Peter Grimes (again)

The ENO have started doing cinema relays, hurrah!  So this afternoon I got to see their production of "Peter Grimes" - at the Curzon in Richmond.  Much easier to get to and get home from.  



"Peter Grimes" is the story of an outsider, a difficult man with no respect for his social "betters", nor for the class system and other niceties like that, and a vicious temper which he battles to control, often unsuccessfully.  He's also a dreamer, with visions of a better life, of love offering him hope, and more wildly, of the stars drawing his destiny up from the sea's depths, and Davy Jones calling him home.

He's a fisherman, in a small Suffolk town modelled on Aldeburgh; the local community is close-knit, and mistrustful of those who stand a little apart.  When Grimes' young apprentice dies at sea, gossip begins to spread that he caused the boy's death.  He didn't; but gossip, as is its wont, has no interest in the truth.  When his second apprentice is killed in a horrible accident, the hostility of the locals becomes open anger.  Hounded by a mob and tortured by his own sense of guilt, Grimes breaks down and drowns himself. 

I think part of what Britten was trying to articulate was the ease with which a blinkered but relatively normal community can become a mob baying for the blood of outsiders.  As a gay man and a pacifist he knew plenty about being an outsider, after all; and by 1945 when "Peter Grimes" was premiered, the world in general had seem some truly horrifying examples of how easily a mob mentality can develop, and just what the scapegoating of those who don’t fit in can lead to.

My biggest beef with this production, which I've seen before and was cross about then, too, is that it turns all the assorted minor characters of the town into grotesques, either vile or comical.  This makes it terribly, seductively easy for the audience to distance themselves from the scenes on stage.  

At the second interval a woman behind me was exclaiming in cultured tones to her companions "Oh, those horrible, horrible people!"  

But part of what Britten is trying to remind us of, in my opinion at least, is that these "horrible people" are all of us.  Every mob that ever lived was composed of ordinary people like you and me - not of some extra layer of society that normally lives hidden under the rug.  It’s a nasty thought, but one we do need to remember.

Oh well; if you ignore the director's ideas, and concentrate on the music, you got a performance to knock your socks off.  The orchestra at ENO are superb and Britten’s wonderful score came bursting out of the cinema sound system with the force of hurricanes and tidal waves.  The huge choral shouts of “Peter Grimes!  Grimes!” at the end of Act 3 scene 1 were heart-stopping.  All the smaller roles were superbly sung, and the three principals were magnificent.

I’ve raved about Stuart Skelton before; this is the third time I’ve seen him singing this role, and he remains unbeatable.  Each time I hear him in action I fall in love with his glorious voice all over again.  It’s huge, yet he can control it down to the smallest pianissimo.  It’s seamlessly, goldenly beautiful, yet he’s not afraid to let it crack and grow momentarily raw with feeling, to use that fractional ugliness to shattering dramatic effect.  He can act; his Grimes is a towering, tragic figure and his agony at the death of the boy John is painful to watch.  He creates a figure of elemental stature, yet also one of pathetically human vulnerability; one suddenly starts to imagine what this man’s own childhood must have been like, to leave him like this.

He’s matched, this time, by a radiant Ellen Orford from Elza Van Den Heever, who sounds like an angel, acts like a RADA graduate, and can actually cry and sing (I didn’t know that was physically possible!).  And another of my favourite singers, the lovely Iain Paterson, was a tremendous Captain Balstrode.  One of the things I liked about the production was the way it clarifies their individual tragedies too; Ellen becomes a lonely war widow who in falling in love again has also unconsciously succumbed to the urge to “fix” a damaged man, and Balstrode a crippled naval veteran trying to cope with civilian life and almost-constant pain, and trying to adjust to his disability without himself becoming another outsider.  The inference that by the end of the story he is also unrequitedly in love with Ellen just makes the whole thing even more pulverising.

Ms Van Den Heever, incidentally, must be a big lass; it only took a relatively low pair of heels to make her as tall as Skelton and Paterson, who are both decidedly big fellas.  She’s slim and good-looking, but heavens, she must be a good five foot ten, if not more!  Hurrah for tall women getting to play the heroine!

So I’m pretty shattered, tonight, but it’s a good kind of shattered.  And despite my disagreements with the production, I’m thrilled that more people will have been able to discover the marvel that is Stuart Skelton; and perhaps some of them, the marvel that is Britten’s music, too.

