A double bill of Martin Crimp plays, the first brand new, the second an older one.
Part of the Orange Tree’s 40th anniversary celebrations and a nod to one of its bigger achievements; championing Martin Crimp’s work in the early days.
Janie and I absolutely loved this exhibition of Hockney’s big landscape works.
It was the day after Uncle Michael’s funeral. We had booked a Friday late slot for this exhibition many weeks before. The exhibition was colourful relief after a sad day.
Janie loved it all so much she bought the book and we went off to Yorkshire in search of Hockney’s Wolds the following spring…to be Ogblogged when I get to it.
Hockney says you cannot photograph those Wolds and in a way he is right, but still I did have a go when we visited in 2013:
Below is a video in which Hockney explains the exhibition from his point of view – well worth a look:
In short, we really loved this exhibition at the Royal Academy.
This concert was the evening before Uncle Michael’s funeral, for which I was scheduled to be the soloist – i.e. eulogist.
Angela and John are patrons of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO). They suggested that I might join them for this concert. An element of bonding exercise and an element (I suspect) of last minute stage management. John had stuck his neck out a little with his Rabbi by suggesting that a member of the family undertake the eulogy and they didn’t want any mistakes.
We discussed matters over drinks and nibbles with the patrons and benefactors before the show.
“Rabbi Rosenfeld is absolutely clear that you should keep the eulogy brief”, said John – who is a graduate of the Arsène Wenger school of management.
“I got the message – I’ve timed the speech; eighty-nine minutes…”
“…EIGHT OR NINE MINUTES…if it goes past ten minutes I’ll shut you up myself…”
…I think John knew I was joking.
Meanwhile, unlike our family funeral, the concert was not going to proceed as planned. The Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin had gone down with “severe gastric flu” (as described in the apologetic programme note.
So we had a late substitute from one of the other dominions, Australia, in the form of Matthew Coorey.
The result was a game of two halves in some ways.
Supersub Coorey was spared the first half of of the concert, as Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili, wisely, chose to lead the orchestra herself in the Mozart Violin Concerto No 3.
I say the first half…of course the Mozart is quite a short work whereas the second half, Mahler Symphony No 9, is a 90 minute marathon. So it was more like an 80:20 thing than a game of two halves…
…I’m digressing. Point is, while the first piece I suspect included all the nuance and personality that had been planned for this concert. I have an affection for that simple but charming piece and it was delivered very well that night.
By cointrast, the Mahler seemed, while very professionally performed, a somewhat retreated, standard performance of the great work. Hats off to Coorey for taking on such a monumental work at such short notice. But “letting the orchestra just do its thing” is probably as good as it gets in those circumstances.
Here is a short video of Lisa Batiashvili playing at home, Tbilisi. I couldn’t find a legitimate vid of her playing Mozart so I thought this gorgeous piece of Bach would do nicely.
While here is a short vid of Matthew Coorey conducting. It isn’t Mahler…instead it is Kodaly, so there is still rather a lot of early 20th century noise and some unusual percussion – it was the closest I could find:
Verbatim Theatre and Physical Theatre don’t seem, on the face of it, to be complementary genres.
But this piece, conceived by Lloyd Newson and performed by physical theatre company DV8, tries to combine the two, around the tricky subject of Islamic extremism, Islamophobia, multiculturalism, censorship, freedom of speech and hate crimes.
It sort-of worked, in that it got me and Janie talking about those subjects afterwards, but it didn’t really work for us, in itself, as a piece talking about those tricky subjects.
In truth, verbatim theatre about such tricky subjects would need more words and less dance.
I remember surprisingly little about this evening. I do remember it being short, physical and interesting, but nothing tangible about it really sticks. I’m not sure that the complex subject matter and verbatim style lends itself to this sort of physical theatre – the issues get buried or confused in the performance and visuals.
I might chat it through with Janie, see what she remembers and edit in some more thoughts. If you are reading this paragraph, then I haven’t yet done that or drew a blank from Janie too.
This was an opportunity to hear two genres of Indian music in one concert. I don’t think that we’d seen Amjad Ali Khan before this concert – although I had heard my father’s recordings of him playing with Ravi Shankar.
This concert was part of his residency at the Wigmore Hall, which I think was a new idea back then.
The first half of the concert was singing in the Carnatic (Southern Indian) tradition. This was interesting but not as relaxing and delightful to our ears as the sarod music performed by Amjad Ali Khan himself in the second half.
For some reason the Wigmore Hall on-line stub for this concert is incomplete and has errors in it (at the time of writing – February 20180 – here is the link anyway.
So I have uploaded the information sheet, which I am sure is accurate:
