Miss Fortune, Royal Opera

On the face of it, Judith Weir's latest work for the theatre, Miss Fortune, is both self-explanatory and timely. The story concerns a girl who shuttles between situations, apparently overdetermined by a meanie countertenor, before a prince charming appears to make it better. The episodes and their contemporary setting seems to reflect the economic downturn and its attendant redundancies and fear.

Yet I was far from alone in leaving the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden last night unmoved by personal drama or unedified by some sort of pellucid argument concerning 'money, fate and fortune' (to quote Weir's own writing on the piece). I simply couldn't find any way of getting involved. The score seems to have ironed itself out to accommodate the composer's own unremarkable libretto. With no contours in dynamic, texture or the sheer kineticism of the music it was as if the population of the stage were already somnambulant in the face of the shock of the rolling episodes of crisis.

The opening scene is a case in point. The staging is semi-abstract, with Tina wandering around a party that her parents are throwing either at home or the business in which they're clearly successful. When news breaks that there is a market crisis, the parents bail out, Tina decides to go her own way and the partygoers/employees are left to bemoan the crash. Yet the music suggests no sense of dramatic tilt, unlike in, for example, the Jungfrau shares scene that marks the downturn in the fortunes of Berg's Lulu halfway through that opera.

Admittedly, the nouveau riche posturing followed by a faintly comic exit gives the impression that the composer has equal contempt for the characters whether in plenty or in need. I don't think that this is a piece that deals in dramatic equivalence for its own sake though. There's no irony here, which, incidentally, is virtually impossible in Tom Pye and Han Feng's semi-abstracted design. Miss Fortune is not a work of satire. Satire on a lyric stage is quite tricky anyway, as it's a form interested in investigating, not undermining emotions.

Lest we get ahead of ourselves, it is worth noting the good music that does emerge periodically. I liked the piano embedded in the score for that opening party, at once both an orchestral colour and - played with great finesse in the pit - a suggestion of the lounge entertainment hired for the evening. The highlight of the piece for me was at the start of the second scene. Seeking her fortune, or maybe just adventure, Tina, sung by Emma Bell, sings of the 'Lonely night' with pared-down string ensemble, echoing Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. The music is introspective but optimistic, one of the opera's natural moments of stasis-but-not-inertia.

There are moments of drama to be had within the score as well. In the laundry sequence towards the end of the first act, two different musics overlap, creating an anticipatory tension appropriate for the expected arrival of a much talked-up client, Simon. Simon himself, sung by Jacques Imbrailo, has the best stretch of solo music when he returns to try and find the girl, and consequently saves the day (rather like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, the aggressive businessman returning bearing flowers).

These gleaming moments aside, I simply found myself either anaesthetised or confused into disengagement. If the music wasn't soothing me with its homogeneity then the mixed signals of the production's intent left me bewildered. One of the significant talking points of the night will doubtless be the employment of a terrific breakdancing troupe, Soul Mavericks (backstage production video here), as the instigators of Fate's invariable malevolence. Their initial, dramatically purposeless formal ballet aside, they were well used as imps of free will and I found the closing-curtain tableau of their ensemble dancing rather affecting (succinctly put, the joy of dancing is not contingent on fortune). But the use of the troupe to evoke the August riots in destroying a small business not only transgressed their supernaturalism but also put the shackles of association on the (street) style of dancing - not to mention the ethnicity of the largely black troupe - which had hitherto been an intriguing idiomatic departure on the stage.

Furthermore we are left with a sense of moral equivalence as to the intention of the Fate character himself. Andrew Watts played the overdeterminator as having a fine old time (anyone who saw his Mephistopheles in Schnittke's Faust at the Festival Hall two years ago will know that he owns such characters), with the 'human' population of the opera at his will, but it is that human population to which our sympathies are naturally drawn; for them to be puppets of an apparently irrational god is simply not interesting.

Ultimately, the opera does seem to tie together around one character. Simon, dressed for the City with his three piece suit and red tie, sings his aria and then goes on to secure the happiness of all with his altruism not only of pocket but of soul. There are flowers for his admiring laundrette, cash for the struggling smallholder and in persuading Tina to come with him and enjoy his manifest security he also gets her to hand over a significant lottery winning to the down-at-heel proletariat. Politically this is a difficult conclusion to stomach, that the economic turbulence we see about us is the result of noumenal forces which may nonetheless be righted by a friendly, philosophically moral banker. Hmm. And as I've already noted, this isn't a satirical work.

