripatetic”? It feels like an irrelevant bolt-on. Why is there a scene in which a rather unpleasant man coaxes her away from her own wedding? And the chorus of three stones in the underworld are risible. Perhaps they’re intended to be comic but actually, they’re excruciating.

And as for those inconsistencies how come Eurydice arrives in the underworld speaking a different language so she’s cut off from communication but five minutes later she’s enjoying a warm, cosy chat with her father (Dickon Tyrrell)? Why, when Hades (Joe Wiltshire-Smith)  first appears is he a schoolboy with a wooden hobby horse? (apart from being able to use the latter to make a lewd suggestion). Why is she told there are no hotel-style rooms in the underworld and then shown to one? The playwright, apparently, wanted an Alice in Wonderland vibe for the Underworld and she certainly achieves that because it’s hard to make sense of quite a lot of this.

Tina Torbey’s set uses lidded grey boxes and floaty blue curtains to good effect but goodness knows what the string is meant to signify.  Carmel Smickersgill gives us a pleasing sound design including evocative sea noises and some suitably hellish sound effects for the underworld

Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine

Cadogan Hall, 07 October 2024

Conductor: Theodore Kuchar

Soloists: Mykhailo Sosnovskyi (flute) Oksana Hretchyn (violin) Jiri Barta (cello)

Monday 07 October 2024

 

Part of Cadogan Hall’s Zurich Interntational Orchestra series, this concert was certainly value for money. It’s rare these days to get four full length works plus gorgeous folksy Ukrainian encore and it didn’t finish until 10.15.

I have known the Brahms double concerto since my teens and have listened to recordings hundreds of times but this was the first time I have heard it live. It gets few outings because it’s expensive to do so this was a rare treat and a terrific start to the second half of the concert. It took cellist Jiri Barta, his music on an iPad with blue tooth pedal under his left foot, a few minutes to warm into the first movement but thereafter he and Oksana Hretchyn, a stately, dignified and unshowy player, were well adjusted to each other with good steady work from the orchestra. They played the richly “Brahmsian” Andante sensitively alongside some lovely work from the wind section. They also packed the vivace with drama leading to a resounding conclusion and highlighting the talent of the orchestra’s principal bassoon, Andriy Thachuk.

The other high spot in this concert, whose second half was generally much better than the first, was a sparky account of Beethoven 2 for which Theodore Kuchar adopted a completely different conducting style. Gone was the score and stand. Working on an assumption that we all know this symphony well enough to present it with panache, and hear it with joy, he found new ways of making it fresh. He bent double to entice dramatic pianissimi and often simply twitched and pointed rather than beating time. The effect was to build in lots of refreshing immediacy. The Larghetto was packed with dramatic contrast with particularly pleasing playing from bassoon and flute and I really liked the wind playing in the trio. Kuchar found lots of lightness in the Allegro with its off-beat rhythms and prominent timp. It was, in short, quite an original performance of a warmly familiar work.

The concert began with a mini flute concerto entitled Chamber Symphony No 3 by Yevhen Stankovych, born in 1942. He re-orchestrated the piece for strings and flute, especially for this performance. The orchestra’s principal flautist, Mykhailo Sosnovskyi, gave us some intensely lyrical playing in the middle section and I liked the plaintive mini glissandi over pizzicato and then col legno strings dying away to nothing at the end. On the whole, though, there wasn’t much warmth  here and it wasn’t a particularly digestible concert opener.

The other work in the first half was Sibelius’s relentlessly lugubrious fourth symphony which, of his seven symphonies is the one I like least. And Kuchar’s rather irritating audible breathing  didn’t help. There was, however, some noteworthy attention to mysterious anguish in the third movement especially from flute and lower strings and the string solos in the last movement were good, Interesting that the Cadogan Hall audience didn’t know when this rather strange work was finished so that Kuchar had to turn round and signal that they could applaud. I think that rather sums up the flaws in this symphony.

Philharmonia

Royal Festival Hall

Andrew Manze (conductor) Lise de la Salle (piano)

06 October 2024

Main photograph: Marc Gasgoigne

It was reduced Philharmonia forces for this all classical (in the strict sense of the word) concert. The configuration was different too with cellos to the left of first violins and seconds seated on the other side of the piano to the conductor’s right. Cue for much pivoting on the podium.

Lise de la Salle –  the first soloist I’ve seen clad in black leather trousers but why not? – was a replacement for Sir Andras Schiff who has broken his leg. Her style is, of course, different  but she gave us a vibrant, energetic, businesslike performance of Haydn’s 1780 piano concerto in D with a sensitive, individual take on the first movement cadenza. I admired the tender accompaniment which Andrew Manze coaxed from the orchestra in the Adagio and marvelled at the explosive, energetic, high speed rendering of the witty Rondo.

Then it was piano pushed to the back for Schubert 8 in all its glory. Manze, who often signals the rhythm of the music rather than beating time, allowed the brooding cellos and basses to work their magic and really leaned on the general pauses and the dramatic sforzandi. All that menacing B minor, which Manze clearly likes as much as I do, simmered mysteriously especially when he racked it up in the big repeat.  The Andante – arguably Schubert’s best symphonic slow movement –  was a joy too, especially in the tentative passages. It was well balanced with plenty of poignant intricacy and some fine work from clarinet and oboe.

The piano reappeared during the interval for Mozart’s 1786 A major piano concerto, maybe his loveliest, which completed the concert. Manze, who smiles a lot, made it sound both crisp and fluid. Lise de la Salle is a poised but not a flamboyant performer who delivered the first movement with charismatic precision and opened the adagio very much in chamber music mode, evidently delighting in playing with the wind section. Her lead into the Allegro was nippily incisive with some nicely pointed left hand work.