I hope too that ENO had the good sense to record this for Dvd…

Immies for last year

I realise with embarrassment that I never got round to doing my personal arts awards for last year.  Oops.  Not as though anyone is likely to have been waiting for them, but still!  It's the awards time of year, and here are mine.  I can't give you a parade of evening-dressed stars shivering in the rain, but that's probably just as well, for them if not for me.

So: here are the winners of the Immies for 2012.

Performances of the year:

Concert: Britten “War Requiem”; Philharmonia Orchestra under Lorin Maazel, in the Festival Hall back in March.  I don’t always like Maazel’s conducting, he often strikes me as terribly cool and measured, but with the War Requiem to play with, and my favourite orchestra and chorus, and a top-notch trio of soloists, he really got fired up and let rip, and the result was a truly fabulous performance.  Especial honours to brilliant Mark Padmore (still having trouble believing this chap was at school with my brother Steve), the heart-rending tenor soloist.  

Operas:  “Der Rosenkavalier”, ENO at the Coliseum.  “Peter Grimes”, ENO at the Proms.  Impossible to slip a sheet of paper between these two for quality of performance; conducting, playing and cast were all first class.  It was fascinating to see how the ENO “Peter Grimes” actually got even better when done as a concert performance rather than a fully-staged production – a real indicator of the strength of the performances and the commitment of all concerned.

Stage play: Nick Payne “Constellations” at the Duke of York’s Theatre.  An extraordinary piece of work; funny, moving and deeply thought-provoking – and a tour de force for the cast.

Exhibition: David Hockney at the Royal Academy.  Marvellous, inspirational stuff.

Dance: The Royal Ballet revivals of Ashton’s “The Dream” and “A Month in the Country” and Wayne McGregor’s “Infra”.  Such a total contrast that I cannot pick between them.

Performers of the year:

Opera: Stuart Skelton in the ENO “Peter Grimes” prom, see above; Otto Maidi in the Cape Town Opera production of “Porgy and Bess”.

Stage: Rafe Spall in “Constellations” – an object lesson in how to make a thoroughly ordinary guy into a credible romantic hero.

Dance: Zenaida Yanowsky in “A Month in the Country”.  Luxuriously gorgeous in her abandonment, in duets with first Gary Avis and then Rupert Pennefather, and heart-breaking in her final moments of desolation.  She was also a superb Odette/Odile in “Swan Lake” in the autumn; no mere princess here but a true Swan Queen, regal, mythic and tragic.

"Onegin"s and observations

 

I saw the ballet "Onegin" last week, and the opera “Eugene Onegin” last night.  What a joy the first was; and sadly, what a muddle the second...

It's one of my favourite ballets, and I've burbled about it before.  This was one of those performances when the principals are hugging one another by the end, with that air that suggests they know this was a good 'un.  They were simply out of their skins (and I was crying into my binoculars).  

Well, and it’s also one of my favourite operas; after all, this is such a classic story of unrequited love, loss and regret – things most of us have experienced at some point in our lives; and then, in the opera you get some of Tchaikovsky’s most fabulously rich and heartfelt music. But where Cranko’s ballet is a perfect distillation of a perfect story (and was perfectly performed by a perfect cast), this new production of the opera just couldn’t seem to find its balance.  It was as if the director just couldn't make his mind up: Straightforward realism, or wholehearted expressionism? - oh, f*ck it, I can't decide; I'll bodge the two together and see what I get...

The answer, of course, is that, rather as in carpentry, bodging the two together produces a mismatched piece of furniture that won't stand up straight and collapses when you put any weight on it.

I went, because my Favourite Baritone was singing Onegin and it’s a role I’ve wanted to hear him in for some time.  He was, as I had hoped, excellent.  More of this anon (to my delight he made it worth going to, all on his own.  Top bloke).  I had heard of the Tatyana, Krassimira Stoyanova (I think I’ve spelled that right), and she was okay, though not great; Amanda Echalaz could give her a run for her money, and is better-looking and a better actress, too (though I have a feeling she may be a bit on the tall side for Mr Keenlyside, who is after all only my height!).   I had also heard of the Lensky, Pavol Breslik, who was excellent, and rather ornamental in a baby-faced way.  

