Thomasina’s last waltz

A Chorus Line

On Sunday to see A Chorus Line at the Capitol Theatre. Thoroughly enjoyable, despite a nasty throat tickle that drove me out into the gilded foyer during “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three”. (Fortunately, my least favourite number in the whole show.) 

I’d never seen this musical staged before, although I’d seen the film as a teenager in the mid-1980s. Afterwards, I dragged my mother off to the specialist record shop near Michael’s Music Room (its name is escaping me just now) where the sales assistant advised us that the Broadway version was superior to the motion picture soundtrack. Nowadays, owning both, I can confirm he was right; the numbers added or updated for the film didn’t really improve on the impeccably honed score of the original. In particular, “Let Me Dance for You” – Cassie’s big number in the film – isn’t a patch on “The Music and the Mirror”.

Which is a long way of saying that I was glad to be finally seeing the show in its original form.

And now I hear of the death of its composer, Marvin Hamlisch, on Monday. He has gone to the great chorus line in the sky. Sobering – especially since he was only 68.

Apart from A Chorus Line, I became aware of Hamlisch through the family record collection: his soundtrack for The Sting, which also introduced me to the music of Scott Joplin, and the soundtrack for They’re Playing Our Song. 

In A Chorus Line I thought I’d recognised a sly nod to They’re Playing Our Song when Cassie sings, “Give me the chance to look forward to sayin’: Hey listen, they’re playing my song.” On checking the chronology on the weekend, though, I realised the nod would have to have been in the other direction if at all.

Seeing it at the Capitol Theatre seemed appropriate. In the old days, before the theatre was restored, that block was also home to the ballet studio of Joan and Monica Halliday. The Hallidays. I didn’t study there, but I did attend the intensive summer and winter schools. And it seemed lyricist Edward Kleban had been there himself when I heard his chorus for “At the Ballet”:

Up the steep and very narrow stairway
To the voice like a metronome
Up the steep and very narrow stairway
It wasn’t paradise, it wasn’t paradise,
It wasn’t paradise,
but it was home.

Not glamorous at all, but very, very serious. Does that song resonate with me? Well, I guess I’d probably take Bebe’s verse. 

A Chorus Line is in some ways a disturbing musical. Especially in productions where the director-choreographer Zack remains disembodied, Svengali-like and more than a little creepy – which is how I remember the film. There’s an underlying metaphor that can cut too close to the bone. But when I first saw it, it was just a strong, coherent musical with really well-written songs, a simple, compelling narrative and some fabulous choreography. “One. Singular sensation…!” Later, on learning how these stories had all come from workshops with real Broadway chorus dancers, it seemed more touching. And you don’t have to be a hoofer to feel keenly the experiences of Cassie (“Let me wake up in the morning to find I have somewhere exciting to go”) or Paul (whose collapsed knee and likely ended career prompts “What I Did For Love”).

Some obituaries…

New York Times
Chicago Tribune
LA Times

 

Touring the provinces

I went to see the English National Ballet in Chatswood for two reasons: to see Apollo (Stravinsky/Balanchine) and to check out The Concourse, only recently opened.

I was pretty certain I’d never seen Apollo before. But a check of the Australian Ballet’s repertoire history suggests that I might have seen it, around the time I was at uni. There are all sorts of explanations for that: a missed performance, the ballet may have been offered in Melbourne but not Sydney (the repertoire history gives only the date of first performance), and so on. Anyway, I was effectively seeing it for the first time.

Recently the Australian Ballet quoted me in a program book as saying that ballet was “music made visible”. Not an original observation by any stretch! And if any choreographer exemplifies the idea of music made visible in dance it’s Balanchine. This is the man who said that if he weren’t a choreographer, he “would not be anything, probably. Perhaps a musician.” In the ballet, Apollo’s favoured muse is, naturally, Terpsichore, muse of the dance, but she carries as her symbol a lyre, a musical instrument. Balanchine is the kind of choreographer who asks you to listen to the ballet and see the music. 

Apollo (English National Ballet)

Which is why you can’t see Apollo and imagine it being danced to any other score – unlike the work at the other end of the triple bill: Serge Lifar’s Suite en blanc to music from Lalo’s Namouna. Suite en blanc is one of those company showcase pieces in the tradition of Pas de Quatre, created for Taglioni and three other leading 19th-century ballerinas. The effect is numbingly generic, even when beautifully executed and the ballet hasn’t aged particularly well.

And yet Apollo was premiered in 1928, Suite en blanc in 1943. Apollo, however, is the ballet that still seems fresh today and remains a delight to watch. Choreographic originality is a big aspect of that. And there’s no denying that Apollo has the better music. 

In the middle: a selection of three pas de deux: Hans van Manen’s piece to Satie’s Trois Gnossienes (with the piano and its player on stage) was new to me and a real treat. The Manon pas de deux was the bedroom scene, in which Manon interrupts Des Grieux from his letter writing. I was slightly disappointed: for musical reasons my favourite is the pas de deux from, if I recall correctly, earlier in Act I – the one that uses Massenet’s gorgeous and haunting Elégie.

The fireworks came in the form of the Black Swan pas de deux from Act III Swan Lake, the one with the 32 fouette pirouettes, which we of course applaud.* While it’s fun to see something like this performed as a showpiece, as with any bleeding chunk you lose a lot in the context. Where are the courtiers? The other potential brides? Siegfried’s mother? And where’s Rothbart, coaching his daughter Odile from the back corner of the stage and providing the explanation for her sudden shift from coldly imperious to tender and vulnerable with the trademark fluttering ‘swan arms’.

The ‘live orchestra’ of the publicity turned out to be a scaled-back Willoughby Symphony Orchestra (strings: 5.4.2.2.1) led by Sophie Rowell and performing in a smidgin of a pit. They acquitted themselves well in Apollo, which may well have received the most rehearsal.

My thoughts on the Concourse Theatre? This is a small space seating about 500. I can imagine it working very well for drama and for small-scale musical theatre, but it felt wrong for ballet  – too small both literally and psychologically. Ballet will never be an intimate art form. Perhaps that’s partly due to its origins in court display, partly to its physicality and partly to the supreme level of artifice involved – you need a certain ‘distance’ as an audience member to enjoy its spectacle and the dancers need a certain amount of space in order to do their thing and sustain the magic. Seeing ballet in this intimate space made me feel like I was seeing a provincial tour. (Not helped by some fairly basic lighting and creaky stage furniture.) It brought to mind the kind of scene you get in The Red Shoes when the undiscovered Moira Shearer is dancing in a suburban town hall, and backstage someone is dropping the needle on the next record. Of course, we know Moira Shearer is a star, and so are these dancers. But I’d rather see them in London’s Coliseum.

* Postscript…
Once again, I envy the ballet world. No hang ups about applause here. It’s very simple: if the dancers take a bow (or if the music makes a definitive pause for a change of scene) it’s a cue to applaud; if somebody does something overtly impressive then a smattering of applause mid-variation (as in a jazz club) is just fine, if you wish. Some ballets are more applause-inducing than others and it seems there’s very little confusion about which is which. No one glares at anyone. Although I was mentally glaring at the couple of ladies behind me: beautifully quiet during the neoclassical and abstract works, the minute they got the “more passionate” ballets they’d been waiting for they started in with the whispered commentary. Ssssigh.

Post-postscript…
Not fond at all of foyer music during interval – live or piped. Especially in any performance involving music, the interval is a time for rest and creating a fresh mental space.

 

Catherine the Great’s Lament

You wouldn’t believe what goes on in my court: Gambling. Harassment. A ghost. Multiple suicides. And I don’t even get a #walkon ! #opera702

That’s The Queen of Spades by the way. In the middle of Act II Catherine the Great arrives at a grand masked ball. Music is sung in greeting, but the scene ends before we actually see her on stage. Curtain.

Opera Australia and ABC 702 Sydney are running an operaplot style competition at the moment, hashtag #opera702. The prize is a walk-on part in Consumptive Courtesan by the Cove in March, which has prompted me to put a particular spin on my entries: each one has to convey the plot from a mute or walk-on cameo character’s perspective. Or in the case of The Queen of Spades, a character who doesn’t even get to walk on.

The problem with this approach is that it rather limits the number of operas that can be plotted, which is probably a good thing. Operaplotting can be addictive.

My other entries…

2 girls: trafficked. Pasha: spurned. Lover: to the rescue. Ruse: get my master drunk. Result: noble outcome. Me: I’m mute #walkon 
The Abduction from the Seraglio 

Door 1 red. Door 2 orange. Door 3 gold. Door 4 aqua. Door 5 white. Door 6 dark. Door 7 silver. Bartók and the Technicolor #walkon
Bluebeard’s Castle

I’m the deaf old servant, so while Figaro thwarts one marriage & facilitates another, I just get to #walkon and say “Eh?”
The Barber of Seville

I may have a stab at Lulu, so to speak, but after that I think I’m done. 

Vital Vacation Statistics

I took a week off. Here is a partial reckoning:

12 hours pretending I wasn’t really working
2 hours being all editorial and advisory by the light of the moon
550 kilometres
22 madonnas (and more) from Italy
100 manuscripts from Berlin (drool)
30 minutes photographing historical correspondence
1 hour of Tchaikovsky piano music (Album for the Young, The Seasons)
1 hour of Haydn sonatas (those that weren’t beyond my dormant technique)
3 movements from Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite in an arrangement for four hands
1 riotously wayward piano duo rendition of the overture to Die Meistersinger
2 hours of hand stitching
6 hours of ballet class
2 hours choosing spectacles
4 successful tussles with pumpkin hour
1 hour contemplating matters horticultural
0 tax returns completed 

Something in there was priceless – probably the piano playing.

 

Checkmate

I really didn’t want Checkmate to turn out a period piece.

My expectations were based on memories of seeing the ballet as a teenager, and the powerful images of fear and raw anguish present in the photos of Robert Helpmann’s performances as the Red King in 1937 and then – when he was on the verge of death himself – in the Australian Ballet’s first production in 1986. There’s an intensity of emotion that comes through even a still photo. Especially a still photo.

And there lies one of the ballet’s challenges: its 1930s stylisation and sometimes static staging – like a tableau – often work against the drama of the scenario by composer Arthur Bliss.

All the same, I liked it. I liked the stylisation, the arcane, almost courtly presentation of a passionate theme; I liked the music. The fact that the scenario was devised by the composer – as opposed to the composer writing to someone else’s scenario – is a source of strength. It’s a remarkable and important work. It has integrity. I even liked Ninette de Valois’ choreographic language, all sur la pointe and, as Colin Peasley so aptly describes it, “very stabby”.

So it made me sad that more people in the theatre didn’t really warm to it. At least not on Tuesday night, when for a moment I feared the tepid applause wouldn’t last long enough for a proper curtain call. 

If I’m rational about it, I can see why it might not truly resonate with audiences in 2011. At least nowadays, this is a ballet that digs its own grave.

If Death is going to win out over Love – and let’s face it, it does this on stage all the time – then we must want to cast our lot in with Love. But in Checkmate, Love’s representatives are old, frightened and feeble, or young, naive and sentimental. (Seriously, Red Queen, what made you think for a minute that pleading would gain you any ground against a stronger woman??) As for Death, he gets the better deal in that he draws the winning colour.

But the Black Queen… She’s the cool, calculating female who will win at any cost and at no cost, who will flirt without an ounce of feeling, who will stab you in the back (and your King too). We know that female and we do not like her. We do not like to see her win. (I sensed a faint collective desire to boo this character, but no one seemed to feel sufficiently worked up to actually do so.)

And yet. And yet… I like it!

Of course, for me it’s one of those ballets that’s loaded with association and significance. All the ballet biographies and histories I devoured as a kid instilled a reverence for the names: Dame Ninette de Valois, Sir Robert Helpmann, the ‘Vic-Wells’ company… even Margot Fonteyn had a role in the premiere. Long before I saw it, it was a ballet I wanted to get to know.

Checkmate is a ballet with a distinctive, coherent style – musically and choreographically. There’s no reason why, period piece or not, it can’t be appreciated for what it is. It is stylised, it does seem arcane. That’s not a terrible thing when the inspiration is chess – calculating, drawn out, merciless, and yet as capable of arousing passions as the next game. But is chess the best analogy for a contest between love and death? Life and death, yes; you don’t need Ingmar Bergman to prove that. But Love as a contestant? Perhaps that’s the weakness. A chessboard scenario with its cool strategy offers no sensible place for Love, which is perhaps why she is so poorly defended in the match.

In the end, the Tuesday audience gave its most rapturous applause to a set of slow pas de deux danced to Arvo Pärt. (Apparently a copyright symbol is a compulsory part of its title. What’s next? Hamlet^©?) There was no dramatic conflict here. It was perfectly controlled, exquisitely executed. In many ways it was even cooler and more technically calculating than Checkmate, the music was certainly more static. But, and this is the important part for the 21st-century sensibility, it managed to be more sensuous and was entirely lovely. Checkmate will never be “lovely” but it will always intrigue me.

Operaplot 2011: Butterfly Fan Art

The operaplot madness this year includes a fan art category. So I’m abandoning my customary wordie cleverness to pay tribute to the best operaplot of all with inks and aquarelles on watercolour paper.

Operaplot by @primalamusica, art by @frindley

Postscript…

If this Pinkerton looks rather more like a ballet dancer than an opera singer it’s because earlier this evening I allowed myself to get all weepy at the Australian Ballet’s Madame Butterfly.

Operaplot 2011: 5 out of 12

On this third time around (fourth actually, but I didn’t play in the first year), the Omniscient Mussel’s operaplot competition caught me off guard. As a result, my participation has been, let’s say, desultory.

But about four hours before the deadline (2pm Saturday, Sydney time) I figured there was no harm in submitting some old favourites. In the process I surprised myself by coming up with a few new ones, including one for Carmen, which has eluded me till now. Here goes (new operaplots are in bold)…

Just sayin’ what I’ve always thought…
“And what is the use of a Cinderella,” thought Alice, “without glass slippers or pumpkins?” #rossinidowntherabbithole #operaplot

Brutalised Soldat leads a dissonant existence; stabs inconstant mistress; only saved from serial crime by accidental drowning. #operaplot

Operaplotter makes underhanded attempt at playing critic…
The nuclear-physical Trinity meets the metaphysical three-person’d god in Adamsian setting. John Donne wins. #operaplot

The park is pointillistic, the whole thing rhymes internally, the hat is quite artistic, Georges’ Sunday lasts eternally. #operaplot

Former Australian convict returns to London for culinary career change & some nasty close shaves; mad wife smells mischief. #operaplot

Pretty respectable widow & proud former flame waltz around the matter of money in the shadow of the Pontevedrian economic crisis. #operaplot

Son abandoned after patricidal prediction, kills father anyway AND marries his mother. That kind of thing will turn you blind. #operaplot

She’s a heartbreaker, he’s a deserter, the other one’s on PETA’s list. Why weren’t they checking for knives at stage door? #operaplot

Weekly winding ritual and manifold, mixed-up indiscretions behind the counter prove good for clock business in Toledo. Cuck-old! #operaplot

The following evocation of a classic Sesame Street song left me yearning for just another 20 characters. As it was, an ellipsis had to stand in for the penultimate phrase – whistle or hum at will.
1 2 3 bat on a bench 1 2 3 jailing offense 1 2 3 fancy dress 1 2 3 oh what a mess 1 2 3 silly revenge… 1 2 3 doing the batty bat! #operaplot

Lively maid betrothed to village idiot :( But marriage bargain turns out ok in G&S-style birth switch :) Exit pursued by a bear. #operaplot

This last operaplot I entered again not only because I’m very fond of it but because this year’s judge, Eric Owens, has been reading selected entries on video. I live in the hope that he’ll sing this one…
Hello muddah, hello faddah, I'm in love w/ Gioconda! But she hates me (so enticing), And goes in for all this noble sacrificing. #operaplot

Clapping, coughing, yawning…

So the local broadsheet published “the insiders’ guide to the arts” in Saturday’s Spectrum – “From scoring the best seat in the house to what you should wear to the opera, get your year in culture off on the right foot.”

It was an innocuous enough exercise – just space filler for the holidays. But it managed to make me twitchy all the same. Here’s why.

It was presented as a series of plausible questions, with responses from industry professionals.

Theatre: are programs worth the money? which performance in a run should I catch? where can I find innovative new work? do critics consider value for money in their reviews? is it worth buying tickets for previews? how should I enter a row to reach my seat?

Visual Arts: where can I spot the stars of tomorrow? how long should I look at a painting? should I read the caption/label before or after looking at the artwork?

Opera: which opera is the best introduction? what should I wear? should I read about the opera beforehand? should I read the surtitles?

Venues: where are the best seats in the house? (Fortunately Richard Evans didn’t reveal the truly best seats for orchestral concerts in the Sydney Opera House. Phew.)

Then…

Classical Music: “Why can’t I clap between movements?” [Yawn] “What should I do if someone near me is coughing (or I am coughing)?” [Double yawn]

You’ll notice I’ve italicised the four questions that relate to some aspect of etiquette or external behaviour. All the other questions are connected to one’s experience of the art form itself. And you’ll also notice that for every art form, except classical music, we have sensible questions that get down to the nub of things.

And for classical music all we get is two tired old questions about etiquette. Nothing about the experience or the art form.

I’m not sure who to blame here. The journalists? Perhaps. Or is it the classical music scene itself that’s at fault if these are the only questions that occur to people in relation to what we do? I fear this might be the case.

But how I would have loved to have seen Rory Jeffes, or whoever, answer these questions (freely ripped from our companion art forms):
Where can I find innovative new classical music?
Where can I spot the classical music stars of tomorrow?

Postscript…

Not to mention these ones:
Should I listen to the music or read about it before the concert?
Should I read the program notes before, during or after the performance?
Should I follow the printed text (or surtitles) during a vocal work?

Wright's mice come out to play

You see, I have this thing about mice. Just ask my big sister, who cajoled a Dutch cheesemonger into giving her his porcelain display mouse because I absolutely had to have a mouse from Holland. And when everyone changed their facebook profile pics to cartoon characters the other day, I was Miss Bianca.

So if there’s one aspect of Nutcracker about which I’m impossibly demanding, it’s the King of the Mice and his gang of rodents.

By far the most common problem is that the mice and their movements are far too cute and generally unthreatening.

C’mon choreographers: listen to the music Tchaikovsky gives the mice and their battle. All the little kiddies in the audience are meant to be terrified at this point. And in any case, this is the only point of real tension and conflict in the entire ballet; it seems such a pity to waste the opportunity.

Which is what happens in the crimson chocolate box of a production by Peter Wright, which the Australian Ballet is presenting at the moment. Oh, it’s gorgeous. And there’s so much to enjoy. It’s lovely, for example, to see the role of Clara become something both plausible and satisfying, and I like Wright’s interpretation of the Drosselmeyer character as a magician – the masterly professional wielding his control over the domestic celebrations and indeed the entire ballet.

But the mice…

The problem begins at the party, when Drosselmeyer-as-magician startles the guests and makes everyone laugh with an oversized mechanical mouse that zips around the stage. That is quite amusing. But later in the act, with the battle of the mice approaching, more of the same mechanical mice enter and zip around. You can hear the whizzing of the wheels. Worse, you can hear the tittering of the audience. So much for building suspense. Poor Tchaikovsky.

When the mice proper enter they’re quite adorable and they’re holding their hands up in front of their chests, curled like paws. So cute. So amusing. Not very scary.

I’ve said it before, but heck, I’ll say it again: Graeme Murphy gets this marvellously right. His mice really are rats. Bolshevik rats, actually, in heavy overcoats with thick menacing tails that they whip around to devastating effect. The masks are quite fearsome. The repertoire of gestures is enough to keep your heart in your mouth for the entire scene. In short, it’s the only Nutcracker which doesn’t undermine the dramatic effect of Tchaikovsky’s music at this point. And no one ever laughs.

At the ballet, in want of a list

On Tuesday night I was at the ballet: a triple bill called Edge of Night. And once again, being alone, I was tweeting in the gaps. (I’d say #foyertweets, but the Opera Theatre foyer is so cramped that I was actually doing it from my seat.)

And of all the random, sometimes whimsical observations made over the course of the evening, one pair of tweets received a surprising response.

I’d recognised a couple of the Rachmaninoff preludes that had been used for the first work, Edge of Night, but not all of them, so I was looking about for the list that would identify them in sequence. Nothing on the cast sheet, and nothing that I could find in a casual reading through the program book. Not even in Dr Mark Carroll’s article about musical matters.

Similarly, there was no real indication of which Handel numbers were to be heard in the final work, Molto Vivace. If you poked around in Dr Carroll’s article you’d find these identified in broad brush terms: excerpts from the Water Music suites, something from Xerxes (no prizes for guessing what that would be), assorted concertos from Opus 3 and Opus 6. But where was the simple sequential list?

You might argue that I should have recognised all the Rachmaninoff preludes for myself, and perhaps you’re right. But I didn’t. I have small hands you see. And in any case, not everyone at the ballet is an expert in piano repertoire or familiar with Handel’s music, so, as I said (but in fewer characters): it’s not unreasonable to expect that a handsome and in other respects thoroughly comprehensive program book will have, somewhere, a list of the actual musical selections used.

Documenting the music (properly, not just naming the composer or burying a summary in an article) is surely as important as identifying the other creative elements in a dance work. Not just for the benefit of the audience but for the value of the program book as a historical record of what was performed. And, as I also said, I’m sure I’m not the only person at the ballet who pays attention to the music and would like to see it identified.

On that point it turned out I was right. “Hear, hear!” came the first response. “YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY ONE!” yelled the next. Then: “no you’re not! I often like the music I hear at dance performances but it is exceedingly difficult to find out what they are!”

Perhaps I should resign myself to a certain casualness about musical matters that permeates the dance world. Except it would be so easy for this to be done better. Grab one of your musical staff in the corridor; get them to make a list. Publish it – preferably on the cast sheet that everyone receives, but failing that, at least put it in the program book in a logical, easy-to-find spot.

Send in the live-twitterers

Previously on Thomasina…
“This isn’t to say that someone who undertakes to live-tweet a performance might not have a role to play. But it is a role.”

Assuming it could be done with courtesy, why would you set out to tweet a performance in real time?

As a form of personal note-taking? – Pen and paper is actually much quicker and less disruptive to all, including the note-taker.

As a way of sharing an experience and discussing it with others? – Sure, but then why not at interval or afterwards, which is when we normally gather our ideas and share them with others.

As a form of citizen reportage? – Well… there just might be something in that.

The other day, @DarrynKing (real name, Darryn King; profession, entertainment journalist) live-tweeted the Sydney production of West Side Story (hashtag #wss). If you go look at these tweets – which is easier said than done since it was on 15 July and twitter is the most ephemeral of media – you don’t get the sense of them coming from an average Joe in the audience. At one point Darryn was talking of wearing all black and lurking in the wings, or even tweeting from the pit. (Sometimes these things boil down to where you can get decent reception.)

He was very well-prepared. And over the two-and-a-half hours the #wss feed included backstage insights, commentary on the performance, slang definitions, pop quizzes drawn from the lyrics, wry plot summaries, musical observations, witty expressions of enthusiasm, meta moments (“If Tony had Twitter he’d be like ‘Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria’”) and even some good advice (“Don’t do it, Maria. Let this endless cycle of violence and great dance numbers come to an end”).

For someone to live-tweet a show and come up with something worth following, a few things are needed: access (not everyone gets to sit in on the general rehearsal, or find a corner in an orchestra pit, or watch the performers warm up before the show); some fairly thorough knowledge and preparation; and skill in rapidly formulating an entertaining commentary that will make sense to someone who isn’t there.

You could be describing the requirements of a traditional arts critic. Or a radio sports commentator.

And what does anyone get out of it? Right now it’s novel, so there’s a public relations benefit. When (if?) live-tweeting becomes commonplace – in the way that arts criticism or cricket on the radio is commonplace – then it will simply become another way of sharing a performance beyond the doors of the auditorium and giving a taste of the event in real time to those who can’t or won’t be there. Time will tell whether twitter is a good medium for this, and whether the effort will be worth it.

What does the live-twitterer get out of it? Potentially a great deal: knowledge, awareness, access, insight, and all the benefits that come from choosing to focus on a performance with the specific purpose of communicating its details and flavour to others.

But the exercise also represents a lot of work – it’s far more than a few idle tweets from a good night out. As I said, you could be describing the experience of a critic, or the broadcast presenter, or the operator of the camera for a webstream, or the surtitle operator. The live-twitterer will, by necessity, be deeply involved in what’s going on, but they won’t necessarily be sharing in the experience the creators intend for the audience.

They’re not free to simply put down their mobile device, forget about reporting, and weep or laugh or listen in awe. They’re playing a role.

Postscript…

Darryn has posted his own reactions to the experience, which I chose not to read before writing my own post.  This was interesting: “That’s the thing. The live tweet itself turned into performance, and arguably my performance, for much of it, was more important than the performance taking place onstage. Heck, I could have written much of what I did listening to the cast recording at home (somewhat more comfortably). But that wouldn’t have been nearly as fun, would it? If it worked, it was the idea, of the illusion, of shared experience that made it work.”

Four things Twitter does for the performing arts

There’s a bigger question behind the #tweetseats discussion: What are the benefits of bringing twitter into performance venues?

At the moment we’re playing around, experimenting, finding our feet. (By “we” I mean presenters and tweeting audiences equally.) Right now, I think perhaps too much excited emphasis is being placed on the particular medium du jour and not enough on the value of what is actually taking place…

1. Connection
One thing at which twitter excels is enabling the connection of like-minded nerds fans. Through twitter we can share impressions with someone who might be attending on a different night or perhaps still be deciding whether to buy a ticket. But unlike a chat with friends, a tweet reaches many more people and it also allows a tweeter to get to know more fans whom they might not otherwise have met.

So you can imagine presenters being very interested in the word-of-mouth potential of that, as well as the community-building potential. And those of us who tweet just love it.

2. Broadcasting

Another thing that twitter does, although not very precisely, is provide a simple mechanism for broadcasting grabs of information to an audience of followers. The equivalent of the opera surtitle, but sent to your phone. The problem is, there’s not much control over exactly when a tweet will appear to a follower. So it would be pretty bad for actual surtitles, and not much good for music alerts of the “listen to the oboe’s entry” variety. But it’s ok for sending generic pieces of background information or pointing out things to listen/look for that are likely to hang around (“see those sheep…”).

Orchestras around the world have been trying this sort of thing, mostly at outdoor concerts. I’ve followed some of the program-notey feeds and found them either prosaic or a bit twee. But there’s scope for a really imaginative use of this strategy.

3. Open conversations
Twitter is also pretty good for opening up conversations and sharing information. Traditionally, performing arts presenters have communicated in very controlled ways: we “broadcast” information through program books, websites, marketing materials, and print and broadcast media (that is, one-to-many), and we allow people to talk to us by phone or in writing, responding in a closed dialogue (one-to-one). But active and flourishing online forums are relatively rare and don’t necessarily include presenters and performers as participants. In any case, the old-school forum environment doesn’t always seem to generate as generous a conversation as twitter does.

Presenters in the 21st century need to be bold enough to participate in many-to-many conversations, engaging the intelligence and passions of the smart people who make up the audience – and a medium like twitter allows a presenter to talk to people, respond to them, answer questions, solve problems and bask in compliments (twitter nurtures an extraordinarily positive atmosphere).

Somewhere between open conversations and spontaneous response is the use of twitter by performers and audience together as part of the creative and performance act. That’s too specific a scenario to cover here.

4. Spontaneous response

Twitter encourages spontaneity and a real-time response to the world. It’s worth remembering that twitter reached its tipping point in 2007 when a bunch of nerds South by Southwest conference attendees used it to keep in touch and to let each other know which were the good sessions and events. If that’s not real-time critiquing, then nothing is.

So it’s the most natural thing in the world to contemplate adopting that approach for a concert or an opera or ballet or in the theatre or at any other traditional performance event. Except it turns out that live-tweeting from the audience in those contexts can be difficult and unrewarding, and it compromises the experience.

In fact I’m going to come right out and say that live-tweeting (as opposed to foyer tweeting) is not going to help you engage more fully with a performance. It’s not going to enhance your appreciation, increase your understanding or blow your mind.

This isn’t to say that someone who undertakes to live-tweet a performance might not have a role to play. But it is a role.

Theatre-goers, a comparison

Theatre-goers are younger (slightly), they seem to be more hip and often better dressed, and – this is the important part – at interval they are 96.3 per cent more likely to be talking about the actual play.

Postscript…

This is really just a prelude to me waxing lyrical about how much I loved loved loved Long Day’s Journey into Night, an act which must be postponed since it’s seven minutes to pumpkin hour.

Live-tweeting and getting into the gig

My corner of the twittersphere has been abuzz this morning. The topics fleeting by: the lamentable editorial omission of any musical representatives from the weekend’s article on twitter in the arts, the state of arts journalism generally and its apparent promotional/PR focus, and tweeting during performances.

It would take me hours to compress my thoughts on tweeting during performances into 140 characters (or even 280) and I don’t have the time. So…

First, this isn’t about the arts using twitter outside the performance time/space or using it as part of the performance – that’s another story, and at times quite an entertaining one. (#operaplot anybody?)

It’s about the matter of audience members tweeting during theatrical and concert performances.

And I’ll be honest. I actually can’t do it. Not while the performance is going on.

I do tweet during interval as well as immediately before/after performances. At concerts I’m often doing that in a vaguely official capacity as @sso_notes. Very occasionally (mostly during long stage moves) I’ve tweeted between pieces.

Here’s my rationale: I only tweet at those points in the performance where it would be undistracting, and natural, to talk.

But it’s not really good manners that motivates me so much as pure selfishness. I simply don’t want to miss anything. And if what I’m doing is likely to mildly distract someone nearby, then it’s absolutely certain that I am, myself, being distracted to be the point that I will have missed a minute or two of the performance – a minute or two that can’t be reclaimed.

As everyone is finally beginning to realise, multitasking is a furphy. Even for girls. In a concert there’s usually so much to pay attention to and to hold in memory that I’m lucky if I can scribble an illegible word on my program in the darkness. Plays/operas/ballets are much the same. If someone tells me they can look at a screen, formulate and type a concise idea for public consumption and remain fully aware of what’s going on during those 50 to 120 seconds, I will happily tell them they’re deluded. Of course, if the performance is really boring…but let’s not go there. 

Actually, let’s do go there. Because my ideal performance in the concert hall or theatre is one that's so compelling and engrossing, so riveting, that it doesn’t even occur to me to tweet while it’s taking place. If my mind is wandering in the direction of epigrammatic things to tweet about the performance then that’s a very bad sign for the performance.

I’ve also tried tweeting during verbal presentations (e.g. during TEDxSydney and during my orchestra’s pre-concert talks). This is slightly easier. Perhaps all those years of taking notes during university lectures taught me something, and a well-constructed verbal presentation usually incorporates sufficient repetition, exploration and summary of ideas that there are opportunities to “take notes” in one way or another.

But I think there’s another difference: when I tweet from a talk I’m mostly tweeting content, an idea I’ve just heard, a pithy quote. It’s more like transcription. If I were to attempt to tweet during a musical/theatrical performance I’d be tweeting my own response/reactions/assessments. That’s a more distracting activity which, in some ways, takes you out of the receptive mode that a performance demands of you and into a critical one. Criticism is a marvellous thing, but if you’re not really receiving because you’re trying to write and publish a critique in the moment then…?

In any case, it’s been my experience that people have far more interesting things to say about a performance when it’s had even a short while to sink in. For example, for (too) many years my ballet subscription placed me immediately in front of a trio of ladies who insisted on verbalising their reactions during the performances. “Hasn’t she got lovely arms,” was a typical comment. Or, my favourite, “He’s very manly looking, isn’t he?” They drove me to distraction and were the targets of more than a few glares in the darkness. But if you happened to eavesdrop on them between acts it was a different story: the level of the observations immediately jumped.

Anyhow, I’m going to leave this post with the wise words of youth. Just recently my nephew went to hear Karnivool in concert, and he wrote about it afterwards. Nice pictures too. Here’s the telling line:

I feel like I probably spent too much time taking photos and not enough time getting into the gig (you live and learn I guess), but regardless I still enjoyed myself a hell of a lot.

Substitute “live-tweeting” for “taking photos” and I think you’ve got it. You won’t enjoy yourself less, but there’s a good possibility that you won’t be “getting into the gig” to the extent you would’ve liked.

Un Salon des Refusés

Following in a long and noble tradition, I bring you a Salon des Refusés. It’s a personal and in some ways haphazard selection – simply what caught my eye during the week and again during the checking process. I fear I may have forgotten some favourites, in which case I’ll have to add them in later. These may not have won in the main round, but they made me smile and I want to keep them around somewhere handy.

Organised alphabetically by opera (discounting the articles)…

Pattyoboe – Leaving your husband & child isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In the end she finally gets on track.
Anna Karenina

Thos Carpenter – Let’s all try to figure out why the King of Sweden was assassinated in Boston. I think it has something to do with the censors.
Un ballo maschera

Jose S Piano – He sings. He schemes. He lies for the lovers. He steals keys. He evades arrest. But does he actually cut hair?
The Barber of Seville

Prima La Musica – Ad man, ladies’ man, lucky man. Dead man, changed man, madman. New man, green man, Honey’s man. Good man. It’s bliss, man.
Bliss

Prima la musica – Betty’s a Bitch, Johnny’s a Jerk, Lucy’s a Leftie, David’s a Dealer. Honey’s a Hooker-with-a-Heart. But Harry? He’s just a Joy.
Bliss again, #incaseyoumissedbliss

Prima la musica – Contestant on macabre Hungarian gameshow ignores all hints from the host and opens one mystery door too many
Bluebeard’s Castle

P Schleuse – Some folks shun CosiFanTutte, find its characters too fruity. Its moral yet is worth a ponder: Absence Makes the Heart Go Wander
(like it says)

P Schleuse – If a Trojan prince comes courting, take him hunting if you’re sporting. But beware of evil mirth, or you’ll end up laid in earth
Dido and Æneas

Dumble Dad – @belinda Remember me but oh do not archive my tweets.
(Because you can never have too much Purcell, although the same might not be said for Twitter)

Classical Review – Notion. ‘Potion’. Commotion. Emotion. Devotion.
L’Elisir d’amore

Sam Neuman – Today on Ricki Lakovsky: Eugene wouldn’t give Tatiana a second look when she was a kid-but look at her now! Come on out, Tatiana!
Eugene Onegin

Where’s Runnicles? – We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars or, more specifically, dreaming of the moon and the 15th century
The Excursions of Mr Broucek

Jennifer Stumm – Hell, I would’ve been better off staying home with a margarita.
Faust

Otterhouse – Just like the opera she was called Leonora,but sacrifices that name for Florestans sake.This offer comes free with four overtures
Leonore Fidelio

Maura Lafferty – Max enters competition to win love. Kaspar has help from below, not above. Bullet flies, someone dies. Karma fits like a glove.
Der Freischütz

MMmusing – In2 the woods we hav 2 go/Our ma is really mad u know/Somebody call 2 DSS & get us an attorney/In2 the woods 2 GINGERbread house!
Hänsel und Gretel (ok, I confess, musical theatre references catch my eye)

Lattavanti – Creepy shepherd forms cult, convinces king to embrace Nietzsche waaaaaay before it was cool.
King Roger

Harry Fiddler – Desperate housewife shags the help, knifes the hubby, knocks off the in-law and ends up in a ditch. Should be on TV. Maybe it is
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Nicole Brockmann – Hindu priest’s daughter, spurned by one who loved honour more, Delibes-erately offs self w/datura. Sponsored by British Airways
Lakmé

Olivia Giovetti – If you knew what happened to the first couple who heard it, you may rethink using that ubiquitous bridal march.
Lohengrin (I don’t know that it’s a plot exactly, but I wholeheartedly agree)

Alejoplay – Everyone thought Lucia was mad when she insisted it would be a simple ceremony
Lucia di Lammermoor

Prima la musica – Amatory lepidopterist traps fragile specimen among Nagasaki cherry blossoms. Fumbling to release her, he crushes her instead.
Madama Butterfly

Talopine – The crew play baseball / In the desert’s heat. And wait. / And…stay with the plane.
Madeline Lee

Meister Mole – “Nürnberg’s Got Talent”
Die Meistersinger

N Brockmann – Ripped from the headlines: sad clown loses it; stabs wife+her lover for real, not pretend. Hey–wasn’t this a Law & Order episode?
Pagliacci

Classical Review – Do the worst things happen at sea? The villagers seem to think so.
Peter Grimes

Otterhouse – The Postilion always marries twice…
Le postillon de Lonjumeau

Eighth Blackbird – An ageing, nostalgic Duchess recalls her youth. Sings an aria while giving fellatio. ’Nuff said.
Powder Her Face

Irene Vartanoff – I’ll build a castle in Paradise, I’m going to get there at any price; Stand aside, I’m on my way (Wotan, apologize to Gershwin)
Das Rheingold (despite not being that into Wagner, I am seriously into Gershwin)

David Karlin – The rivers of Germany are lined with gold. But if you have any sense of destiny, keep your hands off.
Das Rheingold again, my sentiments exactly!

Lattavanti – After decades away, man returns home to free faithful wife from contrapuntal suitors, burden of singing only in recitative.
Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria

Pattyoboe – Love is in the air and at Bullier’s! But her sordid past nixes marriage; it’s something she just can’t swallow
La Rondine

MMmusing – The first chord puts tonality on notice. The ending lets Isolde Liebestod us.
Tristan und Isolde

P Schleuse – What with this hallucination, country life is no vacation. You’ll see him if you sort of squint: that creepy guy is Peter Quint.
The Turn of the Screw

Music Vs Theater – Mix one part Mary Poppins and one part Sixth Sense. Turn until screwed.
The Turn of the Screw

primalamusica – It’s just like The Sound of Music, but with ghosts & Freudian angst instead of schmaltz & Nazis. And the kids are even creepier
The Turn of the Screw (at least, I swear this one was entered for 2010, but it’s not showing up except for 2009; maybe I was just imagining it…)

Prima la musica – Unrequited lover’s talent for maudlin poetry is dwarfed by his spectacular gift for RUINING Christmas.
Werther

MMmusing – Pamina! I just saw a pic of Pamina. Her mom’s a crazy dame & sent it in a frame to me. Pamina! I just dissed a girl named Pamina.
Die Zauberflöte (there’s another very aMMmusing one on the same theme, which made its way into a movie trailer, but I got sucked in by the Sondheim/Bernstein reference of this effort)

****

I’ve already revealed my all-time favourite. If I had to pick two runners up they would be Otterhouse’s Le postillon de Lonjumeau – which is wonderfully epigrammatic, to the point, and a very, very clever use of a cross-cultural reference – and Primalamusica’s Bluebeard’s Castle, which is elegantly apt and completely unforced.

I would then give MMmusing a special prize for uniting the pleasures of musical theatre with the intricacies of opera. Pattyoboe would get the prize for punning. ClassicalReview would get the Sondheim award for perfect internal rhyming. And I could probably go on inventing prizes for everyone. Which is ultimately the greatest pleasure and reward of the whole week: following the whimsy and creativity of all these wonderful wordie-nerdie-musical types. Congratulations to everyone, and a big thank you to the OM for making all this happen.

Butterflies and tomatoes

Others have assembled their personal shortlist of favourites from the 2010 #operaplot entries; someone has even created a taxonomy of #operaplot types.

I’ve been too pressed for time, alas. And so, as the clock ticks down to the announcement of the final results, I will simply put in my personal vote for what I think is the best, the most compleat, the most brilliant, the most poetic, and the most beautiful of #operaplots – the one that should stand as a model for us all:

Amatory lepidopterist traps fragile specimen among Nagasaki cherry blossoms. Fumbling to release her, he crushes her instead.

And I swear, if @primalamusica doesn’t win this time, I will eat a plate of tomatoes!

Operaplot housekeeping: Part 2

And here follow my final 13 entries in the 2010 #operaplot competition. A few more reprises from last year, but also some eleventh-hour inspiration.

13. Die Ägyptische Helena
ß-blocking lotus potion turns tortuous plot (with only @missmussel as company) into “splendidly vacuous” Poseidon adventure. #operaplot

14. Feuersnot
The title’s a falsche Freund (burning mucous???); turns out a comely virgin will light the #operaplot fires on a bed of Wagner references.
I’d like to say that my misspelling of the German adjective (should be ‘falscher’) was deliberate in view of keeping to a character count, but in fact there was room for another letter and I just made a mistake.

15. Capriccio
You know it’s getting too meta when onstage chamber music takes over the overture & we launch into a conversation piece about Art #operaplot

16. Batavia
Some uptight, upright Dutch founder Down Under and all comes asunder. The Lord of the Flies meets the East India Co. #operaplot

17. Bliss (2)
Be still my beating heart; the dead white-suited male wakes to a polonaise. Hell, it seems, is a bass clarinet; heaven is Honey. #operaplot

18.b A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Britten)
Indian boys flit th’rough phrygian brier, lovers wander til they tire; fairy tricks, mechanical ass; triple wedding & a bergamask #operaplot

19. La Cenerentola
“And what is the use of a Cinderella,” thought Alice, “without glass slippers or pumpkins?” #operaplot #rossinidowntherabbithole

20. The Spanish Hour (L’Heure espagnole)
Weekly winding ritual & manifold, mixed-up indiscretions behind the counter prove good for clock business in Toledo. Cuck-old! #operaplot

21. Oedipus Rex
Son abandoned after patricidal prediction, kills father anyway AND marries his mother. That kind of thing will turn you blind. #operaplot

22. La Gioconda
Hello muddah, hello faddah, I’m in love w/ Gioconda! But she hates me (so enticing), And goes in for all this noble sacrificing. #operaplot
One of my favourites from last year – nearly forgotten!

23. Lucia di Lammermoor
How do you solve a problem like Lucia? How can a marriage splice the feuding kilts? (Madness, death & the moonbeam’s out of hand) #operaplot

24. The Love for Three Oranges
Been dying of boredom cos Morgana banned LOLs & now you’re saying I have to go find fruity princesses? W/E #operaplot sponsored by Sunkist

25. Wozzeck
Brutalised Soldat leads a dissonant existence; stabs inconstant mistress; only saved from serial crime by accidental drowning. #operaplot

Operaplot housekeeping: Part 1

This year’s entries so far, mostly reprises, with just over 12 hours to go before #operaplot 2010 is over. (Opera titles link to actual tweets for the pedantic.) Can I come up with 13 new operaplots in the time or am I suffering from some strange Antipodean writer’s block?

1. Bliss
What’s the Joyful feeling when the opera’s Harried hero dies three times (so the author said), but nobody dies at the end? Bliss! #operaplot

2. A double bill: Prima la musica…/Der Schauspieldirektor
First the music then the [Italian] words? Or a flustered impresario auf Deutsch? Opera vs Singspiel playoff in Joe 2’s orangerie. #operaplot

3. Rigoletto
He had a hunch, the Duke was up to no good. Precautions futile: between ducal charm & noble curse Gilda didn’t stand a chance. #operaplot

4. Doctor Atomic
The nuclear-physical Trinity meets the metaphysical three-person’d god in Adamsian setting. John Donne wins. #operaplot

5. The Golden Cockerel (aka Le Coq d’or)
Ki-kiri-kuku! Silly recumbent king finds that relying on avian warning system for border control costs him sons, bride and life. #operaplot

6. The Invisible City of Kitezh or the Maiden Fevronia
Saintly forest maid weds prince (cue balalaikas) Tartars disrupt honeymoon (cue Bb min) Ghostly reunion in misty city (cue bells) #operaplot

7. The Merry Widow (aka Die lustige Witwe)
Pretty respectable widow & proud former flame waltz around the matter of money in the shadow of the Pontevedrian economic crisis. #operaplot

8. Dialogues of the Carmelites [with thanks to the Met Opera quiz]
Begins in French. Shy miss flees aristo danger for Carmelite cloister. Martyrdom not quite the plan. Ends badly and in Latin. #operaplot

9. Der Rosenkavalier
The horns orgasm and it’s all downhill from there in the face of young love. Who’s it by? Mozart: you can tell from the costumes #operaplot

10. The Telephone (Menotti) [with thanks to Verizon]
Can you hear me now? [No] Can you hear me now? [No] Damn phone. [Goes out] Can you hear me now? Good. Will you marry me? Yes! #operaplot

11. The Beggar’s Opera
Polly is a sad slut: finds upwardly mobile marriage is more encumbered than suspected. Madness & folly in a totally Gay pastiche. #operaplot

12. Giulio Cesare [in tribute to Yvonne Kenny]
See the conquering hero comes (wrong #operaplot) while she bathes in ass’s milk. Revenge & plotting saves her throne but the bath gets cold.

Operaplot 2010

Around this time last year, I found me a new addiction and time waster.

And the Omniscient Mussel has just reminded me that #operaplot is happening again. Not that I’d forgotten exactly, but I hadn’t been paying proper attention to the dates.

And it’s this week. Yikes!

Entries open Monday 26 April at 9am EST. And I don’t think that’s Australian EST, so Sydneysiders are best to wait until after 11 o’clock tonight just to be on the safe side.

Entries close on Friday 30 April at midnight (or 2pm on Saturday). Thank God it’s only a week or I would get nothing done.

The rules and FAQs are here. The prizes are very enticing indeed.

Non-winning entries from the past are eligible, so those of us with treasured rejects can dust them off and send them out on another attempt. But half the fun is inventing the things, of course. The other half is following everybody else.

The entry limit is ten (your first ten contributions, anything after that is sheer indulgence). Unfortunately @FAKEfrindley was outed last time, although no one’s exactly saying you can’t enter from more than one account…

So off you go, get ye a Twitter account if you don’t have one already, and operaplot!

Postscript…

For geeky Mac-using types I recommend the Smultron text editor as a drafting tool (Smultron is Swedish for strawberry, by the way). It’s very simple, which is good for creativity, and it counts characters as you go.

An imposter keeps going to the opera

I like Brett Dean’s Bliss enough to have seen it three times, but that doesn’t mean I don’t find it problematical. The stumbling block for me has been the ending, which (at its core) is simply not very operatic, or even theatrical.

The first performance I saw left me feeling slightly deflated, as if I’d just read to the end of a certain kind of New Yorker short story. Like the woman I overhead at another performance, I was thinking “That’s it then…” At this point I still hadn’t managed to finish reading Carey’s novel, so I heard Act III of the opera with no idea of what was in store other than curiosity as to whether Harry would actually die that third time. After I had finished the novel, it seemed to me that Brett Dean and Amanda Holden had dealt very well with the challenges presented by the book itself, which meanders to its conclusion in a way that isn’t suited to theatre. 

And after tonight I’ve decided that New-Yorker-short-story is the wrong analogy.

Here’s what really happens: Acts I and II are Harry Joy’s story. He’s the one you care about, the one whose struggles you share. But Act III is really Betty Joy’s story. She becomes the one whose ambition, pain and self-destruction draws empathy. A certain kind of good opera ends with someone dying, and as one person said to me, half joking, Bliss could easily end with Betty’s inflammatory suicide (not necessarily musically spectacular, but dramatically spectacular). That’s not entirely true, but you get the point. After the Board Room scene, the conclusion is something of an anticlimax. And I realised tonight that if Bliss weren’t strictly speaking all about Harry, then the final scene would probably be labelled in the libretto as the Epilogue.

You know what an epilogue is…

“No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs no excuse. Never excuse; for when the players are all dead, there needs none to be blamed.…But come, your Bergomask: let your epilogue alone.”

But the players in Bliss are not all dead, and Harry must be there at the end, no question, and so we get the final scene, In Elysium. It’s not a Shakespearean epilogue, an “apology” and summons to applause, it’s more like the final chapter of a Regency novel. All the action has come to a conclusion, but we must needs find out what happens to the characters after and be given something improving, and possibly epigrammatic, to take away:

“If you would seek salvation, remember this:
a life in Hell can still aspire to BLISS.”

Postscript…

I’m not the first to say this, but it sure is bliss to have the libretto of a new opera reproduced in the program. Bravo Opera Australia!

An imposter at the opera, an interlude

This post is not really about the opera Bliss, but an incidental thought brought on by it, in particular by the ending, over which I’ve been mulling. (What could have made it more satisfying in dramatic, theatrical terms? And has it been hindered by the structure of the novel?)

Anyhow. In the novel, Harry Joy has a way with stories, a certain rascally charm and a white-suited panache.

More important, he is killed – finally – when a log of wood falls on his head.

So does that make him a kind of Cyrano de Bergerac figure?

Postscript…

Cyrano is an opera as well, at least twice over that I’m aware of, but this one will do.

An imposter at the opera, part the first

Not being a true opera buff, it so happened that I saw Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the first time in my life on Tuesday night. I knew only one part of it, the very beginning:

How the opening happens to be engraved in my memory is a curious story. It was played to us in Year 8 elective music as a dictation exercise and for some strange reason it’s stuck with me ever since. I’m not sure why, since I couldn’t name even one other work that was introduced to us in this way. I may have been especially attracted to the set of intervals on the words “We do wander everywhere”. Or maybe it was the glissando strings accompaniment, which wreaked havoc with our efforts to write down the melodies.

I’m quite pleased to have been able to unearth it on YouTube, especially since the only version I could find also happens to demonstrate that superbly reedy Spanish choirboy effect (Catalan, actually) that I was hankering for at times on Tuesday. Curiously, it shares echoes of the bilious green, blue and pink colour scheme in OA’s Baz Luhrmann production, but (I’m guessing) its moon remains that classic nail-paring shape for the duration of the performance.

Which brings me to the only truly annoying thing about the Luhrmann production (surely an achievement – I’m easily irritated). Perhaps because of Athens’ new-found sub-continental proximity to the Equator, the moon changed phase several times in the evening. And yet I did always think the whole point of Shakespeare’s play was that the forest adventures took place in one magical night.

But this was a very small thing – and it wasn’t enough to dampen the magic. This production deserves all the acclaim it’s earned. It’s bold, it’s imaginative and, most important, it’s sensitive to music, text and spirit. It’s a brilliant move to get the orchestra out of the pit and onto the on-stage rotunda and in doing so bring the staging further forward into the audience. If there was a downside to this, some of the orchestral balance seemed off at times. The harpsichord, for example, would emerge from the texture mid-phrase and at other odd times, and then be perplexingly inaudible in moments when I’m convinced it would have been playing. (Someone who knows and loves the piece well confirmed my suspicions on this front.) But it was nice to see the musicians as actors within the production: costumed and with a “part” to play that went beyond the usual black-garbed anonymity.

I wasn’t the only one to mark Tobias Cole’s stunning diction (and gorgeous sound): it’s a rare enough thing to be at an opera in English and not feel the slightest urge to check the surtitles. Could the interpretation have been more dangerous and oozing with the power-plays that underpin Oberon’s games? Perhaps. But I’m not sure – on one hearing – that this is in Britten’s opera; perhaps it’s only in my reading of the play, which for various reasons I’ve come to know best of all Shakespeare’s works.

All of which tells me that Britten’s Dream deserves more of my attention. And since I don’t listen to operas on recording if I can possibly help it, I guess this means I’ll need to go see it again. Once anyway.

Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere…

Ballet or circuses?

One of the things my ballet teacher taught me was that everything – everything – should look effortless, regardless of how much work you were doing or how difficult the steps might be. We were never to be like the tightrope walker who sets out to make you gasp at the danger and the risk.

Two concerts last week reminded me of this.

From the program book of a set of piano recitals: Joyce Yang commenting on how “the hardest thing with Chopin is to make it as effortless as possible”; Bernd Glemser said something similar (not quoted) in his conversation. Whereas the more dazzling of Liszt’s pyrotechnics might occasionally seem calculated to elicit oohs and aahs from an audience, there’s none of that in mature Chopin. Even the most brilliant and powerful moments must seem easy and effortless to the listener, with no edge-of-the-seat anxiety or fear of missed notes. And Joyce Yang is right, it’s probably one of the hardest things with Chopin.

My ballet teacher was talking to 10 year olds. The more complicated truth is that sometimes choreographers quite deliberately set up a “tightrope walker” effect. You get it in the famous 32 fouetté pirouettes in Swan Lake and the nail-biting Rose Adagio in Sleeping Beauty – spinning and balancing acts respectively. Of course the dancer still strives for effortlessness and grace but, all the same, you are meant to sit there, holding your breath, and be utterly impressed.

