Thoughts on concert-going

It’s occurred to me recently that going to a concert is no longer the huge attraction it once was. In the past, concerts were opportunities for connection with other performers, with friends and colleagues (both on the stage and in the audience), and to be moved or transfixed by the music.

Nowadays, I feel more reticent to head out. Perhaps this is a result of too many Melbourne Festival tickets bought for performances that failed to please. Perhaps it is a delayed reaction to the many, many orchestral concerts I went to, in the days that I worked for an orchestra. Mostly though, I have to confess that it is a response to the growing sense that I often have after going to a concert (or any other performance) of a kind of blankness, when I wake up the next day and have absolutely no reaction to it. It is simply…. nothing, really. An experience that hasn’t really impacted on me (in the true sense of the word) in any way. It isn’t about ‘like’ or ‘dislike’.

It seems a ridiculously tall order, but I want my performance-going to be life-changing. I want to come home and have it rolling over in my head, again and again. Questions, or issues, or ideas, or challenges, or puzzles to ponder. Or delights, or a remembered experience of connection with the music and the expression of the artists.

It has become a kind of assessment tool, in a way, prior to buying tickets. “Will it be worth it?” by which I mean the investment of effort and the time on my part, rather than the actual cost.

Last week I went to the Melbourne Recital Centre to hear the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra perform three works under the baton of Sir Neville Marriner. Andrew Marriner (his son) played the Mozart Clarinet Concerto.

How was this concert for me, given the above criteria? Well, I know that I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the company I was with, and I very much enjoyed the orchestra’s playing, as I haven’t heard them for quite a few years.

I loved Andrew Marriner’s performance of the clarinet concerto. It’s a piece I know very, very well, and it was truly a delight to hear such familiar lines being performed so well. There is a delightful fluency, or lightness, in the writing. (I know, it is silly to comment on the delicious craft of Mozart’s writing as we all know he was a genius… but truly, this is such a wonderful piece, and as I listened to it I was reminded of this again, and again, and again…). I enjoyed noticing some of the interpretive decisions Marriner made – his choices in articulation, or in cadenza. I know that he studied with the same teacher I studied with for a year, so I listened for ‘Hans-isms’ in his playing too.

But here is the life-changing bit: it made me want to go straight home and dig out my well-loved score of the concerto, and my Music Minus One CDs, and play it again! I think this is a fine concert experience to have. It reminded me of how I loved playing this piece, way back in my classical performing days, how much I love its phrases, harmonies and structures still, and that these are still there for me to return to, whenever I want.

I haven’t yet had time to get my clarinet out, but I shall, very soon. And I am looking forward to revisiting the Mozart Concerto when I do.

On another note, I realised that night that the traditional concert length no longer suits me. I would have been happy to go home after the Mozart, as there was so much to digest and process from the experience of the first half of the concert. This is absolutely not meant as a disparaging comment on what took place in the second half. The second half of the program was a new work by the Melbourne-based composer (and virtuoso organist) Calvin Bowman. He wrote a song cycle, English in tone and turn, with echoes of Finzi, Delius and even Michael Head and Warlock (to my ears) which was absolutely gorgeous, filled with light and shade and colour. We had the treat of hearing the songs performed by a lovely soprano, Jacqueline Porter… so really, it was all quite delightful.

However, as we walked to the car, I commented to John my companion that the first half of the concert now felt like a distant memory, our heads were so full of the most recent piece we had heard.

Thus, I find myself fully in favour of shorter concerts that allow patrons adequate time for reflection and digestion. Or perhaps concerts with a dinner break between the first and second halves.

Ringing the Changes

One of my favourite performances in this year’s Melbourne Festival was the music/performance piece by Strange Fruit, Ringing the Changes. It was created especially for the bell field of Federation Bells at Birrarung Marr. Each of the bells in the field has a specific pitch and sits at the top of a tall pole, and Strange Fruit perform mesmerising dance/visual/physical theatre pieces atop long bendy poles, so really, this was a match made in heaven. Composer Graeme Leak was commissioned to write the work, taking into account which bells the different performers would be able to reach within the radius afforded by their bendy pole.

The whole piece was masterfully conducted by Timothy Phillips. Here are a couple of photos:

I like the way Tim appears to be suspended in midair. It was quite a feat to conduct the work (including several sections of audience participation, which required him to swivel around to face the audience instead of the performers) without losing his centre of balance. I also like the iconic view of the MCG and its ring of lights, in the background of this photo.