BlogalongaBond #14 - A View To A Kill (1985)

(Here is a link to a revised version of my IMDb review of A View To A Kill, May 2003
... and with apologies for this being almost a week late)

There is little to be said about a film that is conspicuously inferior to those that came both before and after. The cancer at the heart of A View To A Kill is not that of the punch-drunk height of 1980s capitalism - although the foul scene of new wealth squeaking around the exquisite grounds of Chantilly does plenty on that score. No, it is Roger Moore's age which is beyond that of the character.

Yet there is something worth salvaging from the film. Certainly Alan Hume's photography of the aforementioned French estate and of the scene at Ascot (yes, complete with My Fair Lady reference, thanks Lois Maxwell) is superb. John Barry also returns the goods, although an early romantic scene with Tanya Roberts' Stacey Sutton, in which he re-works Duran Duran, sounds dangerously like it has the same melody as a contemporaneous Flake advert:





For me the true draw of the film is the casting of Grace Jones as Mayday. The woman brings an uncategorisable belligerence and its attendant frisson to the set. Her acting is haphazard but not self-indulgent, though her style is. She plays a thug whose muscular, sweaty ebony body is at the very least distracting and, at best, dare I say it, irresistable. She makes Christopher Walken's loony Zorin seem possible, and though she invokes the franchise staple of Jaws with the venegful henchman act at the close there's no way the butterfly burlesque of the Eiffel Tower stunt preamble would have worked without her; certainly no-one would have thought to try and pull off the sequence in a burqa. She's possibly the coolest thing that ever happened in a Bond film - and I'm glad I waited until a week after the View To A Kill February deadline to come to that conclusion, since The Guardian seems to agree with me.

Ms Jones, we tip our expensive, gaudy hat and invite you to sing a brilliant electro single about anal sex to mitigate the horror of having had sex with Roger Moore at all:

Gary Hume, Flashback, Leeds

While London's Gagosian Galleires put on their arm of a worldwide showing of Damien Hirst's Spot Paintings, Leeds have contrived their own YBA retrospective with a modest exhibition of the work of Gary Hume. Gary Hume's current work is also available in London at the moment but Flashback at the Leeds Art Gallery offers an opportunity to see work over a longer period, including the hospital door series that first brought him to prominence.

It's that series that I headed to first. It's good to see them for real. Reproduction of Hume's work is particularly misrepresentative, given the surface of the acrylic and gloss paints that he uses, the aluminium on which many are rendered and the surface peccadilloes in each painting. The shapes of the panels and windows built into the doors are all that bring feature or focus to the paintings - all are paintings of double doors but none have marks in the paint or the canvas to shows the central division. Brush strokes are virtually indistinguishable. Instead, the pastel colours throw themselves from the surface of the paintings in an emancipated act of tonal 3D, even more alive than the suggested Manga-like anthropomorphism of the vaguely face-like features of the fittings.

Colour may be the issue with these paintings but it is the surface that is half the story with the other pieces on show. Hume's manipulation of the paint is changeable. There are brushstrokes in a piece like Mud, culminating in crests as swirls of paint meet one another: Hume has actually painted a number of these with a lick of white to highlight them. The effect is dynamic. But this isn't always the case, as the earlier Snowman, a piece caught somewhere between Matisse and Kazimir Malevich's reductive blocks of colour has no surface interest. A colossal Barn Door, rendered in scarlet is in fact the opposite of the hospital doors - a solid block of colour, its features are only discernible through the imposition of familiar marks in the paint.

The confrontational soul of the YBA lives on in a piece that demands discussion on the wall opposite the  hospital doors. The Cunt seems at first to simply be a crude, reductive picture of female genitalia. However, immediately there are questions. Which way up? What's the perspective? With two undulating areas of paint, one pink, one deep brown around a central pastel flange its also impossible to work out the ethnicity of the subject. I found myself thinking of cubist explosions of 3D, taking the contour and depth-of-field interest of a subject like a woman's groin and rendering it as a flat surface. It's in this that Hume's technique comes into its own, where the figurative information in a more straightforward painting is rendered in colour, construction and the ambiguous appeal of the surface. Such is the nature of Four Feet In The Garden, the picture being used to publicise the exhibition. From a distance the picture looks like a Rorschach Test, with only closer inspection showing the figurative outlines of the (eight!) feet worked into the surface. The blazing and deeply dark colours of the composition suggest something less cosy than barefooted friends standing together on a suburban lawn - the formal oddity of the grass at the bottom of the painting confirms these suspicions.

