Friday, May 30, 2014

Julie Fowlis

30 May 2014

Regular readers will be aware of my crush on the Scottish Gaelic folk singer Julie Fowlis. I recommended her first album 'Mar A Tha Mo Chridhe (As My Heart Is)' here in February 2006, just a few months after it was released, and I have written about her here several times since. On Thursday I made the short journey to The Stables in Wavendon to see Julie Fowlis and her band who are currently touring to promote her new album 'Gach Sgeul (Every Story)'. It was an excellent concert. Julie Fowlis has an amazing voice – beautiful, delicate and precise – which gives slow ballads a haunting, ethereal quality (enhanced by the sibilant Gaelic consonants). She is also an impressive performer of traditional Gaelic mouth music, creating a bewildering chain of rapid-fire percussive rhythms with her voice. And then she picks up a tin whistle and demonstrates incredible technique that would be worth the price of admission on its own. She also surrounds herself with amazing musicians, including her husband Eamon Doorley and Tony Byrne on guitars. Byrne's playing in particular was exquisite. And it was a fantastic bonus to discover that her band includes the Scottish fiddle player Duncan Chisholm. I wrote here about Duncan Chisholm in December 2010. He creates a velvety melancholy sound from his violin and his excellent albums 'Farrar' and 'Canaich' are two of my favourite folk recordings of recent years. Chisholm has the ability to make the fiddle sound like a human voice while Julie Fowlis can make the voice sound like an instrument: the combination of these two effects was truly magical.

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'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time' adapted by Simon Stephens from the novel by Mark Haddon

30 May 2014

When I heard that Mark Haddon's novel 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time' was to be made into a stage play, my first reaction was that it felt like a mistake. Haddon's novel seemed a perfect miniature masterpiece, showing the world through prose written by a fifteen-year-old autistic boy and playing with the format of the written word story. Any stage adaptation would surely dilute the effect and end up as a poor substitute for the original novel. So I didn't get around to seeing the National Theatre production of Simon Stephens' adaptation. But last week I was persuaded to watch the NT Live cinema broadcast of the play (at Cineworld in Milton Keynes) and quickly realised the error of my lazy assumptions. This was an excellent theatrical experience, played in the round with a very clever set (by Bunny Christie), inventive use of physical theatre and movement (by Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett for Frantic Assembly) and wonderfully directed by Marianne Elliott. The play managed to be true to its source while inventing a theatrical frame for the story. I think this succeeded because the temptation to break the fourth wall was indulged very sparingly: most of the action was a careful and precise portrayal of events from the point of view of Christopher. Similarly, some brilliant moments of humour were all the funnier for their scarcity, with a serious tone set from the opening tableau of the eponymous dog impaled on a garden fork, brutal in its reality. The cast were all very strong and worked extremely hard in a variety of individual roles and crowd scenes but Luke Treadaway's performance as Christopher deservedly stole the show – 'A' star!

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Monday, May 19, 2014

BBC Young Musician 2014

19 May 2014

This is the fifth time I have written here about the biennial BBC Young Musician competition. Reading through my previous posts (you can read them all at: http://culturaldessert.blogspot.com/search/label/BBCYoungMusician) I think I have probably done enough moaning about the TV coverage. I have some sympathy for the points made in this article in The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/bbc-young-musician-2014-forget-the-format-give-us-the-music-9364814.html but, apart from my ongoing sadness that we are no longer treated to five concerto performances in the final, I really enjoyed this year's competition. Possibly for the first time, I managed to watch every minute of the coverage on BBC Four (which is no mean feat if you want to be ready to watch the concerto final live!). And my record of spotting the winners is improving: this year I picked three of the five category winners, correctly predicted the three who would make it through to the final and identified the overall winner before the start of the semi-final. More importantly, the 2014 concerto final was the best I can remember. All three performances were worthy of winning the title and all were immensely enjoyable – showcasing three teenagers with a very special blend of technical virtuosity, personality, musicality and emotion. It's a cliché but it is incredibly difficult to compare Elliott Gaston-Ross's performance of the percussion concerto 'African Rise/Manhattan Rave' by Dave Heath, Sophie Westbrooke playing Gordon Jacob's 'Suite for Recorder and Strings' and Martin James Bartlett performing the 'Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini' by Rachmaninov. But I think the young pianist was the correct winner – an astounding performer in an outstanding concert.

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'The Shock of the Fall' by Nathan Filer

19 May 2014

'The Shock of the Fall' by Nathan Filer, which I have just finished reading as an unabridged audio book, narrated by Oliver Hembrough, won the Costa first novel award last year. Matt, a young schizophrenic is conducting his own writing therapy by typing the tale of his life. Gradually, through a non-linear series of episodes and digressions, his story becomes clear to the reader and we learn how the death of his brother defined Matt's life. It's a sad tale, beautifully written. Matt's voice is totally believable and his narrative is often very funny. 'The Shock of the Fall' reminded me of 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time' by Mark Haddon, 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' by Lionel Shriver (reviewed here in August 2006), 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' by Ken Kesey and ‘Stuart: A Life Backwards’ by Alexander Masters (reviewed here in August 2010). It's not always a comfortable read, but it is a cleverly constructed book and is, ultimately rather uplifting. 