I had heard of the director, Kasper Holten, because he’s the new director of the Royal Opera as a whole.  On the evidence of this, that’s a bit of an oh-dear...

The production had some strengths; it looked good and the crowd scenes were well-shaped (there was no milling about on group exits, something which always gets my goat, and the formal dances in the penultimate scene looked good and were cleverly used to emphasise Onegin’s sense of disconnection from his surroundings).  On balance I felt the use of stage doubles for the young Tatyana and Onegin was a booboo, as it was terribly distracting and got in the way more often than not; but it did have a few benefits.   It emphasised their sense of grief and regret, and in particular Tatyana’s compassion for her idiotic younger self.  And, by setting the bulk of the story firmly as memories rather than “now”, it served to bring out the way that for each of the two principal characters, the memories are different.  For Tatyana, the crucial moments of that summer were her falling in love with, and being rejected by, Onegin, and for him the crucial moments were his argument and subsequent duel with Lensky, and the latter’s death.  

If you think about your own "lost love and regret" type stories, and imagine a situation where you could find out how the other party or parties involved viewed them, there's a pretty good chance the results would be similar; that something absolutely central to you would be tangential to them, and vice versa.  It was effective, and psychologically acute.

The tiny touch of having Onegin try to screw up the courage to kill himself after the duel and not having the nerve was brilliant, too.  It served beautifully to illuminate the very unusual way that Onegin himself had been directed as an essentially sympathetic character.  Think about it.  Have you ever seen a Eugene Onegin you actually felt for?  Usually he's either a cold bastard, or a bit of a cypher.  This one was credibly foolish, and a coward, but not such a crud as all that; and it was made quietly but effectively clear that his rejection of Tatyana was due not to dislike or even indifference, but to panic; a knee-jerk reaction to her having forced his hand by writing to him. 

I have to say, though, Mr Holten was very lucky in his Onegin.  I can't think of many baritones who could have pulled it off.  But Simon Keenlyside, with his nervous intensity and battered good looks, and huge, quiet stage presence, could and did.  I have no idea if his Russian was remotely idiomatic, but that husky catch in his voice, that I have always loved, served him well, too, and at one point he hit a high pianissimo that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.  

I just wish he'd had a more coherant production around him.  It didn't seem fair.  The last production I saw, at ENO, was also a mixture of "That idea worked" and "That idea didn't", and had a cracking good Tatyana in Amanda Echalaz and a bland, blank Onegin whose name I can't even remember.  This one had a cracking good Onegin and a fair Tatyana, and was a similar curate's egg as a production.   Grr.

Now, a fusion of the two, that might have been interesting.  But that sort of thing doesn't happen. So I'm glad I saw the ballet again, and done so superbly, too.  The two final pas de deux - between Tatyana and her husband, gravely loving and trusting of one another, a distillation of everything one would hope married love could be for a lass with such a rocky start to her emotional life; and the frenzy of the farewell between her and Onegin, hurling themselves into one another's arms and tearing themselves apart repeatedly - were both absolutely mind-blowing.  Hurrahs, deservedly, at the curtain call, for Gary Avis's gentlemanly, strong Prince Gremin, Federico Bonelli's powerful and sexy Onegin, and above all for Laura Morera who, for me, simply is Tatyana.

Meanwhile and moving laterally and onto other things entirely, I have some observations on the 5:2 diet, which I have been following since the autumn.  It's the longest I've ever kept on a diet, and it's proving an interesting experience.

It’s surprisingly easy to keep to, and if I slip (or have a week’s holiday) I find it’s easy to get back into.  It doesn’t seem to have, for me at least, the guilt issues associated with most diets and most attempts to reform one’s eating habits.  And it seems to be working; albeit not quite as I had anticipated.

I feel great.  I feel healthier and more active, and more energetic.  I am walking more briskly, running up stairs, hurrying across the Gardens running errands. I'm coming home and getting stuck into some writing, or some typing up, or a bit of each, instead of slummocking in front of the tele.  I feel physically and mentally good.

At the end of each fast day my body feels light and clear, as though I’ve cleansed myself inside.  I don’t feel hungry, except for perhaps the last half hour before my plate of salad in the evening.  I don’t feel deprived, unless I watch a particularly popcorn-y movie in the evening.  I sleep well and I don’t wake up hungry, either.

