Un Ballo in Maschera - review

Sometimes modern production teams succeed in ruining great work of art but, more often than not, such works assert their genius ineluctably and egotistical attempts to enlist them as auxiliaries in the Directors’ political campaigns roll like water off a duck’s back. This was the case with Opernhaus Zürich’s production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh last night. I’m not qualified to pronounce on the musical niceties, but it seemed to my untutored ear that Gianandrea Noseda produced a hard-edged and disciplined performance, full of drama, especially in the many passages where the music is so palpitatingly driven on and where there are so many shades of light and dark. The singers were magnificent and seemed to do justice to the marvellous score. 

The opera was set in a revolving contraption that doubled as a mortuary theatre, a hustings, a bandstand and a ballroom. The design was a little dowdy, but there were nice tableaux of a Victorian era séance in Ulrica’s dwelling and the ball itself.

The Director, Adele Thomas, posed us some puzzling questions. Verdi was obliged to move the setting of the opera from the Swedish Court in the 18th century to Boston in the 17th century American colonies for political reasons. Thomas opts for America but moves it to Henry James fin de siècle, the 'gilded age' period of the robber barons when, as she tells us in the audio warm-up provided by the Festival in advance, ‘capitalism was just beginning to be a problem.’ In spite of this I looked in vain for any trace of a disquisition on the shortcomings of Adam Smith or trickle-down economics in the production and wondered why she mentioned it. 

Then, as Riccardo dies, magnanimously forgiving his assassins, the chorus sings that he was a great and noble soul. And he was. The opera is about a great man caught up, helplessly, in a tragic love triangle that results in his undeserved death. It has brooding supernatural overtones. So why, on arriving in the Theatre, are we presented with a massive stage cloth containing a photo of him looking shifty while surrounded with slogans about public faith and liberty and one saying 'You can count on me'? Did Adele Thomas fear that a classic period Verdi work would have nothing going for it if it wasn't knowingly hitched  to a clever but completely irrelevant critique of Donald Trump in order to, ironically, ensure its "relevance."  One had the impression that her imperative, overriding all artistic considerations, was to let us know she had the right views on Trump.

There were further instances of deafness to the tone of the story. The curtain raises during the overture, to a spectacle of Riccardo‘s autopsy being conducted in a mortuary theatre watched by a top-hatted and tail-coated audience which contains some of the assassins. Renato is brought on in jailbird stripes to contemplate his handiwork and then dragged away. The overture completes and, the suddenly revivified figure on the slab tosses the mortuary sheet away and leaps into action fully dressed as the opera begins. It’s clever and raises a titter but the frivolous comedy jarred with the dark, brooding tone of the work. This was a strange moment for comic relief. Later when Riccardo announces his wish to visit Ulrica's cell we have, literally, lords-a-leaping, doing quasi-Russian dances in their excitement for no apparent reason. The masked ball itself has a strangely French feel to it. The male participants look like a Renoir or Manet riverbank party and we actually have female dancers showing us their knickerbockers in a full cancan; it would all have looked perfectly at home in La Traviata. It was as though the director didn't understand what the story was about and randomly inserted cut and paste vocabulary from a range of lexicons without rhyme, reason or emotional consistency.

 

None of this tone-deafness mattered in the end. It did its distracting best but the music was so marvellous that it just batted it away like an irritating fly.

MERE MORTALS - SAN FRANCISCO BALLET - review

I’d guess that there’s no question that the dancers of the San Francisco ballet are world class. But how do you depict the advent of AI in dance? “ In the curators words” on the programme, it tells us that it resembles the pain and suffering which entered the world when Pandora opened her famous box. 

The music provided by Sam Shepherd aka 'Floating Points’, was, unusually for modern ballet, performed live by the Scottish National Orchestra in the pit. It was kind of techno-Shostakovich. We are treated to flowers and spangling starbursts on video screens as the backdrop to the dancers.

Wearing dark, padded jerkins and the black baggy skirts of Russian dancers, Orwellian ingsoc Party grandees resembling praying mantises move sideways with regimented, mechanistic jerks. They scrum down into conflab huddles with only their heads lit. I'm guessing they're supposed to represent oppressing impulses on a circuit board. Who knows? Becoming one creature, they form into anthills of lava out of the top of which a sole figure emerges.

The lead female dancer is sinuous to the point of liquidity with pipe-cleaner limbs. In her spandex, she resembles shiny, black electric flex.

At one moment she stands motionless, like a numinous Gormley figure, for several minutes in front of a video screen on which appears the making and unmaking of cosmoses and worlds - all racing storm-clouds, lightning bolts and volcanic eruptions; geology speeded up. This morphs into an achingly beautiful pas de deux with the principal man. The two dancers interact like the mating ritual of stick insects.

The rest of the company then re-emerge, molten in sparkling gold lamé, spinning and circling around the couple like a Matisse whorl. It's all curving lines, beauty and humanity until the twitching Party grandees reassert themselves at the end. 

Rather than evoking AI specifically, it could have been about any routine crushing of the human spirit by dehumanising industrial processes going right back to Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. They made a damned good fist of it though and the dancing was arresting and magnificent.