The City Beats children were involved in the first performance, taking part in the audience participation sections which required them to play on tin cans with chopsticks and teaspoons. They were so thrilled by the whole event.

Recognition for young adult author

Anyone who missed the interview with Simmone Howell in last week’s Age can check it out here… here’s to ever-increasing profiles for young adult writers (and equal prize money)!

I re-read her latest book Everything Beautiful last week. It’s a truly lovely book, gutsy and honest, like its protagonist.

Does it get better than this?

Last night I went to hear the Schonberg Ensemble perform, as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

Man, it was good! The sound from this band was extraordinary, their virtuosity had us enthralled. Andriesson’s Zilver, John Adams Chamber Symphony, Kagel’s Divertimento? Farce fur Ensemble, and then Schonberg’s Chamber Symphony op.9, taken at a cracking pace. It was a small audience, but incredibly appreciative. Long extended clapping ensued at the end of each half.

I think the thing that bowled me over the most was the sheer joy of their playing. They were just having such a great old time up there, playing this incredibly technically demanding music, but smiling away, exalting in their own and others’ lines.

Why can’t we see joyous performances like this more often? A colleague I bumped into at lunch today said, “We should remember that this is repertoire for them. They’ve played these incredibly demanding works loads of times, so there is a familiarity there that makes it more possible for one to relax into the performance…”

Ah, true. But then, I am not sure I see other orchestras smiling away as they play the gorgeous melodies and harmonies of Beethoven 6, for example. Which is repertoire performed pretty frequently.I don’t know. Perhaps for a lot of orchestras, playing concerts is just what they do, and it ceases to be special after awhile. Or the audience ceases to be of any great significance. Or they just get tired. Or bored. I don’t know. It’s a privilege, really…. to do that kind of work. Maybe if your life is contemporary music, you have to love it so much to begin with…. and then you just feel compelled to communicate that love.

Maybe it comes down to personalities. I don’t think there could have been a soul in the audience who did not fall a little bit in love with the violist in the Schonberg Ensemble. Right from the moment she walked on stage she invited us to participate wholly in the music she was playing. She beamed at everyone – the conductor, her fellow musicians on the stage, people in the audience. We couldn’t take our eyes away from her for long. She was bringing out the best in everyone.

I think everyone could do with a shot of that kind of engaging, warm, joyfulness in their lives! Certainly we in the audience were all the better for it. So much so, I am planning to go and hear them again tonight.

MTeach class, week 5

From now to the end of semester, the MTeach students and I will be exploring the music of different twentieth and twenty-first century composers. Today we explored Shostakovich.

For me, Shostakovich is immensely approachable as a composer. For one thing, he is very well documented, with a lot of footage and quotes available that features people who knew him and worked with him, and heard his music performed. If you haven’t seen it before, Shostakovich against Stalin – the War Symphonies, is a must-see documentary that really depicts the times in which he lived and worked. I love it. I probably watch it every year. The interviews and archival footage are interspersed with performance footage of the symphonies by Valery Gergiev conducting the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. If you don’t know Shostakovich’s music, this film is an excellent way in.

He was a composer of his times, and justly celebrated, in a way that we don’t see these days in the ‘western art music’ world. He wrote about current events in a way that his audience connected with very directly. His use of musical symbols (quotes, rhythmic figures assigned specific meanings, melodic fragments) is in dispute between scholars, but his musical vocabulary is certainly a rich one to mine for workshop starting points.

I have led several composing projects based on Shostakovich’s music. My main points are to:

• identify a current event or topic about which the group feels strongly, to depict in the composition
• Develop ‘word-songs’ (following Shostakovich’s example with his ‘name-song’, D.SCH) as the main melodic material and mode to stick to for harmonies
• Choose several rhythmic figures or cells from Shostakovich’s music to incorporate into these pieces.

I find that this is enough to get some really interesting music happening. It did today – even limited to mostly tuned percussion instruments, each group created highly individual pieces of music. The group chose the current controversy over the photographer Bill Henson as their composition focus. They developed word-songs on words like ‘dirt’, ‘art’, ‘pervert’ and ‘photos’. Some of the small-group pieces sounded more ‘Shostakovich-y’ than others, but that’s fine. We are not looking to imitate him wholesale, rather, the intention is to create strong listening pathways into his music for all the participants.

