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Czech National Symphony Orchestra 14 May 2024 (Susan Elkin reviews)

Czech National Symphony Orchestra

Fairfield Halls

14 May 2024

Hearing a Czech orchestra playing the Valtva section of Smetana’s Ma Vlast is a bit like hearing the Vienna Philharmonic play Strauss waltzes or the BBC Symphony Orchestra play Henry Wood’s Sea Songs – it’s in the blood. So this performance flowed cheerfully like the river it depicts with the timp more prominent than sometimes. It was, however, a bit staid, possibly because of the frequency with which CNSO has to play it,

The stage at Fairfield Halls is tight for a full orchestra and there had to be some adjustment at the back of the first violins to get Choloe Hanslip on stage and for each of her audience calls at the end of her performance. Nonetheless, once she was installed at the front, her aide-memoire iPad on a stand, we were into Bruch’s first violin concerto. She used so much rubato and glissando in her opening statement and leant on the semi-tones so emphatically that it sounded, for a moment, like Klezmer and later I had to check whether Bruch was Jewish. (He wasn’t).

An interesting interpretation, it made a strong dramatic entrée into one of the most popular works in the “classical” repertoire.  Hanslip had plenty of rapport with the orchestra – almost dancing as if she should have been conducting – during the orchestral passages. I liked the segue into the adagio which she played with pleasing warmth and the duet with the horn was delightful. The impressive technical acrobatics in the finale were, indeed, energico as Bruch specifies.  Goodness knows how she gets that mellow tone so far up the instrument. And Steven Mercurio ensured that the interspersed, lush, fortissimo passages rang out richly. All in all it was a pretty decent performance of an audience favourite. And her encore –  Massanet’s Meditation gave us the requisite soupy lyricism played with panache and adeptly accompanied, especially by the harp.

Now, Dvorak’s 8th is a symphony for which I have a very soft spot having first encountered and played it in the Lewisham Philharmonic (yes, really!) 54 years ago. Of course I’ve played it again since and have heard it performed many dozens of times over the years. And it never palls.

On this occasion all Dvorak’s melodious mood changes were played with character. Highlights included the double bass pizzicato and later decorative flute work in the opening movement. The odd wrong note and occasional loss of impetus were very minor blips. I also enjoyed the pleasingly rich string sound before the rippling tune (later reversed) in the adagio and the nice lilting quality of the allegretto. My favourite moment, though, is the rhythmic, minor key wind entry in the fourth movement about eight minutes before the end – and it made me beam as usual. Moreover, the opening trumpet fanfare was neatly precise and the gallop down the last page with the big rallentando was as uplifting as it should be.

Mercurio, an American who is CNSO’s current Music Director, is a happy, relaxed looking conductor who beats time in a business-like way with lots of smiles. At the end of the symphony he spun round to face the audience with a flourish on the last chord. When the applause had died down, he said “Well that was fun!” before introducing Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance number 15 as the encore and then delivering it with much slavic colour and brio.

 

Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique

Dinis Sousa

St Martin’s-in-the-Fields

14 May 2024

Part of a week-long Beethoven cycle, this concert presented Beethoven’s second and third symphonies – with all the energy, verve and passion that are the hallmarks of Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (ORR). Yes, it’s a world of original instruments – valveless horns, woodwind instruments made of wood, few cello spikes, gut strings and bows mostly held above the nut – and that’s what makes the music sound so gloriously fresh.

Sousa is a highly sensitive conductor who brought nippy urgency to the opening movement of the second symphony (1801). The fullness of sound sat very well in the rich acoustic of St Martin’s and yet the alert eye contact between front desks made if feel like chamber music. He is also very good at balance: the interlocking melodies in the larghetto including the running scales in the strings and the flute arpeggios, for example. After some attractive intersectional dialogue in the third movement he launched the Allegro Molto  finale at a cracking speed but also brought out  smiley insouciance.

And so, after the interval,to the wonders of the Eroica Symphony in which the precision was rapier-sharp. The opening movement stands or falls, in my view, on the groundbreaking (for 1803) climactic, discordant, off-beat horn chords which were splendidly played here. I noticed the three section members exchanging happy little grins during the passage which follows so I think they were pleased with their big moment too. Another delight was outstanding work from the timpanist in this movement.

