Not by bread alone...

It’s a long time since I wrote.  I had a lovely fortnight off; chilled out at my mum’s, then swam and sketched for a week in Kefalonia.  I came back to work tanned and refreshed, straight into a cloudburst at Gatwick.  That was just two weeks ago.  Work has been steadily busy ever since, which is good (I hate being bored).   

My cultural life since then has consisted of three mixed evenings out.  The first was to a concert that was a bit of a curate’s egg – a beautiful, lump-in-the-throat producing performance of The Enigma Variations, followed by Brahms’ Violin Concerto played by a Very Famous Soloist who I rapidly began to want to slap.  I’m sorry, but being a “character” does not entitle you to add extra percussion (sometimes off the beat, to add insult to injury) by jumping heavily up and down in fake exuberance as you play.  I love the Brahms concerto dearly, and the last person I heard playing it was Christian Tetzlaff, who is a musical demi-god in my book; I don’t want to see it turned into a self-indulgent party turn.

The second was last Friday, to a Hollywood blockbuster of the “lets trash New York with CGI” variety, and the last was last night, to “The Prince of the Pagodas” at Covent Garden.  “Prince of the Pagodas” was interesting stuff.  I gather the plot has been tweaked a bit, the intention being to make it a scrap more comprehensible; not very successful, I’m sorry to say.  Britten’s score veers between very beautiful and very weird, and so does the choreography.  But the orchestra and the excellent cast were putting their all into things, and I cannot fault the performance.  I’m just not sure it was worth reviving in the first place.  Marianela Nuñez was a radiant Princess Belle-Rose, Nehemiah Kish a handsome, gentle, gentlemanly Prince and Tamara Rojo a splendidly contemptuous Princess Belle-Épine, flashing her magnificent eyes and slashing high kicks at everyone.  The four evil kings who team up with Belle-Épine were terrific, the daft but saintly Fool bounced like the requisite rubber ball, and all the numerous bit parts were well done too.

But I’m afraid the blockbuster movie was a lot more fun. 

There are times when you want perfectly-cooked fresh food and top class wine, followed by superbly-played Mozart, and there are times when you want popcorn and a large chocolate milkshake, and lots of hunky men slinging each other about the place, and explosions.  “The Avengers Assemble” has the hunks and the explosions, a plot that is surprisingly easy to follow given its complexity, a script that is well-constructed, intelligent and genuinely witty, and a very good cast.  It was a perfect Friday-night movie, and I shall probably buy the dvd when it comes out, to add to my collection of things like “Aeon Flux”, “V for Vendetta” and the “Star Trek” reboot, for those “popcorn-needed” evenings.  Come to think of it, of course, although those are all popcorn movies they are, like “Avengers Assemble”, blessed with better than average scripts and good actors (okay, and eye candy). 

I’ll grant you that some of the Avengers are, to be polite, more limited as actors than others.  Captain America and Thor are big manly lunks of muscle, and they do “decent” and “honourable” and “heroic” to a tee, but I’m not sure either of them would do “Hamlet”.  Tom Hiddleston, enjoying himself playing the villain, would be a dream Hamlet, on the other hand (& is my dream Gabriel Yeats).  Robert Downey Jnr., Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo and Samuel L Jackson are all eminently watchable, in pretty much everything they appear in, whether they are paying their mortgages doing junk or acting their socks off in something intelligent.  They can all carry a movie on their own, and any of them would be worth seeing this for.   Yes, that’s right, I’m not being silly; this really is a superhero movie worth seeing for the acting. 

That brings me to Hawkeye, Jeremy Renner, who was new to me, and steals every scene he is in.  Even when he isn’t doing anything, one’s eyes stray to him; he’s so hot he burns.  I haven’t been able to muster myself to see “The Hurt Locker” (I have a vivid imagination, and don’t want to see the subject matter made any more real than my imagination already can); so I had no idea what this chap was capable of, or even what he looked like.  Indeed, I admit that I was vaguely expecting a handsome, high-cheekboned scenery-chewer, trying wildly to capitalise on having been flavour-of-the-month a couple of years ago.  Mr Renner however is the exact opposite; a middle-sized guy with nice eyes, who looks as if he might be part hobbit, and does bottled-in intensity so well he could almost be British.  He’s terrific. 

So, not for the first time, I have the great Joss Whedon (who wrote and directed this) to thank for a good evening’s entertainment.  Thank you, Mr Whedon; more, please!

I came home from this so fired up that the Muse popped in and has been hanging out with me ever since.  A new story!  I’m about 25 pages in, and it’s feeling good.

I am officially in love...

...with Nikolai Lugansky (again). By damn, he is brilliant.

He gave a recital at the Queen Elizabeth hall on Tuesday night and it is hard to put into words just how beautifully he played. Ravishingly wholehearted romanticism and absolute technical clarity and precision, held together in a perfect balance... It was simply stunning.

I know I tend to wax lyrical at the drop of a hat - my enthusiasm for performing artists I admire is probably rather comical, looked at from the outside. But Mr Lugansky reduced me to tears (and that was with the Brahms, which is quiet and introspective music in comparison with the far more obviously emotional Chopin and Liszt that made up the rest of the programme). I do not think I'll hear finer piano playing for a long time. The holy art of music is well-served in this man.