Watch out for these names…

I have just come back from a wonderful concert of Schubert Lieder at the Australian National Academy of Music. The big sensation of the afternoon was a set of three songs performed by tenor Christopher Saunders accompanied by Berta Brozgul, a pianist at the Academy.

Oh. My. God. It was stunning. It was one of those moments in a concert where suddenly you realise that something really special is taking place and you are compelled to hang on to every word, every note. (I used to work at the Wigmore Hall in London, where every great artist performs, so I heard a lot of concerts. I quickly realised that great performances have something that sets them apart, so that the air in the hall shifts suddenly, and every single person is held in the moment. They aren’t all like that. It is rare, and incredibly powerful).

Christopher Saunders is a young tenor. They are both young. Afterwards the audience buzzed around, and theirs were the names on everyone’s lips.

How wonderful, to be so in agreement with everyone! How wonderful to go to a concert and find yourself truly transported by it! These are sad days for me, in general – lots of difficult things happening that I have to get through -  but this afternoon nothing mattered except the beauty of this music, and the magical, inhabited way it was performed. Bravi to the duo. I’m so glad I went.

Storms, movies, rain… La Dolce Vita in Rome

Today a storm passed over Rome. Lightning, thunder, and lots of rain. Great. (Except that I wasn’t closeted away in some nice sheltered spot, I was out in the street, trying to be a Good Tourist.

My umbrella (the latest effort) of course turned scared at the first sign of serious rain. Spokes started to wrench themselves from their pathetic cotton confines (needlework attaching them to the waterproof fabric). The fabric started to show signs of strain. The whole thing kept turning inside out, and is now kind of warped. Odd, isn’t it. Seems like a design fault. The umbrella doesn’t cope well with rain.

So I did what any smart tourist would do, I headed for the nearest cinema that shows films in the original language, and spent the early part of the evening watching a movie.

Not a lot of choice, of course. Some of the films screening looked interesting, but their Original Language wasn’t English. I’d probably be okay with the Italian subtitles, but it would be a lot more work.

I watched… Leoni per agnelli (Lions for Lambs). Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise. Bit of an anti-war, preachy movie that was very, very talky. Tom Cruise plays a highly unlikeable Senator determined to provide a new strategy for winning the war in Afghanistan. He asks things like, “Do you want to win the war on terror? Simple question. Yes or No.” In his loud American, preppy voice. Typecasting. I can’t bear Tom Cruise.

Meryle Streep plays a fluttery, yet apparently hard-hitting journalist, who has been invited to the meeting by Cruise who wants her to write an article about his new strategy. An exclusive. Basically, the article would be government propaganda. Streep remembers the heady, idealistic days of journalism in the 1960s and the time of the Vietnam War. She carries a huge guilt burden about the way her network has sold out to ratings, and the way her profession has also sold out in order to stay in favour with people in power.

Robert Redford plays an earnest professor type, trying to inspire one of his brightest students to stop being an apathetic dick and BE SOMETHING. His whole part in the film consists of a meeting taking place between him and the student, who is a smart-alek, over-privileged, highly-annoying young man, filled with smart-arse cynicism about politics and government. This is all highly emotive stuff, this meeting. Incredibly earnest and do-goody and preachy.

All of this is interspersed with scenes about two of Redford’s former brightest students, who enlisted in the army and are now taking part in Cruise’s big new strategy, which is clearly a disaster waiting to unfold.

Didn’t catch who wrote the soundtrack but it was horribly cliched and cheesy. At one point Redford says to his student (in a moment of passionate appeal), ” Rome is burning, son”, and while he says it we hear a growing string tremolo in the background, gradually increasing in volume. Good Lord deliver us, please, from such cinematic banality.

You are probably getting the impression that I didn’t like this film. You would be right. I thought it was horribly base in the way it delivered its messages, it was in a way its own kind of light-weight propaganda, it felt like it was someone’s baby (Redford’s?) that they personally had pushed to get made. Maybe, in the mid-West of America, and in an America heading towards an election, there need to be films like this, maybe it is this kind of film that gets people thinking a bit more about the decisions our leaders make about things like going to war.

But for me, it was cliched, heavy-handed, earnest and preachy, laid on way too thick, with a trowel or a blunt instrument (cricket bat?). I couldn’t help but compare it to Sophie Scholl, the last similarly talk-heavy movie I saw. That film was vastly superior. It was mind-blowing, in fact. She was mind-blowing. The clarity and poise and intelligence with which she responded to her interviewer was utterly compelling.

Perhaps Lions for Lambs could have been similarly compelling. Maybe however, that is not the film it is supposed to be, nor the audience it is intended for. I would say that I am definitely not part of the target demographic.

Anyway, back to Rome. Tomorrow I will go to Porta Portese, the street market that stretches as far as the eye can see in all directions, that is held every Sunday. Hopefully the weather will be kinder and calmer. And SB returns tomorrow – yay!

Day after that, I am definitely on the plane. Homeward bound, I shall be.

Blue sky Friday morning

I’ve woken up with lots of energy this morning. I slept with the window open which brought in a lot of noise from the street, but also lots of cool air which was refreshing counter to the relentless cetralised heating in this building. (I am staying on Ile-St-Louis again).

Last night I went to the theatre again – another performance by Theatre de l’arc-en-ciel, this time of Les Tolstoi – Journal Intime (The Tolstoys – Intimate Diary), which told of the marriage and life shared between Leo and Sonia Tolstoy. It’s an epic story indeed that starts with their meeting and marriage (when Sonia is 17 and Tolstoy is 34) and ends with Tolstoy’s death and a fleeting image of the great changes under the newly arrived communists.

I loved it! It was written by CP’s mother and she is in Paris at the moment. I read the script in English beforehand, and unlike Monday night’s play, I found I could follow the dialogue and action quite successfully.

Seeing theatre in another language is interesting as it really encourages you to read everything that is taking place on the stage. All the nuances of interaction. I am always amazed, after reading a script, at the ability and skill of the actors and creative team to bring the words from the page into life. When I read it, and hear the words in my head, it sits quite flat.

So, it looks like today will be sunny and fine! I now have a plan for the next rainy day (to explore the undercover passages and arcades that criss-cross one section of the city).

Today I could:

• Walk to Bercy village which has undergone a transformation in recent years and now has many small boutique shops and cafes and village feel. I need to buy some presents for people and this could be the place to do it;
• Head to Belleville, where there is a park on a hill with views across this mostly flat city. This area is known as Paris Mondiale, a microcosm of the many nationalities that call Paris their home, from North Africa and Asia and all over…
• Montmartre and Sacre Coeur?
• Head to the galleries on foot. There is an exhibition of art from Iran (in the Sephardic tradition) that I’d like to see… as well as a return visit to the Musee d’Orsay, in part to enjoy once again the cafe on the top floor that is illuminated by the large railway clock/window, a very photogenic place to enjoy a coffee or chocolat chaud.

So many possibilities. I’ll choose soon.

Post-Hunger…

The Age published a very glowing review of Hunger (read it here).

The Theatre Notes blog also published a review – here.

Two quite different points of view. The Theatre Notes review has been commented on further by a reader – making for an interesting dialogue. Blogs are particularly interesting avenues for reviews and commentary because they offer readers the possibility of responding to the views expressed with their own.

Feeling quite knackered today. Musicircus on Friday night went well – but I think the role of creating and leading a new project so soon after Hunger did my head in. I spent the weekend feeling weepy and tired and overwhelmed. I’m still fragile today.

On Wednesday I drive 3.5 hours to Albury (surely it doesn’t take that long??) where I spend the rest of the week working with AYO’s Sartory String Quartet and local children on a creative project. Hopefully my brain will be back in gear tomorrow.

More thoughts on shows I’ve seen…

And yet more hindsight! The interesting thing I am discovering at the moment is how many fragments of This Show Is About People have stayed in my head. I keep returning to certain images. Today I was replaying my favourite moment, when the audience realises for the first time that two of the cast members are twins, and that what we thought was a reflection in a mirror-surface was in fact exquisite, perfectly toned placement of two identical actors, the illusion broken when one moves independently of the other, and we wonder if she was there all along, and how she got on stage in the first place.

In my initial commentary on the work, I suggested that it needed further digestion time. Now, as images keep returning to me, unbidden, I wonder if in fact I am the one needing more time. Time to sit with the work – if not in the theatre, then in my head. Or perhaps this infectious subtle, sneaky quality of the images that were made is part of the creator’s magic touch.

It was certainly a show that divided the small group of friends I spoke with afterwards. Some loved it, one saying it was the best show she had ever seen, that it was everything she wanted a piece of theatre to be. Others were more like me, critical of its earnestness. But I bet we will talk about it again.