In the funeral march Sousa made sure we heard the growling double bass motifs at the start and at the recap, which is rare because they are usually lost in the texture. He opened the third movement like a grewyhound out of a trap  and all credit, again to the horns for their valiant hunting calls in the trio-esque section. Then finally the interwoven fugal finale came with charm and Sousa extracted every ounce of heroic grandiloquence out of the final pages.

Despite the delicacy of their old or repro instruments, the fortissimi achieved by this orchestra can make the building, and one’s breast bone, vibrate almost as forcibly as an amplified pop group – from Row D, at least. And yet that is set against some of the most delicate pianissimi imaginable.

ORR was founded in 1989 by John Eliot Gardiner who conducted it, and the associated Monteverdi Choir, until recently. He has withdrawn from conducting for the moment because of an incident relating to anger management issues last year. I was struck forcibly at this concert by the phenomenal achievement of “his” organisation over the last 35 years. Nothing can detract from the strength and importance of that work – and it’s most encouraging to see the baton being grasped (literally) by a totally attuned younger man who can create such fine music with ORR, thus taking an important legacy forward.

I have loved and admired (most of) Margaret Atwood’s fiction for a very long time. She is, of course, supremely intelligent and knowledgeable but that never gets in the way of accessibility. She understands that you can be an expert on music or art but still need to cook dinner. You might have a top flight academic brain but you still chose your lipstick carefully and enjoy cold water swimming. So I pounced on this new collection of short stories with glee. This time, much of the writing feels very personal and I was much moved as well as entranced.

Some of these fifteen stories have been published before. Others are new. Most of them are reflective snapshots of life rather than action-driven narratives. The first three  and the last four relate to a couple called Tig and Nell  as they journey through life towards her eventual widowhood. They go for walks, fix things in the house, share, debate and do all the things contented couples do until eventually Tig is swallowed first by dementia and then by death. Some of the feelings – finding a note in Tig’s handwriting after his death or dreaming about him just being there – are heart-wrenchingly familiar. Atwood’s husband Graeme Gibson died in September 2019, by coincidence less than a month after the death of my own my own husband, Nick. I rarely allow myself to cry or grieve – whatever the counsellors and their ilk say, thinking about other things and striding on with life works better for me –   but Atwood penetrated my armour with these stories. In her end acknowledgements she writes: “And as always [thanks] to Graeme Gibson, who was with me for many but not all of the years in which these stories were written, and who is still very much with me, although not in the usual way.” And I wept. Yes, yes, yes, that’s exactly how it is. And she captures that feeling for her fictional Nell too.

The centre panel of this triptych-like volume comprises eight stories not about Tig and Nell. I enjoyed the The Dead Interview – a perceptive and witty “interview” with the late George Orwell in which she updates him on what’s now PC and what isn’t, as well as probing him about his wife Eileen. It makes serious points but does it lightly and it’s fun. There’s a funny but wickedly perceptive tale about two women of a certain age taking tea in the garden during Covid. Probably the most chilling story in this collection is Freeforall which posits an Atwoodian world in which “a sexually transmitted disease has swept through humanity” Men and women therefore have to be “kept” separately while matriarchs arrange marriages between  uncontaminated indiviudals to ensure the procreation of healthy babies. Like all her dystopian fiction, somehow it seems horribly plausible, especially after Covid.

I hadn’t – oddly – read any reviews of this book (published March 2024). I simply spotted it while browsing in Beckenham Books, my local independent bookshop. And I’m very glad I did.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Big Lies by Mark Kurlansky

The House Party

By Laura Lomas, an adaptation of Miss Julie by August Strindberg

Directed by Holly Race Roughan

Chichester Festival Theatre in co-production with Headlong in association with Frantic Assembly

Star rating: 3

Photograph by Ellie Kurtz

We’re in the present, in a spaciously luxurious home where a teenage party is about to kick off. Loren Elstein’s shiny set connotes that well and makes imaginative use of the Minerva space. There’s a large kitchen island centre stage. When the party bursts in, the island becomes a mini platform for dancing. And much later it morphs into a very different sort of small kitchen with clothes airer, cereal packet and small old fashioned sink unit.

Because there’s a party for eighteen-year-olds in the background Giles Thomas’s sound design gives us short bursts of music so loud the building shakes – which feels authentic, and it’s interspersed with dramatic blackouts. The ensemble of party goers are cast from Chichester Festival Youth Theatre and Frantic Assembly’s Ignition programme. Choreographed by Frantic’s Scot Graham, their work is spikily arresting.

At heart though, Strindberg’s 1888 play is a three hander, and I’d argue that Lomas’s play is inspired by Miss Julie rather than adapted from it because it’s a very long way from the original in many respects.  Before I saw it I received a cryptic note from the press office asking me to be aware that the play does not end where you’d expect it to if you know Miss Julie. Indeed – does Julie really go off to commit suicide and if not, or if she fails, where would these three people be in ten years’ time? Lomas gives us a rather odd epilogue or postscript to explore that point and it seriously upsets the balance of the play because the first half is nearly an hour and a half and the second less than 20 minutes. At the interval, puzzled people all round me were asking each other “Is it finished?”

Lomas has enhanced the role of Christine (Rachelle Diedricks) who comes from a working-class background but is very bright and hoping to go to Cambridge. She is a close friend of Julie (Nadia Parkes) whose wealthy absent father owns the house. Christine’s boyfriend Jon (Josh Finan) is the son of woman who does the cleaning in the house. Thus, ways have been contrived of making the play’s central, troubled relationships more or less plausible for 2024 although the characters are very different from Strindberg’s. Jon, for example, is much more decent and less self-interested than Jean in the original, his one big mistake notwithstanding.

Diedricks as Christine is warm, bubbly and later intense and troubled before eventually finding a calm maturity and a sense of stillness – it’s a strong performance. Parkes’s Julie is engagingly volatile as she gives us a deeply flawed and troubled personality – affected by the fatal combination of privilege and neglect in which she has grown up. And Parkes nails that. Finan, who uses his native Merseyside accent, finds innate commonsensible decency and homeliness in Jon and it’s pretty convincing. Lomas says in her programme interview that she hopes that, at the end of the play, the audience will feel compassion for each of these three characters – and she certainly achieves that despite the play feeling a bit like a jigsaw whose pieces don’t quite lock together.

 

 

Twelfth Night

William Shakespeare

Directed by Owen Horsley

Music composed and supervised by Sam Kenyon

Open Air Theatre, Regents Park

Star rating: 4

We’re in a louche 1990s-ish café near the sea – call it Illyria or “What You Will” –  where a four piece band is playing plaintively. And that’s one of many quite neat contrivances in this engaging version of Shakespeare’s gender fluid comedy about grief. There’s a lot of music in the play and here it is on stage where several accomplished actor-musos play the minor roles such as Curio and Fabian.

Director, Owen Horsley tackles head-on the blurring of sexuality in the play. The relationship between Sebastian (Andro Cowperthwaite) and Antonio (Nicholas Karimi) is there in the text in plain sight. Horsley makes it overt. This Sebastian is definitely not going to settle down to marriage with Olivia. Meanwhile Sir Toby Belch (Michael Matus – excellent) is a drag queen. And Orsino (Raphael Bushay – lots of gravitas) is uncomfortably puzzled about his feelings towards this faintly androgynous person who has joined his household.

The acting and direction is this show is glitteringly good. The text has been altered very little but this cast knows how to squeeze a nuance, innuendo or laugh out of almost every phrase. There’s none of the fashionable gabbling to make it sound chatty either. They make sure that you hear and respond to every word. Enunciation is the rule but it’s never – obviously – declamatory.

Anna Francolini’s Olivia (excessively and hilariously swathed in black lace at her first entrance – costumes by Ryan Dawson Laight) is richly compelling. She delivers every line with wit and verve, hamming it up a bit but also finding pathos and that silvery sadness the play demands. Moreover I’ve rarely seen an actor make better use of perfectly timed looks and pauses.

Evelyn Miller as Viola  is warm, charming but feisty – even as she deals with her own grief and hurt. One of the play’s synergies is that both women have lost a brother. Yes, you can understand why Olivia falls for her but equally you share Viola’s horror when she realises what’s happening. It’s exquisitely nuanced.

And so to Richard Cant’s Malvolio. Now I’ve seen many pretty good Malvolios over the years with Desmond Barrit for the RSC being one of the most memorable. Cant surpasses them all. He gets the tiresome, fussy humourless officiousness perfectly but when we see him alone in the letter scene (with the listeners behind imaginatively directed in a series of freeze tableaux) Cant shows us the character’s vulnerability and it’s painful. And then there’s the horror of the scene in which he’s confined as mad and his final exit – in which we feel real shame. So the moment of reconciliation at the very end (inspired idea) comes as a welcome and warm surprise. It is an outstanding performance.

Less successful is Julie Legrand as Feste. The conceit is that she’s the singer in the café and she sings well enough but she’s more like a cynical, weary school teacher trying to be clever than anything resembling the joker the play really needs.

Overall though, this is a refreshing, thoughtful and warmly entertaining take on an old favourite and an excellent opener for Open Air Theatre’s 2024 season. Moreover, the weather gods were smiling on press night which was a delicious “darling buds of May” sort of evening. And there’s no better venue when the weather’s right.

Ten in a Bed

By Steve Tasane

Directed by Chris Elwell

A Half Moon Theatre production

Polka Theatre and touring nationwide

Star rating: 4

For a “simple” two hander show for 3-8 year olds this powerful, insightful, moving play is pretty complex. Developed as part of Half Moon’s 2021 “Narrative of Empathy and Resilience”, at one level we see two brothers Iggy (Hayden Mampasi) and Kaz (Hari Kang) playing and singing in the night because they can’t sleep. And it’s funny. Young audiences love to see adults pretending to be children and doing silly things. At another level this is a refugee story of two children who’ve arrived safely – the lucky ones or at least “luckier than before” – and are being held in a facility on Britian’s south coast. They are lonely, frightened and haunted by what they’ve been through but they are also mischievous, playful and imaginative – because they’re children.

The concept is clever. The cushions on the bed represent the other eight of the titular ten. Each has a name.  They are the boys’ friends. The traditional “There were ten in the bed” song is sung several times but the words are changed to “Roll over and there was room for everyone” which is a pretty pertinent political message – which palpably gave the large Year 2 group I saw it with something to think about.

The play’s message –  subtly presented and never over-egged – is underpinned by symbolism. One of the games the boys play, regularly harassed and threatened by an adult English voice telling them to be quiet, is to imagine they’re on a boat. The sea is rough and there are sharks circling. Should they lighten the load and throw one of the cushions overboard and if so which one? Iggy is constantly hungry and the jelly baby (ten of them in a bed of icing) cake he keeps remembering symbolises what he has left and lost. Eventually he and Kaz find a way of reconciling their old and new lives but the coloured jumpers strung like washing across the back screen quietly tell their own tragic story. Where are their wearers?

Both actors are good and they work pleasingly together under Chris Elwell’s very experienced direction. Sorcha Corcoran’s design, which includes a stage left quasi-building made of therapy boxes, is simple enough to go into all the different spaces this fine show’s big forthcoming tour will require. Mark Newnham gives us fairly gentle folksy music which might be from, say, Syria and which plays continuously shifting from major to minor according to the mood of the moment and accompanying the boys’ singing.

Of course, as an amateur violinist, I’ve always been interested in violin repertoire and have known – at least as a listener – Beethoven’s 1803 “Kreutzer” sonata since I was a teenager. It was dedicated to violinist Rudolphe Kreutzer who said it was too difficult to play. In recent years I have also developed a fond respect for Leos Janàĉek’s first string quartet (1923) which he called “After The Kreutzer Sonata” although it’s way beyond my abilities as a player.