Review of TONGUE STRAMASH

 A LOVE-LETTER AND A QUARREL

My review: 'TONGUE STRAMASH’ - poems in Scots' by the Poet in Residence of the Athletic Arms (the Diggers), David Bleiman

The collection can be bought at

https://poetrykilt.bigcartel.com/product/tongue-stramash

It includes lovely Scots lyrics such as ‘Watter-Mooth’ (River mouth) about the exchange of salt-water tides from the Firth of Forth into the mouth of the River Almond at Cramond where David Bleiman lives and his typically cosmopolitan translation of Villon’s ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan?’ which contains the heart-tugging stanza:

Whaur’s the hen in the fox’s maw (mouth)?

Whaur’s thon (that) laddie gane tae war?

An whaur’s the print o the deid dug’s (dog’s) paw?

A bairnie thraws a weet snawbaw, (child throws a wet snowball)

Baith thon craws flichter awa. (both those crows flutter away)

His use of Scots is, in some sense, a love letter to his Scottish home for 46 years. There is love in his tributes to the great poets in Scots, Burns and Fergusson and also in his thorough steeping and high competence in the Scots language.

The title refers to the din, or uproar of languages (to me, rather randomly, a goulash, a stew or simply a ‘bose’) that rings in his ears as a result of his heritage and history making the principal theme of the collection identity. For this reason it will be pertinent later to explore Bleiman’s antecedents and even his name.

A particularly significant ‘poyum’ in respect of identity is ‘Cargaes.’ Bleiman commits an act of piracy on the high seas, perhaps paying a sidelong tribute to it, whereby he hijacks John Masefield's 'Cargoes'. Finding that Masefield's exotic vessels are laden with the 'roostie' (rusty) English canon set out by Arthur Quiller Couch, he chucks the lot, Tennyson and all, overboard in favour of an imagined, raging Scottish poet struggling to get his 'melts (spleen) oan the flet white page'.

This alerts us to the fact that, as well as a love letter, this is, in a sense, his ‘quarrel with himself’ and a tricky relationship with the English tradition in which he finds himself located. Most of his other poetry is written in standard English and this collection shows that he finds that fuel for the quarrel for poetic and cultural identity are complicated things. For example, the Scottish poet and St Andrew's academic, Robert Crawford, in his biography of Burns, tells us that the Bard's favourite poet was one he shared with Byron; Alexander Pope.

On meeting David Bleiman in person and conversing in 'southron', I had lazily assumed him to be English, (he looks like an Englishman, quacks like….etc). His mother tongue is English because he was born in South Africa because Jewish-Lithuanian and Jewish-Viennese/Galician grandparents all made their way there, the latter as a result of the rise of the Nazis. At the age of seven his Progressive party activist father judged it wise to seek and find sanctuary from the apartheid country in the England. As a result 19 seminal, educational years were spent there. Since then he has spent 46 years in Scotland, marrying a Glaswegian but spending most of that time in Edinburgh. This explains the Scots. His Jewishness and the earlier story explain the Yiddish in the collection.

His 'Ma Makaronic Manifest' urges the inclusion of Scots, Yiddish, Polish, Cantonese, Spanish, Punjabi, Urdu and French in his 'clootie cloak' (patchwork cloth). This reminds me of Hugh MacDiarmid's process in 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle' where many European languages pop up amongst his Scots. Bleiman even ventriloquises Robert Burns making Yiddish/Scots 'luv' to a Jewish red rose called Reyzl Gershon. A glossary is provided.

He makes a profession of a certain rootlessness, declaring himself one of Theresa May's 'citizens of the world/citizens of nowhere' and an immigrant. He does not ‘identify’ as English but as British although it has to be said that this might tangle him with the Empire that brought 'Clarty (dirty) Scottish slave ship(s) blawin into Greenock.'

It is in 'Why Dae Ah Screive in Scots?' (Why do I write in Scots?) that we discover that, in David Goodhart's terms, David Bleiman has become a Citizen of 'Somewhere' because '...wurds will wander tae a mooth/whaurivver makars staun and blether.' (words will wander to a mouth wherever poets stand and chatter). 

In other words, because we are finite, the piece of geography and geology we hail from or light upon, eventually, always breathes through us. Identity and the need for it are difficult to avoid.

Stimulus and Response and the Three Cup Trick

The most noticeable technique of the left in recent times is a distraction one. An egregious event occurs which stimulates a response which would not have occurred had the initial event not have happened. Then the left make the story all about the poor qualities exhibited in the response and dare you not to make your main priority deploring them on pain of being impugned for heartlessness etc. Like the three cup trick they distract your attention onto the lesser evils of the response and away from the superior evil of the original egregious occurrence. They did this with October 7th and Jason Arday.

The Rapture

 We are blessed in this country that, for a pittance, we have a national broadcaster who provides us with such nourishing fare in the form of BBC Drama while steadfastly eschewing the taking of political positions. It subtly uses the idiom like an expert pianist to pluck our cultural strings and to lead us into good pastures. My fear is that I am too unschooled and obtuse a recipient to understand the fullness and subtlety of the riches on offer, to, shall we say, hear every wavering melody in its full significance. I offer you the characters from THE RAPTURE so that you can assist me by explaining what ingenious semiotics are at work. I know that most of them will have gone over my head.