Large, modern paintings that gradually force you into a relationship with them, Hume's paintings have a surprising subtlety that has grown out of the crack in the firmament between the modernism of Matisse and the Impressionism of Bonnard.

Reality TV Musicians 2012

Today has seen a pair of disparate announcements concerning musicians in Reality TV shows (Reality? Can one call them that any more or is the term already a Noughties' anachronism?).

The first is that the BBC are to produce a second version of their 2008 show Maestro. In that original six celebrities were tutored in conducting and then competed before a panel from the industry for the prize of conducting at The Proms In The Park. This edition will have four celebrities and the prize will be to conduct an act of an opera at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

The second is across the pond where the new series of Dancing With The Stars (the US version of Strictly Come Dancing) is about to launch. One of the contestants will be the singer Katherine Jenkins who sang as a guest in a previous series of that show.

Clearly, Katherine Jenkins is seen as having a wide portfolio of appeal. She has worked not just as a mezzo-soprano singing classical music but also as a broadcaster (as part of the panel of the truly execrable UK Reality Show Popstar To Operastar), dancing (like the Viva La Diva stage show of 2007 with Darcy Bussell) or as an actress (the Doctor Who special of 2010). All these other appearances have her singing in some context and no doubt this latest venture will be seen as the vehicle for promoting her singing in the US.

Where Dancing With The Stars is a straightforward entertainment show, Maestro 2, with its rather more industry-centric contestants and modified pretext could yet recapture the rich, instructive nature of the first two episodes of the previous series. It's clearly a move by the Royal Opera's new director Kasper Holten to capitalise on the success of musical director Antonio Pappano's work in broadcasting as well as a general move to expand the profile and appeal of the Royal Opera (lest we forget, this is the Holten who brought us a sexy-thriller film version of Don Giovanni)



UPDATE 5/3/2012: These things always come in threes. This week sees the launch of a new crossover collective. Amore are Royal College of Music singing students. They're young, pretty and up for it. Good luck to them.

Re-booting the Avant Garde

A leading article in this Sunday's Guardian/Observer has piqued interest across the Twittersphere. Vanessa Thorpe's piece reports on the conflict between the custodians of the tradition of the avant garde and those who think it is now an anachronism.

What is avant garde? When the term is used, it tends to summon the idea of unexpected art - theatre, music, film or visual art - that shocks the viewer or audience by transgression across accepted convention. This often means trespassing on invisible demarcations that render the audience a separate existential entity or, further, the reality of the outside world a separate existential world from the fantasy world of the theatre. This trespassing is often referred to as 'pushing the boundary' (and in theatre that boundary is often referred to as the 'fourth wall').

The avant garde is often associated with the 20th century, rather than the progressiveness in art in previous periods, as one associates it with Modernism. If Modernism itself has a characteristic it is its explosion of the envelope of what constitutes art. Film brought a whole new wing of art, coinciding with the immersive, multi-dimensional pinnacle of the development of opera. In contrary motion to the ostensibly documentary-like properties of film came visual art's move away from literal, figurative representation to abstraction. Theatre straddled the fourth wall with work that begged more questions than for which it provided narrative, and for answers invoked responses in its audience rather providing information. All of this, naturally, coincided with the rise of psychoanalysis, the investigation of the outside superceded by investigation of the inside.

The avant garde then represents an extreme development to one end of the scale where the consumer - to use a modern term - feels involved in the art rather than at the other end, as an existentially separate entity, assessing it in isolation. The avant garde may be said to represent the Heisenberg end of the experience, where it is impossible to examine the worth or even viability of the art on its own terms, so wed is it to the experience of the viewer.