Ravel does this in the opening of his G major piano concerto, which offers some kind of fiendish difficulty to just about everybody, beginning with the piccolo. When you listen to Ravel himself conduct the first movement (a whole minute quicker than anybody else – eek!), it’s hair-raising. And after hearing it again in concert this week I’ve come to the conclusion that this is precisely the effect he wants: to make it sound like everyone’s hanging in there by the skin of their teeth, even when the execution is perfect. Just another reason why this concerto makes me think of circuses.

Optimism

I’ve been known to leave concerts at interval, and opera too. But I’ve never done a half-show at the ballet and not at the theatre.

There is, however, a first time for everything, and on Tuesday night I wandered out of the STC’s Optimism (Tom Wright after Voltaire’s Candide) at the point where they flashed the sign “Drinks at the bar”. It wasn’t awful so much as lame – the “confection” (Wright’s word) was too reminiscent of an undergraduate revue, and just as uneven. Someone needs to buy a candy thermometer.

The very best moments (Abigail’s monologue, for example) tended to be those that stayed closest to Voltaire. Mixed in was a staggering variety of songs, a gentle kind of standup comedy and strange jokes, like the one about underwear fitting like a glove. Perhaps my heart wasn’t in it, but for something that was meant to be funny, I wasn’t able to manage much more than a wry smile at most of the silliness.

The first disconcerting thing was Barry Otto, projecting as a fine actor does, but miked. Too loud! And why does anyone need microphones in the SOH Drama Theatre anyway? Because of the singing, it turned out, and an often intrusive underscore. It probably didn't help that I was down front and to one side, too close to a speaker stack for comfort and not enjoying the forward-facing spotlights and industrial fans all that much either. For a romp – which is what I think its creators and performers were aiming for – it was often too “in your face”, literally. 

And so I left Candide and his companions in Surinam with the gurgling slave. (That was actually quite impressive: Michael Hamish singing “I could be happy” at half tempo and sounding for all the world like he had mud in his throat.) I figured the second half was going to be much the same as the first, and – pace Dr Pangloss – I couldn’t muster any optimism.

A postscript…

I went to buy a program, as is my wont, and was startled to find the price had gone up to $12. I winced and handed over another gold coin. I winced again when I got home and realised that I had in fact purchased a set of discounted program vouchers with my subscription.

Sleeping Beauty: The Program

I have six minutes till pumpkin hour (yes, I know that’s the wrong fairytale) so no time to comment on the production in this post. But I do have time to say this:

Thank you, oh publications people at the Australian Ballet. For the first time (at least since the 70s) you have given us a program book that fits in a girl’s handbag. You wouldn’t believe how happy this makes me – how deliriously and irrationally overjoyed I am. Yee ha!

It’s a handsome number, with no compromise in its scope.

I’m just going to say one thing, which in no way diminishes my joy but which might have spoiled it if I were 15 or 20 years older: the body copy font is just too small. It’s 6.5 point by my reckoning (the embedded quotes are even smaller!) and although, unlike in concerts, there’s no need for it to be read in semi-darkness, it really wants to be at least 8.5 or 9 point. For two reasons: the obvious one is legibility and reading pleasure; the other one is to avoid the page design looking as if an A4 layout has simply been shrunk down all round to fit the new size.

Oh, and since I’m griping (joyously, of course): it would be so nice if the cast sheet, when folded in two, fit nicely inside the book without jutting out. After all, we’re being encouraged to sit these new programs “snugly” on our bookshelves, and the cast sheet is an essential record of the performance and the dancers we’ve seen, so we’ll want to keep that pretty snugly too. If 20mm were trimmed off the height of the cast sheet it would be perfect. Actually – wicked thought – I could do that myself: there’s a band of sponsor logos across the bottom… Ahem.

Now comes the nerdy complaint, which probably I and maybe two others will be making: those of us who keep our program books and actually plan to take them down to Croydon to get the bookbinder there to make them into annual volumes will be wondering why, oh why, couldn’t this change of program format be kept until the beginning of the 2010 season? Now I’ll have to bind the first three programs from 2009 in one book and keep this final one to be bound with the four from 2010 (assuming the format doesn’t change again). “Grr” is the customary response, I believe.

But ignore the whinges (especially the nerdy one). This was quite the nicest surprise of the year.

A postscript, some years later…

As it happened, the format did change again – back to the original “souvenir” size in 2010. So this one program was something of an aberration. Until, that is, 2022, when the compact format was tried again. And this time it was done right: designed for the size (and gorgeously so) and wonderfully rich in content, both words and pictures. This time the delirious joy is here to stay. Alas, there are now no cast sheets at all, unless one remembers to go to the trouble of copying and pasting the relevant info from the website, formatting it to fit on a single sheet and printing it out. That’s kind of tedious, but it doesn’t diminish my happiness. 

Concord, or The Good, the Great and the Ugly

I go to the ballet alone. This, combined with the strange state of affairs that gives me mobile reception in the SOH Opera Theatre but not the Concert Hall, meant that I could tweet some of my immediate reactions to the Australian Ballet’s Concord triple bill as the evening progressed.

The one thing I didn’t tweet (and perhaps I should’ve) was the question that’s been bugging me all year: why is Concord called “Concord”, and how does the idea of agreement or harmony relate to what’s meant to be “a journey to the centre of modern ballet”? Is it too nerdy of me to want a satisfying explanation? (I’ve read the season brochure and the program book, and scanned the blog, which for all its excellent coverage of the development of the new works doesn’t seem to have stopped to ask this question…) But I’ll let the matter drop; glass houses and all that. In any case, this was a triple bill of three disparate pieces – there’s probably little point in forcing them together under some common theme.

Although the program book suggested the original plan had been otherwise, the evening began with Por vos muero (For thee I die) by Nacho Duato. I had seen this before (in 1998), but it was only the Australian Ballet’s repertoire list that reminded me of this. The Duato ballet that I did remember seeing was Jardi Tancat, from three years before that.

Part of me thinks that Por vos muero should have been left last on the program, because it was by far the most successful and satisfying piece of the evening. And that’s not just because it allowed me to spend 40 minutes or so listening to Jordi Savall and the Spanish repertoire he does so well. This dance work was intrinsically about dance itself. The refreshingly clear-headed summary of the ballet says it all:

“In the 15th and 16th centuries, dance formed part of the cultural expression of all people, including all social hierarchies. Por vos muero pays a tribute to the pivotal role that dance played in every social event during the Spanish Renaissance.”

This is a very simple but strong conceptual foundation. No surprise, then, that it works incredibly well. The dances and canzonas of the period provide a logical and grateful musical fabric – and much as I might lament that the music wasn’t live, I wasn’t exactly complaining. [The score incorporated poetry too; unfortunately the program didn’t include any translations, so I have no idea what this contributed to the overall work.] The choreography was marvellously musical, with just a hint of period gestures, more often in the patterns made on the floor than in the movements themselves. The costumes took us to realms of emerald green, violet and midnight blue within an overall darkness suggestive of old Spanish paintings. Again, there were discreet period touches. The women’s skirts, in particular, seemed almost formless, so unlike the highly structured garments of the Renaissance, but ­the magic was in the way they took shape when in motion. The props were similarly abstracted (masks for example) until real censers made an appearance with what, from stalls row J, smelled like real incense.

Scuola di ballo, which followed, was the opposite in every respect. Where Por vos muero was subtle, richly sensuous and beautiful, Scuola was highly coloured and heavy-handed. Even high camp needs a light touch if it’s to yield frothy comedy.

I’ve not seen the original (footage resides in the National Film and Sound Archive), so I’m not sure whether to point the finger at Alexei Ratmansky or Léonide Massine, who created the ballet in 1933. What I am sure of is that I like Boccherini, I like Françaix, I like Goldoni, and my impressions of Massine’s works in the past (Les Présages, Symphonie fantastique) have been very favourable. But I simply couldn’t find it in my heart to like Scuola di ballo.

Valerie Lawson’s fascinating program article about the “studio ballet” did Scuola no favours by bringing to mind far superior (Bournonville’s Conservatoire, Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun) or much, much funnier (Béjart’s The Competition) examples of the genre.

There was one very beautiful, admirable thing in Scuola – something for which I’m sure we can thank Massine. When the talented Rosine arrives in the class it is necessary for her to demonstrate her superior natural gifts. What’s telling (and lovely) is that she does this not with technical fireworks but with an expressive and musical adagio. I was very glad to see the message being given that razzle-dazzle does not equate with artistry, however much the former may make an audience erupt in squealing applause.

Por vos muero I could not fault; Scuola di ballo left me cringing a little. The final piece, Dyad 1929, prompted a mixed response. The music was the recent Pulitzer prize-winning piece by Steve Reich, Double Sextet. This work can be played by 12 musicians or by six with a pre-recorded tape. The program didn’t credit the 12 (or six) musicians, nor did it mention this rather interesting aspect of the musical score. I have a sneaking suspicion that it was six-plus-tape for this performance (although it may simply have been amplified sound that I was hearing), but I didn’t think to investigate the pit during interval and so can’t say for sure.

I’m going to be nice about the music, since it was commissioned by an ensemble for which I have a lot of admiration. Actually, I don’t need a pretext to be nice about it; this is a strong piece that deserves its accolades. But Reich’s pieces do have this one problem (for me). I like to close my eyes when I listen to them. Not because they’re soporific (as the unkind might say), but because I like to trace in my mind’s eye the subtle transitions of textures and harmony and to let the hypnotic aspects of the music take full effect.

So several times during the performance my eyelids drifted shut until some small voice reminded me that there was dancing to be watched! So take this with a grain of salt if you like: the choreography was very pleasing in its form and balance – let’s say its geometry – and impressive in its virtuosity.

My gripe with Dyad 1929 is with its stated concept, which is either half-baked or poorly explained. Where the inspiration and intent of Por vos mueros could be summed up in a few sentences, Dyad 1929 still didn’t really make sense after four paragraphs. Apparently aviation and the first flight over the South Pole was a key inspiration for choreographer Wayne McGregor, but you’d be hard pressed to see how that manifested itself in the final creative work. (Kate Scott’s blog post on the ballet admits that the other half of the diptych, Dyad 1909, was a much more literal realisation of McGregor’s interests.) Given that the ballet, in itself, had all the potential to be very satisfying, I’m wondering whether it wouldn’t have been better to ditch the supposed inspiration, tribute to the influence of Diaghilev, yadda yadda, and simply offer it as the abstract work that it seemed to be.

Ultimately this is a matter not of choreography or of dancing, but of how the art form is presented to its audience. Yes, we in this modern age love words about art – we’ve inherited that tendency from the 19th century – but sometimes less is more and sometimes being more straightforward (vide Por vos mueros) and less clever or contrived (Dyad 1929) pays off. They say, for writing, that if you can’t express your ideas in a clear, simple way, then your ideas are probably faulty. Allowing for the fact that a choreographer’s mode of expression is movement rather than words, I do wonder whether the success and power of Nacho Duato’s ballets is related (cause? effect?) to the fact that his themes and concepts can be communicated, in words, so convincingly.