The feisty female psychologist in a wheelchair 

Her young black female patient endowed with prophetic gifts and wrongly accused of a heinous crime

Her gentle and empathetic support worker, Rafiq, whose alibi is only believed when backed up by a white man

A spooky white Christian evangelist who says he is taking away climate alarm for poor children and replacing it with “hope.”

The fat, white, male psychiatrist who does the bidding of the evangelist and undermines the wheelchair-bound psychologist

A fossil fuel company pretending to like sustainables with a white male CEO

A feisty black female climate activist leader

A wronged journalist working on exposing the Fossil fuel guys

A corrupt MP enabling the Fossil fuel barons for the sake of “growth.”

A black policewoman feistily leading door to door inquiries

Pearls before swine in my case; all assistance appreciated….

Ways of Seeing - John Berger

I have a memory of reading this book decades ago but have recently watched the four half-hour accompanying programmes produced by Berger which brought it back to mind. My impression is that it's very sixties/early seventies in sensibility in that Berger takes the part of a MARXIST MARTIAN astonished by the humanoid creatures he is examining for us. If he had known and understood what he and his fellow creatures were in advance might he have been less astonished? Or does he affect to be nonplussed in order to ' know again' the bleeding' obvious about western humans, as if he has just discovered them in the Brazilian jungle, in order to endow them with an academic mystique concocted by himself? In, for example, his examination of Gainsborough's 'Mr and Mrs Andrews', he declares himself to be terribly surprised to find that we are territorial animals who struggle for success and, when it comes, like to advertise the residential property and belongings it brings us and our families.  His astonishment seems a more extraordinary thing. Similarly, in the case of a mammalian species whose survival depends on sexual reproduction, he is surprised to discover that western art reflects that most women go about with a concern about how they appear to men. Evie tells me that to know this is still true you only have to go to Glasgow bus station on a Saturday night. Then he is amazed at the way in which adverts associate the products they are trying to sell with glamorous people with glamorous lifestyles. Whoddathunk? And he looks like Roger Daltrey but sounds like, if it's possible, an even more serious and portentous Malcolm Muggeridge.

https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=john+berger+ways+of+seeing&ra=m

QU’EST-CE QUE C’EST? David Byrne at Edinburgh Playhouse

I was delighted and excited to pick up a late resale ticket on the day of this concert from the 'Who is the Sky' tour. That spoof Madison Avenue voice, a shock of white hair and the Norman Bates mien and 74 year old David Byrne was on stage at the Edinburgh Playhouse 50 miles from where he was born! A photographic tableau vivant behind him and surrounded by no less than twelve musicians and dancers, like Byrne himself, all sporting orange jump suits, and gyrating groovily across the space. It was a pot pourri mishmash of the Playschool Teletubbies, old Benetton ads, that Jaguar advert that almost finished the company off and the inside of Doc Brown’s head from Back to the Future. It all felt very modern with no drum kits, just four percussionists wearing their electronic drums on their hips on shoulder straps. Byrne fades in and out of a stage choreography which he has described as 'democratised' because it makes prominent at different times other musicians. He treats us to his trademark, appealingly Wordsworthian, childhood wonder and his Gregor Samsa-like bafflement on encountering that human condition thing. And, as you’d expect, musicianship of the highest order and highest discipline was a delight. The classic songs that I knew, And She was, Once in a Lifetime, Burning Down the House, Life During Wartime, The Road to Nowhere and Psycho Killers were all performed with a tight swagger and arresting visual interplay between the onstage complement and the video backdrop. I'll just mention, and you will be staggered, Dear Reader, that, completely unexpectedly for an American Rock musician living in New York, Byrne felt moved to communicate his political credentials to us! Imagine my wonderment! The word FASCISM was given a prominent namecheck in connection with footage of Italians singing to each other from balconies on Liberation Day during Covid (there were a strange number of references to the Covid era). David explained for us that the liberation was from Fascism that happened in Italy don’tchaknow? He told us that showing kindness and love is the most punk thing you can do at the moment and the way to ‘resist.’ There followed footage of clumsy ICE myrmidons clutching vainly at a wacky young fellow on a strange bike-like contraption running their gauntlet and getting away. We cheered. Oh how we cheered! Then he asked us to guess which member of the band had a degree in Astrophysics and took delight in inviting a black female to step forward and give us a twirl. We also learnt that four members of the roadie crew were home-schooled but were marvellous anyway. And, finally, a hoarding reading ‘MAKE AMERICA GAY AGAIN!’ was projected. Which brings us back to the Teletubbies mentality and the infantile packaging. Did I discover that, appealing as the music is, it is really the juvenilia of a 75 year old man who is still producing it and that this was the answer to Qu’est-ce que c’est? that I hadn’t realised until now? Perhaps I'm being too harsh on an extremely talented artist...

Managed to catch a wee video of Psycho Killers. I thought this stuff was the dog’s bollocks when it came out.