My “skinny” jeans are now comfortable jeans, my “comfortable” jeans now need a belt; and the belt I use with them now needs to be done up on the third hole instead of the first one.  A blouse I couldn’t get buttoned over my bosom last summer is now wearable again; close-fitting tee shirts look okay on me instead of showing off my bra bulges; and I can wear all my rings a finger along from where I could wear them five months ago.

But - according to the scales I’ve only lost five pounds. 

I find this very odd indeed, but I’m not complaining.  Feeling healthier and changing shape mean a lot more to me than the number on the dial.  And yes, I did check the scales; they’re working fine.  It’s not them, it’s me. 

I’m still no sylph, nor am I likely ever to be one.  But it’s good to feel energetic and ready for spring, instead of wanting to crawl under a stone and hibernate. 

The curate's ball gown/opera/ dream

Well, I had a very mixed day yesterday.  

I’d booked a day of annual leave, thinking it’s nice to have a midweek day off before Christmas to do any final bits of shopping and so on.  Also I had a ticket for “Robert le Diable” and that started at 6pm, so I was going to have to ask to leave work early at the least.  Since in the event I’d done all my Christmas shopping, I had a lazy morning and then went to the V&A to have a mooch and see the “Ball gowns” show (which closes in early Jan).  

It was a very odd show – the first half (mostly from the 50s and 60s, with a few more modern classics) was about 80% terrific, and the second half (contemporary designers’ red-carpet gowns) was about 80% terrible.  If it had been selected with the express purpose of demonstrating that the contemporary applied arts are just as desperate as the contemporary fine arts to be innovative at any and all cost, even if it means being crap, it couldn’t have made its point better (& I think it was meant to have demonstrated how damned hip and wonderful they are!).

 

And as for the opera; well, I actually left at the interval – only the second time in my life I’ve ever done that.  It STANK.  The music itself was uninspiring (alternately hammy-rumbly and sugary-tinkly), and the production was irredeemably bad.  It was “ironic”, and so heavy-handedly so as to be just plain embarrassing.  I’ve seldom seen anything so unrelentingly cheesy in my life.  

At least if one went to Disneyland the cheesiness would be sincere; this was all eye-rollingly superior.  I swear it was more self-consciously knowing than a Carry-on film, and without the redeeming silly humour.  It sucked.  My heart ached for the poor cast, who were bravely doing their best, with rubbish to sing and a director with his brain up his arse.  

You will gather I hated it.

I then went home, feeling rather cross, and got on with some typing, and the laptop got hiccoughs and wouldn’t save.  In the end I left it running, with its little error message saying something along the lines of “I can’t do this, why are you asking me to do this?” and went to bed.  I arranged a large book propped open to mask the light from the screen, and tried to ignore the constant chuntering-computer sound, but of course I couldn’t sleep with it purring away a few feet from me.  I got up at 1am and checked, and it was still jammed, and I thought “sod you, then” and switched it off at the wall...  So will probably go home tonight to an injured complaint of “you switched me off in a bad way, you’re a mean missy”.  I don’t know if the stuff I had typed (about two thousand words) will have been saved or not.  There’s supposed to be an automatic back-up-save every ten minutes, so in theory I shouldn’t have lost too much (cross fingers).  Poor old laptop, I think I do have to accept that it’s nearing the end of its useful life.  

At any rate, by the time I had relaxed enough to actually get to sleep after all that, I had less than six hours before my alarm went off.  I think I was still pretty stressed about the laptop, since I then had a really weird dream.  It was a glorious summer day, and my mum’s friend Ninetoes and Robert Downey Jnr. were helping me to move house.  I had bought a lovely big house with a garden, and as house-move-help goes, Ninetoes and RD Jnr. made a pretty great team (at least once she had stopped making eyes at him), so things weren’t all bad by any means.  The downsides were RD Jnr. insisting on playing just one song, over and over, on the stereo in the pantechnicon (I have nothing against Duffy, but “Beggin’ you for mercy” has fairly repetitive lyrics when you hear it just once, let alone six times in a row) and the bizarre house-warming gift I had been given from work; a urine-driven coffee-maker. 

My subconscious goes to some very strange places at night.  As new green energy concepts go, I think wee-power will take some beating.