Written 120 years apart, these two works are hooked together by a longish Tolstoy short story which was published in 1889. The sonata features in the story and Janàĉek’s  piece is inspired by Tolstoy’s novella. It occurred to me recently that I knew this history but had never read the missing link so now I’ve put that right. And it was quite a revelation.

We’re on a train embarked on a long Russian journey. Goodness, how Tolstoy loved trains. They symbolise all sorts of horrors in Anna Karenina and he even managed to die (1910) in a railway station. The narrator, Trukhachevsky describes the other passengers and then gradually it thins out to leave him alone with a disconcertingly forthcoming and haunted looking man named Pozdnyshev who expresses forthright views about sex and marriage before settling down to recount his own experience. Yes, this is one of those works in which the main story teller is not the framework narrator – in the tradition of The Ancient Mariner, Heart of Darkness or even Wuthering Heights.

 Pozdnyshev, clamining it’s standard behaviour, for a man of his nobleman class, led a “debauched” (brothels etc) youth before somewhat reluctantly embarking on a more-or-less arranged marriage. He bitterly regards marriage as a form of licensed prostitution and seems to view his wife, who is never graced with a name, with a cynical blend of revulsion and obsessive jealousy. They quarrel and then use sex (“love”) as a reconciliatory tool over and over again. She produces five children most of whom she breast feeds as her husband thinks she should. His contention is that love – in the sense of sustained, affectionate commitment – seems to work for peasants who live simple lives but doesn’t exist among the privileged classes. Unsurprisingly The Kreutzer Sonata was banned for obscenity by the Russian authorities as soon as it was published.

Eventually Pozdnyshev’s marriage plunges into Othello territory with a hint of Browning’s My Last Duchess which doesn’t come as a surprise because he begins his story by announcing that he killed his wife. The catalyst for his final outburst of violent revenge is music. A talented violinist arrives in their social circle and Pozdnyshev’s wife welcomes him as someone she, a pianist, can play duets with and they do some soirees together. No prizes for guessing what, among other things they play: Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, of course.  Pozdnyshev convinces himself that there’s more between them than music. And as a female reader in 2024 I find myself looking past Pozdnyshev and empathising with his poor wife. He must have been appalling to live with.

It wasn’t only the Russian authorities who condemned Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata. It caused tensions between him and his own wife. Sonia. Theirs was not the happiest of unions and she was convinced – probably rightly –  that there were a lot of autobiographical elements and opinions in the narrative.

And as for Janàĉek, well he wasn’t happily married either and seems to have poured much of his angst into his first string quartet – hence the name he chose for it. Interestingly, though, it was written late in life when the composer was 67 years old.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood

Chet Baker: Let’s Get Lost

Tim Connery

Directed Finlay Glen

Bridge House Theatre

Star rating: 2

Chet Baker was a talented 1950s jazz trumpeter – “the King of Cool” –  who got  into drugs and failed to fulfil his potential. Tim Connery’s short play attempts to give us a glimpse of Baker’s mindset before things went fatally wrong. Thus we see a young man (Alfredo Mudie Smart) who is ill at ease and loathes being pushed in every direction by people trying to make money out of him. “I’m a jazz man. I play and I sing” he says repeatedly, stressing that he doesn’t want to go to Hollywood and be committed to “some studio”. We are required  to imagine that he’s in an empty rehearsal venue confiding his inner thoughts to an imaginary audience.

Smart is a competent trumpeter with a sweetly mellifluous singing voice. He’s also a fairly convincing actor and has got the Oklohoma accent sorted along with the Western drawl of some of the people his character is addressed by. The final few moments of the play are moving too.

Sadly, though, none of that is enough. This play is skeletally thin. It runs just 45 minutes – short, often repetitive, monologues interspersed with Smart singing far too many ballads of the period, each including a trumpet interlude. It’s a samey format  which doesn’t add to the story telling. I wanted to know how Baker came to play the trumpet in childhood before his two army stints. Suddenly he mentions a wife – sorry? He swigs from a bottle he keeps in his brief case. When and how did that start?

This play feels very much like work in progress – a starting point. As a critic, of course, I didn’t pay for my ticket. If had done so I would have felt short-changed by the slightness of the production.