A good week so far... Good, did I say? Best!

This has been a good week; passably good weather, a party, a concert, a behind-the-scenes tour, a chance to meet a hero of mine, then the ballet tonight and another party on Sunday. And most of my French beans have come through, and my tomato plants are thriving and growing daily.

I do love getting behind-the-scenes. Yesterday, after the dress rehearsal for their evening’s concert (& it was fascinating to discover how detailed and rigourous this was), I and four other middle-aged Friends of the Philharmonia got a backstage tour of the Royal Festival Hall. Good grief, what a labyrinth. It’s as bad as the Herbarium here at Kew.

Dozens of passages and dressing rooms and storage areas are packed together, folded round the great central box of the auditorium in an amazing piece of architectural origami. The nice Friends’ co-ordinator showing us around admitted she still gets lost sometimes – and later proved it by losing the way out. We also got a chat with one of the stage managers, the chance to go on the stage (sorry if this sounds incredibly starry-eyed, but this was a huge thrill for me), and best of all we got to meet Maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Who turns out to be a very sweet, rather shy guy who needed a shave, and who couldn’t have been nicer, friendlier, or more interesting. I was, as I’d feared, completely tongue-tied at first; two of the men in the party rather monopolised things, though, giving me time to go through the process of saying inwardly “be still, my beating heart” over and over, until I was fine and could participate rationally in the conversation, even under the gaze of those brilliant slate-blue eyes.

Oh, yes, I have a crush. Horsesh*t yes. I already had, but this has reinforced it. What a lovely bloke. Oh horsesh*t yes…

Well, as I’ve said before, I’m attracted to genius, and that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. Married genius, in this case, so quite safe from any tendencies to embarrassing behaviour on my part.

Oddly, he turns out to be a lot taller in person than he looks on stage. I had thought (no offence meant) that the Maestro was a bit of a short-arse, but he’s about my height; at most, maybe half an inch shorter.

The evening’s concert was, as usual with my favourite orchestra, terrific. An interesting programming zeugma gave us Brahms, the ultra-classical purist, paired with Berlioz, most passionate of the early romantics. Both were played beautifully. Sergey Khatchatryan was a tremendous soloist in the Brahms Violin Concerto. I wish my father could have heard him; he would have been purring, figuratively speaking. In the second half, Berlioz’ “Symphonie Fantastique” was as huge and dramatic and intense as it should be, and, again as it should be, a tad bonkers.

Chatting earlier about the programme, the Maestro had remarked that Brahms “would have had a fit” at finding his work played together with Berlioz. “He would have hated every note,” he said, and then went on to remark that in the early nineteenth century there used to be fist-fights in the streets between the supporters of Brahms and of Bruckner; comparing this to today, when only football seems to arouse such violent emotion, he said rather sadly that he felt it suggested classical music was now tangential to the dialectic.

It’s an interesting point; the sort of question I’d love to corner him in the pub with. Is it that classical music is now tangential, or is it that the social structures that inform that dialectic are so different now as to render direct comparison meaningless?

After all, in the nineteenth century it was completely normal for people to want to “better themselves” – a concept so loaded now with socio-political baggage that I feel unable to use it without inverted commas. The interests, activities and passions of the educated classes were once things to aspire to, whereas today the aspiration is to become yet more intensely involved with the latest pop culture, yet more post-modern in one’s outlook. The bourgeois today aspires to be (or at least to seem) less like a bourgeois, rather than more so.

To my mind the whole things is deeply tied-up with the ingrained dirt that is the British class system. But then, how does that work in other countries? How widespread is that class system? I’ve always been taught to see it as a specifically British thing, but it must have equivalents in other countries and other cultures...

And how specifically British, I wonder, is the other factor I think may be contributing to this situation – namely contemporary culture’s profound alarm in the face of sincerity? The post-modern world view is fundamentally flip. Since everything is held to be of equal value, nothing can be genuinely serious or genuinely sincere; hence anything that is is viewed as suspect, even dangerous. And classical music, even at its lightest and most upbeat, is fundamentally serious - and most of it, absolutely sincere as well. But a cultural discourse which maintains that nothing can be authentic, that everything is relative and contingent and nothing can be understood unless seen in this way, pours out mockery and bile when confronted by sincerity. It reflects, to my thinking, a deep, deep insecurity. Contemporary cultural discourse is as terrified of the real as a mediaeval atheist would secretly have been terrified of divine retribution. And as a result, as one of the characters in “Sunday in the Park with George” says, “It seems to be more and more about less and less”.

Oof, heavy stuff, Dent. Going back to the pleasure of meeting the Maestro, seeing the orchestra rehearse, visiting the Green Room and so on, I have to say it gave me one other thrill. It is so easy, watching performers of any kind doing their thing with grace and brilliance - beautifully costumed, distant, glowing under the stage lights - to fall into a childish admiration, and see them almost as demigods. Yesterday I saw the Philharmonia in street clothes, with shopping bags and cups of coffee at their feet. I heard them push themselves hard, even make mistakes, working for hours to achieve something better and finer than the last time. It all suddenly became much more about the collaborative effort of a great body of individuals, rather than some shining final product. And that is a precious extra dimension to bring to my experience of their performances.