Getting “into” classical music

The other day FK of Classical Review posed the question: “Would more people get ‘into’ classical music by hearing it first on CD or in a concert hall?”

I’m assuming the question is about getting into classical music generally, as opposed to getting into specific musical works. And since it’s a hypothetical question as it stands, I’m going to turn it into something more personal if not necessarily more scientific:

What got you “into” classical music?

Was it hearing the music on recordings, was it hearing the music in the concert hall, was it hearing the music used in some incidental way (soundtracks, advertisements…),  or was it something else?

This post is my answer. You’re invited to share a response in the comments, or to write your own blog post and leave a link here. (Does that make it a meme? Maybe.)

*****

I got into classical music as a kid, when I was too young to be taken to formal concerts, but not too young to ask for my favourite records to be put on.

The family record collection was probably 75 per cent musical theatre and 25 per cent classical (orchestral) music.  So strictly speaking, the musical genre that I first got “into” was musical theatre and I got into that solely via recordings, since I was in late primary school before I saw any musicals on the stage. (By contrast I’ve never been interested in recordings of opera and my interest in that genre is solely from performances.)

Anyhow, classical music. Recordings first. No prepping or priming or earnest guidance from my parents. The music was there simply to be listened to and enjoyed. I didn't particularly identify what I was listening to as “classical” music. It was all just music, from Scheherazade to Eagle Rock. I knew I preferred the Rimsky-Korsakov by a long shot, but I wasn’t making any particular genre distinctions with the exception of one: singing and no-singing.

But recordings were only part of the picture. There was a piano in the house, my big sister was taking lessons, and at some point I began fooling around, trying to work out notation with the aid of one of those paper charts that sit at the back of the keyboard and improvising what I called “fairy music”. This was probably maddening, formal lessons were in order!

But there’s more, and if this next factor wasn’t the real reason I got “into” classical music, it certainly has influenced my taste in the long term. It’s dance, specifically ballet. I first heard live orchestral music not in a concert hall but in the theatre, in a production of Giselle that I saw when I was about 6 or 7. The first accomplished pianist I heard play regularly was the ballet school accompanist. The music I most liked to listen to, I realise now, was often ballet music or at least well-suited to dance. My favourite mode of “listening” involved moving. There were plenty of concert works I heard for the first time in the theatre, for example Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G (which I loved, aged 9) and Webern Opus 5 (which I hated, aged 14). And I grew up revelling in the colour and buoyancy of Russian and French music and the elegant rhythms and phrases of baroque music.

All in all, it was a gradual immersion that began at a very young age, first with recordings and then through the theatre. My attraction to classical concerts is really part of a bigger love for live performance generally, and it seems to have emerged as much from a childhood of going to plays and ballets as from the music itself.

To my shame, the memory of my earliest classical concerts is really hazy. There was my first studio concert, in which I played some little beginner piece in the midst of a program of lieder and advanced repertoire (the other students were all much older and mostly singers). My teacher also conducted the Western Sinfonia, and I recall going to a couple of those concerts, probably when I was in primary school. Around the same time there was the SSO concert in the Sydney Town Hall to which I was taken in fervent anticipation of seeing and hearing a harp. There was a harp, but not as soloist; I was very disappointed.

The first orchestral concert that I really remember was the SSO, in the Opera House, with Jean-Pierre Rampal as soloist. I was at least 12, because I’d begun learning flute. Mum and I set off with the primary goal of hearing Rampal play Mozart. I remember the concert so vividly because I emerged from it having lost all interest in Rampal, and Mozart – I had just heard Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra. Woah! Now that was exciting stuff. But by that time I was well and truly “into” classical music, I knew that was its name, and I also knew that I belonged to a nerdy little minority. And I didn’t care because I was in love.

Peter Grimes

Others are way more qualified to write about opera than I am, but I want to enthuse a little. You’ve been warned.

Here’s the scenario: someone who’d done a half-show at the previous OA production he attended raved to me about Peter Grimes. Enthusiastic reports came from one, two, three other trusted sources. So I knew I had to go, especially since I still bear the bruises from kicking myself for missing Billy Budd. The final prod came in the form of an attractive rush price. Now there were no “barriers”, as the marketing bods would say. It turned out to be one of those nights where I saw a lot of familiar faces. Heaps of industry acquaintances and colleagues, performers, various “important people”, the odd composer. This was good to see: an audience full (literally full) of the kind of people whose opinions are likely to hold sway.

I’d not seen this opera or listened to it in its entirety before. Like many orchestrally biased music-lovers, my appreciation is for the Passacaglia and Four Sea Interludes. But I’m not sure I’ve seen any Opera Australia production that I’ve liked better, has been better sung and played, or made more musical and dramatic sense.

The storm-painted curtain opens on a period piece, a town hall in all its sturdy detail, an interior not from the early 19th century but c.1940. It’s Britten’s era, in other words, not Crabbe’s, and Britten’s sympathies emerge unhindered. The hall becomes the set for the whole opera, shifting easily from indoor to outdoor communal spaces with just the subtlest of variations (some of them carried out by possibly the most illustrious stage-hand ever: Peter Carroll as the silent Dr Crabbe). There are basically no private spaces in this opera, barring one, which I’ll get to.

The set conveyed no real sense of the sea, and you could argue that this is a (minor) weakness when the music so overpoweringly redolent of the sea. But there’s reason in the madness, I think. First, the music needs very little help; its evocations are even more powerful for not being mirrored in any literal or naturalistic attempt to represent the sea or the shore. Second, and more important, it allows us to step back slightly from the plot and see the theme: this is an opera that ultimately is about community, public opinion, and gathering together vs social isolation and rejection. I think we can be sympathetic to Britten’s Grimes in a way that it’s nearly impossible to feel for the Crabbe Grimes because he’s recast as the dreamer and an outcast, battling futilely against an implacable, tight-knit community. Crabbe, on the other hand, portrays a Grimes whose sole motivation seems to be the desire to exert power over a weaker character. You don’t go all weepy when he goes mad with despair. You do when Stuart Skelton does.

The one truly private space is Grimes’s hut, in Act II. Here Neil Armfield proved that less is more. There’s an interlude. Dr Crabbe methodically clears the stage, then moves to the curtained platform at the rear of the hall and beckons it forward. And the whole wall moves, slowly, inexorably to the front of the stage proper. It’s the simplest thing, really, but the effect was oppressive and somehow damning. Shudder. 

From Britten himself came tiny discoveries and exquisite pleasures. Some of the text setting in Widow Sedley’s part is astonishingly effective, with such striking colours in the accompaniment. Her amateur sleuthing and predictions of doom are clearly meant to be a pain in the proverbial, but I didn’t want it to stop.

There was no faulting the cast: Skelton as Grimes; Peter Coleman-Wright as Balstrode; Susan Gritton as the one character I can’t quite understand, Ellen Orford; some serious-looking casting in the supporting roles and an adorable pair of “Nieces”. Aside from the mad scene (or the scene in which the orchestra switches off its sconces and Grimes’s life totally falls apart), Skelton had me wowed with his amazing pianissimos. At one point he was singing so softly while projecting so unerringly, that, as was commented to me, it was as if he was singing from offstage. And then to bloom from that into a perfectly shaped crescendo. Stunning. Is there nothing he can’t do? But always in the service of the music. The same is to be said for Coleman-Wright.

I’m not sure how to sum this one up, because everything seemed so right and so wonderful and so moving. Let’s just say it was, without hesitation or question, a “stay to the end” evening at the Opera House. And that’s high praise.

Hard by a fountain

My title today comes from a 16th-century ditty by Hubert Wælrant, which used to give us hysterics when I was in high school. Perhaps we sight-read it once, or maybe it was just in an anthology that we used in choir. Anyhow, it was simply too much for our collective immaturity and cleverness. [The typesetter in my linked pdf seems to have taken the joke a step further with an unconventional spelling of shepherd.]

Opera Australia reminded me of it on Wednesday by presenting two operas, both of which feature fountains and neither of which actually shows one. That would be “Hard [to come] by a fountain”, I guess.

So the show was a double bill, Handel’s Acis and Galatea followed by Purcell’s Dido and Æneas or, as originally publicised, and already discussed, the other way ’round. I’d agree that the final order was the stronger one, and would have been even without the Big Star in Dido. 

And there’s really one reason why I say that: this production of Acis and Galatea leaves me cold in a way that Dido and Æneas couldn’t and doesn’t.

A small part of it is Handel’s fault. One of Roger Covell’s two essays in the program book hints at the reason for this, by pointing to Handel’s earlier serenata, which sets the same story with an Italian libretto, Aci, Galathea e Polifemo (1708). Covell points to the stronger dramatic qualities of the serenata: it introduces “the threat of Polifemo into the opening duet”, allows “Aci to make enough undaunted response to Polifemo to gain some credibility as a hero” and gives Polifemo a chance to savour his revenge while regretting “that his tender feelings for Galathea have been turned into unforgiving anger”.

On the other hand, Acis and Galatea, despite Handel’s glorious and magnificent music, seems dramatically superficial. Perhaps this is as good a reason as any to give it a production populated with “beautiful people” for whom life is one long party, or perhaps one long catwalk. Modern narcissism and modern scrutiny gets a look-in as the chorus of nymphs and shepherds photograph and film each other, projecting the results in real time on a scrim. [It was actually lovely to see those close ups and behind-the-front-line details projected in this way, but it does send a certain message when the camera operator is herself wearing the obligatory white frock.]

Peter McCallum’s review made a point about the challenge of presenting the pastoral/serenata genre, with its idealised rural and mythological themes. We might still have a taste for myth, but the idea of playing shepherds and shepherdesses in a world where no one ever throws a sheep, or drenches it, or shears it, or sends it to market is just too naive. (In much the same way, going out into the gardens of Versailles in a simple muslin frock and pouring one’s own tea no longer convinces as an evocation of the joys of peasant life.)

The trick then, is to find a plausible modern equivalent for an idyllic world in which, according to its rules, no one is ever hurt. Director Patrick Nolan offers one solution by turning the serenata back on its own performance context: ephemeral and private entertainments, staged by the privileged for their own delectation. This, then, becomes the scene for Acis and Galatea. As Nolan puts it: “a world of celebrity where people party hard and everyone wants a piece of the star. The surface is all.”

It’s very glamorously done, but it is hardly an idyllic world (only the table dancer with his iPod seems to have found that and, for all we know, he isn’t even listening to Handel). And from the opening moments of the overture this scene tells you that, for sure, someone will be hurt.