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Friday, May 16, 2014

'Henry IV Part 2' by William Shakespeare

16 May 2014

On Thursday we were back at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon to see Greg Doran's RSC production of 'Henry IV Part 2'. Seeing the play in sequence after 'Richard II' (reviewed here in December 2013) and 'Henry IV Part 1' (reviewed here in April 2014), the historical backdrop was much clearer. But I was struck by the fact that 'Part 2' is a play without much plot and which is not remembered for its poetry. What it does, perhaps better than any other Shakespeare play, is to provide a deep and searching exploration of character. While 'Part 1' is Hal's play, in 'Part 2' Falstaff dominates, with a series of opportunities, alone on stage, to address the audience directly. Anthony Sher's Falstaff was wicked and mischievous, funny and despicable, with an earnestly precise diction suggesting his frustration at having to address a bunch of idiots. Sher is a brilliant physical actor and Falstaff became a hobbling, unsteady presence, constantly shifting from one leg to the other, as if trying to balance himself on the rolling deck of a ship. Falstaff can sometimes be a very unfunny clown, but the scenes where he was reunited with Justice Shallow (the ever-wonderful Oliver Ford Davies) were hilarious (with an unnervingly odd performance from Jim Hooper as Silence adding to the effect). I must also mention the amazing physical performance by Leigh Quinn as Wart (one of the members of Falstaff's Scarecrow Army), bent into the most remarkable shape but still managing to move around the stage. This RSC production used a sparing stage set but created a series of realistic worlds through incredibly imaginative lighting and sound design (by Tim Mitchell and Martin Slavin, respectively). It was a very impressive production and the climax, where the newly crowned Henry V publicly rejects Falstaff was a stunning moment.

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'The Cuckoo's Calling' by Robert Galbraith

16 May 2014

I really enjoyed 'The Cuckoo's Calling' – J. K. Rowling's first foray into crime fiction, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Though set in contemporary London, it's quite an old fashioned private eye novel. The detective, Cormoran Strike, takes his place in a line descending from Sherlock Holmes through Philip Marlowe and Dirk Gently. 'The Cuckoo's Calling' is in a very similar vein to Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels, such as 'Started Early, Took My Dog' (reviewed here in April 2011). Both detectives have an army background, a troubled love-life, an assistant who is more capable than they expect and a strong sense of moral justice. The plot of 'The Cuckoo's Calling' is a little more conventional than Kate Atkinson's multi-strand narratives, and it's not the most literary detective novel, but it was a very enjoyable puzzle. Best of all 'The Cuckoo's Calling' obeys my first two rules of detective fiction – 1. The Reader should not know any more than the detective and 2. The detective should work out 'who done it' from the clues they unearth, rather than being handed the solution on a plate by a turn of events. I look forward to the next Cormoran Strike novel which is due to be published this summer.

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Friday, May 09, 2014

Antwerp

9 May 2014

We had a lovely holiday in Antwerp last week. Antwerp is Belgium's second largest city and the de facto capital of Flanders. It was also the main port in Northern Europe until overtaken by Amsterdam. The historic centre of the city is very pretty and the main square, Grote Markt, has a lot of similarities to the Grand Place in Brussels (which we visited in May 2013) and the main square in Bruges (which we visited in June 2009). Antwerp was the home of the painter Peter Paul Rubens and it was interesting to see several of his works in their original setting in Antwerp Cathedral, and to visit the Rubenshuis museum to see the building where he lived and worked. We also visited the Antwerp Opera House to see the Vlaamse Opera production of Bela Bartok's one-act opera 'Bluebeard's Castle' combined with a staged version of Schubert's 'Winterreise'. This was a spectacularly bizarre evening in the theatre, which demonstrated the incredible visual imagination of the director, Kornel Mundruczo. It incorporated close-ups of the singers captured by an actor with a video camera and projected on a large screen at the back of the stage, an impressive model railway, two large flying fish and a huge stage set which gradually exploded into its constituent parts. It was fascinating to watch but somewhat distracted from the music – which was excellent. All three singers (Stefan Kocan, Asmik Grigorian and Toby Girling) and the orchestra (conducted by Martyn Brabbins) were very impressive. Antwerp is also known for its restaurants and we had some excellent meals, sampling French, Italian and Flemish cuisine in some amazing old buildings. We also enjoyed a visit to Antwerp Zoo which sits directly alongside the fantastic Antwerp Central Station – one of the most beautiful railway stations in the world and the setting for that brilliant 'Sound of Music' flashmob performance in 2009 (well worth another look at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUazLI9k).

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