First opera of the autumn season

I thought you might like a review of “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, which I saw at the Coliseum on Monday night.  Basically, if you missed it, you didn’t miss much! 

That’s not really fair of me.  The cast was excellent, especially Roland Wood and Benedict Nelson, and they were all singing their hearts out.  The orchestra were playing their socks off.  The music was lovely, though it didn’t leave me with any particular moments that stay in my head musically, much less coming out humming the big tunes. It was just slow, lusciously melodic Vaughan Williams-y stuff; it rolled beautifully on, but never really got anywhere.

But there were some big buts; it was very long and terribly slow and the production was a bit confused.

The staging looked great; fabulous set design and lighting, with moving grey walls suddenly bathed in blazes of richly textured colour, and amazing puppetry for the giant figure of Apollyon, and the costumes for Vanity Fair were brilliant.  The whole thing looked as though it had been designed by a team of Mark Rothko and Anselm Kiefer for the sets and Georg Grosz for the costumes.  But the story had been re-imagined as a man dreaming about his last days on death row before going to the electric chair, and that just didn’t really work.

I gave it a chance; I gave it 3 hours’ worth of chance, but I still wasn’t convinced by the end.

I didn’t mind it going into modern dress, especially as it was pretty non-specific modern dress.  John Bunyan became a kind of generic political prisoner in a prison camp or gulag that could have been anywhere and anytime in the last century or so.  It could have been Siberia or Robben Island or Reading Gaol.  That seemed reasonable to me; after all, Amnesty International is dealing with the present-day equivalents of Bunyan, wherever they work.  But then it all got a bit confused. 

Initially all the other characters (except Apollyon, who was a marvellous fifteen foot tall rod puppet) were portrayed by the other prisoners quickly putting on white scarves or black gloves or something, to indicate they were now appearing as someone else.  The result was that at first it looked as though we were meant to imagine they were enacting the story for the lead character’s consolation as he faced his approaching execution.  But the Evangelist was a slightly comical-looking Lowry-type figure with a raincoat and umbrella, and as the evening went on other characters appeared who were properly costumed, not just wearing some small indicative touch over their grey uniform, so it wasn't consistent as a theme.  

Vanity Fair was dressed in brilliant colours and masses of spangles and glitter and balloons; it had cross-dressing, money raining from the flies, people dressed as devils, men wearing fake bare boobs with tassels on them...  It looked fabulous, both showy and horrible at once – exactly right, in fact. 

Most of the second half was dominated by the shape of the electric chair at the back of the stage, and all the references to the Delectable Mountains, the Celestial City, etc, were directed towards it.  This was weird and rather nasty to my mind.  The production scrupulously avoided any hint of Christian symbolism or iconography, substituting a rather chaotic mixture of symbols; some that seemed to have come from other religions and some that seemed to be saying all religion was empty and meaningless too. 

For example, the Herald who sends the Pilgrim on his way, part of the way into Act 1, was played as a visiting dictator or general, with all the prisoners in the gulag apparently lining up for inspection and the Pilgrim stepping forward and volunteering to set off, as if he’s been drilled to show what a good boy he’s become - thanks to being re-educated by the kindly government who care so much for all these foolish dissidents.  It really jarred.  At another point when it was obvious from the libretto that there should have been something fairly overtly Christian going on, the scene instead featured a circle of men doing tai chi for ages.

But the implicit criticism of religious faith wasn’t strong enough or carried through far enough to be really biting, and at the same time, all the time it was pulling against the obviously very sincere intentions of the original.  That grated badly; it was neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring.  A clear critique might have been effective, if completely not what Vaughan Williams intended, but it wasn’t a clear critique, it was a muddly one.  I hate to sound like one of the religious Right (about as far from me as you can get!) but I did have a lurking feeling of "How many religions would you get away with this over?"  If one took a celebrated work of historical Jewish religious-polemic-cum-devotional literature, upended it and excised all overt Jewish signifiers to make it appear to be about something else entirely, wouldn't that be viewed as offensive and inappropriate?  Yet anyone going to see "The Pilgrim's Progress" who was hoping for a religiously-sensitive experience will have been disappointed; and anyone like my godparents, who are deeply devout and fairly High Church C of E, would have been horrified.

And it was all s.o. s.l.o.w...