The concept also allows Nolan to give his characters some very modern affectations not actually to be found in the words they sing, or even in their music. Boredom and ennui, for example. 

Nolan again: “When we [the audience] meet Galatea, she is bored by it all. The sheen of constant sex and drugs and rock’n’roll has begun to tarnish. In Acis (Henry Choo) she finds someone who is also looking for more.”

Or you know, maybe she’s so wildly in love with the young and beautiful Acis that everything else in her quite lovely and innocent world has simply paled into insignificance as a result. Just a thought.

But what would a contemporary opera production be without a little onstage fellatio and cocaine snorting? [I’m sure it wasn’t snuff, that’s so 18th-century, and in any case you don’t inhale snuff in neat lines from a page of your Moleskine reporter.] Damon does (or receives) the honours. I confess it left me unmoved. And apart from the gentleman who called out “Rubbish!”, I suspect it left most of the audience unmoved. More important, it left Henry Choo’s Acis distinctly unimpressed as well. If these are the joys and pleasures that are meant to stop Acis running after his beloved Galatea, Damon will need to try a lot harder.

And that’s the thing. For all its fantasy and artifice, baroque music sought above all to move the passions of its listeners. To present Acis and Galatea as something coolly superficial and heartless does it an injustice.

Dido and Æneas is anything but heartless, which is why it was right to make it the second half.

Purcell’s work is dramatically more satisfying, and this production makes many appealing and convincing gestures. As a friend observed, it also exploits the one asset of the Opera Theatre stage – its remarkable depth – by setting up a forced perspective with a tiny Æneas standing at the far rear all through the opening numbers before he makes his entrance. Dramatically, Dido and Æneas maintains a fine balance between tender, noble feeling, sinister machinations, and raucous humour, and the production delivers all three. 

If I have a complaint, it’s the puzzling matter as to why Opera Australia would go to the trouble of assembling period instruments but then not cast with an equally stylistic ear for vocal sound. Although, perhaps it’s not so puzzling a matter. “And ever and anon, she sadly sighed.”

Escalators

This is what’s in store for us at the Sydney Opera House. Humble escalators, more than 30 years after the building opened. I can’t believe there weren’t elderly or otherwise less-agile people wanting to go to concerts and operas and ballets in the 1960s and 70s, but for some reason it just never occurred to ‘them’ to include escalators or even public lifts in the original building. 

Well, better late than never. Although, it’s not as if there haven’t been solutions up until now. Those with titanium knees and other exotic accessories are able to pop around to Stage Door, where they’re escorted to a backstage lift that takes them straight to the main foyer level. My mother does this all the time, and I suspect that, once the escalators are completed, she’ll rather miss the frisson of that little glimpse of the backstage world. She is her daughter’s mother after all. And you don’t see sights like this in the foyers.

What was I doing at the Opera House tonight? Impromptu attendance at the opera: the A&G D&A double bill, otherwise being publicised as Baroque Masterpieces. I’ll save writing up my observations for a more godly hour of the day. The program editor in me does wonder, though, why Henry Purcell’s portrait was selected to sit alongside the title page billing of Handel’s Acis and Galatea, while Mr Handel’s portrait sits beside the billing for Dido and Æneas. And the programmer in me wonders whether this was the result of a change of performing sequence at some point.

Larger than life

This is why I love the theatre!

Typecasting

The other day one of my sisters got me thinking about performers who are, for one reason or another, firmly embedded in our brains for one particular role. 

So here’s my list:

• John Bell simply is Cyrano de Bergerac.
  
• Gary Norman will always be my perfect, smouldering-eyed Spartacus. 
• There is no Don Quixote but Robert Helpmann.
• Judy Davis as Hedda Gabler.
• Robyn Nevin as Lady Macbeth.
• John Howard as John Proctor in The Crucible.
• Drew Forsythe serving two masters. (Alas, I’ve been unable to find a photo, nor can I find a picture of him as Mozart in Amadeus, which comes a close second.)
• David Oistrakh (may he forgive me) is fated to be forever associated with the Khachaturian Violin Concerto. He does make this seem like much better music than it really is.
• And a little part of Beyond Twelve died with Kelvin Coe. (But not, unfortunately, my lingering impression that concert performances of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G have the movements in the wrong order. Graeme Murphy has a lot to answer for.)

Slonimsky: plot master

Ok, so it’s more than 140 characters, but it is in one sentence. A masterly Rosenkavalier “operaplot” from the inimitable and ageless Nicolas Slonimsky:

26 January 1911
Der Rosenkavalier, “Komodie für Musik” in three acts by Richard Strauss…full of sophisticated waltzes and ironically sentimental arias, to Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s tale placed in 18th-century Vienna, in which a conniving dowager designates her young lover as the bearer of a symbolic silver rose sent from her aging cousin to a young coquette in proposing marriage, with a characteristic reversal of roles as the cavalier of the rose woos and wins her after many a transvestiture (in the third act the Rosenkavalier, a mezzo-soprano, is disguised as a maid thus reverting to her natural sex), the score containing 118 identifiable leitmotivs, according to officious exegetes, is produced at the Dresden Opera, Ernst Schuch conducting.

Love those “officious exegetes”.

And another priceless gem for an opera rather less well known:

17 February 1900
Anton, opera in three acts by the 27-year-old Italian composer Cesare Galeotti, wherein a young Libyan, whose pagan mistress slays his early Christian concubine known as the “Flower of the Catacombs”, flees to the Egyptian desert, suppresses his sensuous memories, resists a series of diabolically contrived temptations and becomes sanctified as Saint Anthony, to a musical score gushing out crimson floods of curvilinear melos, is produced at La Scala, Milan. [italics mine]

Source: Nicolas Slonimsky – The First Hundred Years (1994)

Nutcracker: printed matter

Being a program book junkie, I naturally bought one for Nutcracker. Australian Ballet programs are $15 more expensive than your typical free concert program ($12 if you buy vouchers up front) but well worth it, since they are loaded with beautiful photography and usually contain a number of thoughtful articles by a variety of writers.

One of the Nutcracker articles was an interview between conductor Nicolette Fraillon and choreographer Graeme Murphy – “Universal Genius: How Tchaikovsky became Australian”. Is that sounding a little familiar?

I was actually a bit shocked. Not because the AB had made double use of its editorial content but because they weren’t transparent about it (which they should have been, despite both blog and program “belonging” to the same company). Evidently the program book was published first; the blog version appeared online on Tuesday. How difficult would it have been to append a brief notice at the end of the blog saying that the interview had been published in the program book for the production?

There’s more to this than transparency, of course. In fact, even though that was what raised my eyebrows initially, it’s the least important issue here. What’s more important is that the failure to credit the program book as the published source results in a lost opportunity.

Bearing in mind that the AB sells its programs, it would be smart, surely, to tell blog readers when something they’ve just enjoyed has come from the program. (They could even tag program articles as such.) Who knows, some readers just might be inclined to buy a program next time when they see how interesting and connected to the performance and its creators the content can be. 

On a more positive note, although it’s risky putting too much program content online (why would you buy a program if you could read everything in it for free?), one of the great things about online publication is the potential for links, explanations and multi-media generally. So if you click through to the article in question you get a few things that you’d never find in the handsome printed books.

First up there’s a link from a mention of Murphy’s Swan Lake (2008) to an archived review quotes page on the AB’s website. (And 12 points to Gryffindor for keeping such available on the website! Even better would have been the original information page about the production.)

Then there’s a link to the wikipedia entry on E.T.A. Hoffmann at the point when he is mentioned as the source for the original Nutcracker. I’m wary of linking to wikipedia as a source, but the idea is right: providing an easy way to fill in knowledge gaps on the fly.

And finally there’s a link to a YouTube video of a traditional version of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy when Nicolette mentions it. After this the link-goodness peters out – it can be quite time-consuming to research and set up such things, a task akin to indexing or building glossaries, so I’m not entirely surprised. But it’s a move in the right direction – here’s hoping there’ll be more of it.

Nutcracker: the reminiscent review

The Australian Ballet has launched a new, communally written blog, Behind Ballet. It hasn’t really settled yet, and some of the writing is very amusing in its earnestness. But the variety of themes and diversity of voices is excellent. More important, today’s post, “Universal Genius: How Tchaikovsky became Australian”, reminded me that I had to put my ticket for Nutcracker in my bag for tomorrow!

I saw Graeme Murphy’s Nutcracker when it was premiered in 1992. I have two vivid memories from it all. First was seeing the season brochure or perhaps a feature article explaining that Murphy was going to create an “Australian Nutcracker”.

I admired Murphy’s work tremendously – Beyond Twelve was a long-standing favourite, for example – but at that news my heart sank. Terrible visions came to mind of cringe-making attempts to Australian-ise classic masterpieces such as Carnival of the Animals, attempts that always seemed to be trying too hard and going in too strongly for some overtly “Aussie” flavour. So of course I anticipated the worst. And hence came one of the most delightful evenings I’ve ever had in the theatre, as Murphy’s Nutcracker demolished my fears and prejudices.

One of the factors behind the success of this version is that the original libretto is in many ways quite weak and it lacks the satisfying dramatic arc of Swan Lake or even Sleeping Beauty. The essence of the action is all over by the end of Act I and Act II becomes a pretext for spectacle and a lot of pretty dancing. Then there’s the mismatch in the relative importance of the dramatic leads versus the real (dancing) leads. Which is a long way of saying that there is room for dramaturgical improvement on the original. And Murphy achieved this by constructing an ingenious story line that makes its logical way through Tchaikovsky’s music.

But really, what I loved most about the Murphy Nutcracker was the brilliance with which it injected the Australian flavour. He avoids all clichés with the masterly exception of the Hills Hoist. (A prefiguring of the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony perhaps?) And instead he’s dug down for some genuine Australian ties to this Russian ballet and found them in the touring De Basil Ballets Russes and the Borovansky company, who gave this country a taste for what the Australian Ballet does now. The connections all made perfect sense and they map beautifully onto the original drama of the music. And – very important – there’s no loss of fantasy or magic.

What’s bookmarked on my DVD of this? Among other things:

The battle with the rats. These are the Bolsheviks to Clara’s White Russian officer, but they are still rats, and in costuming and movement they are by far the most fearsome rats I’ve seen in a Nutcracker production anywhere.

The tai chi scene. This is remarkable for being danced in a slow-motion silence for a good minute or so. Only when it’s over do the touring dancers come bustling through in their rickshaw to the sounds of Tchaikovsky’s Chinese Dance (Tea): foreigners bringing foreign impressions.

But these are just clevernesses. The thing I can’t “bookmark” is the overall emotional impact of Murphy’s retelling – convincing and moving in every way, nostalgia without sentimentality. Tchaikovsky would be pleased, I think.