The natural development of this Modernist-inwardness is the biggest threat to the tradition (such as there is one) of the avant garde. Modernism's single most influential message is that the personal response is the basic arbiter of aesthetic and so moral validity. There has been an total, three-dimensional explosion of the consensus, which no longer exists. For every aesthetic opinion, the opposite may also be held, and there is no way of testing who is right. The extrapolated upshot is that someone may deny having an affronted response to art that is, in consensual terms, immoral - aesthetically impoverished - and there is not only no way of testing that response. In doing so it also dissolves the claim of the art to be avant garde. Post-Modernism is the awareness of the Modernist phenomenon and the viability of the consumer to manipulate that awareness to once again assert an existential separation from the art whilst simultaneously engaging with it.

The 'having your cake and eating it' mechanics of post-modernism means that the avant garde has little purchase. If the experience of the consumer can be effectively categorised as inauthentic via post-modernist double-think then the act that rendered the experience is coupled with that. The logical algorithm goes: Shocked? I can see why I was shocked. I didn't mean to be. It's not really meant to be shocking. It's not shocking.

My current experience of theatre is that if it can't join them it might just try and beat them, for example with pre-emptive intermediaries. Recent productions of Turandot, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tales of Hoffmann at English National Opera as well as the current Stephen Medcalf production of Aida for Raymond Gubbay all use an additional, mute character wandering the stage as a consumer figure that the director can control and manipulate to show the audience how he intends their responses directed.

Naturally, this post-modernist dissolution of the bathwater of the avant garde throws out the baby of something more worthwhile. And just as directors try to pre-empt the audience with proxies such as that suggested above, so others produce art that pre-empts the director with art predicated on market research. This is the art that is commonplace in the West End at the moment, anodyne, consumer-predicated art that plays to a market majority in the absence of an aesthetic objectivity. The irony is that this is not only the sort of uncontroversial art that is anathema - target, even - of the avant garde but, seen at arms length, is the cyclical opposite of it.

Cyclical? How will the avant garde return then? Post-modernism cannot simply be uninvented. Instead those who would see the return of the avant garde might have to try and re-establish some sort of aesthetic framework - some aesthetic objectivity  - whose bonds they can subsequently assault afresh.

Aida, Raymond Gubbay at Royal Albert Hall

The Albert Hall is a friendly place. It's just as well, as the circular construction means that there is a natural, low level sense of drama surrounding the central space. Even during the Proms, when the performers are corralled at one end of the building, there is a drifting focus onto the standing area and the hardy folk who have paid for the best 'seats' with cramp. There's no mortal hand-to-hand combat in the Albert Hall these days but that's the echo of the design.

This sense of drama is antiquarian, especially in this building, a Victorian reconstruction of the Coliseum held in such esteem in that latter period. Stephen Medcalf's admirably poised production of Aida for Raymond Gubbay simply places itself amongst the ley lines offered by the space. A permanent set that looks like the ruins of an Egyptian archaeological site abnegates the need for more built-up stage furniture. A small corps of non-singing performers take on the role of a team of archaeological explorers, including a single woman, described in the programme as the novelist and historian Amelia Edwards. This addition follows the fashion familiar from ENO for a pertinent if extraneous character to wander the action as a foil to the fantasy. The whole inter-period dumbshow also acts as punctuation between acts and scenes. A screen covering the organ at the south end of the building expands the intent of actions on the floor and provides backdrop for the scenes as they occur with a series of projections. It's intelligent and discreet. Here's one of a series of videos from the production process:



With pop-up ideas from both the flies and beneath the floor as well as some precise lighting the space remains lively for all its stasis. Into this is poured the spectacle that one expects from not only a production bearing the company's name but also from this opera. A sizeable, well-choreographed chorus has no need of camels and the like in the triumphant march of the second act (and the upshot is that the focus remains on the performers, no parenthetic circus here). The drama, which is  half driven by the Egyptian-Ethiopian antagonism is worked into the floor-show; surtitles on LED boards around the hall are available but by no means essential for an uninitiated. The action is sufficient.

One might imagine that this is an ideal situation in which the principal cast might play out the drama. A certain groping of the imagination is indeed necessary as despite the best (i.e. most expedient) efforts at resolving the issue of performing in the round, and additionally in such a large hall, it really is impossible to get in touch with the singing. Using individual mics, the principals not only sound as if they might be coming from any one of a half dozen directions but the selective pickup of the technology, not to mention the necessary level adjustment to which each is subject, leaves voices physically adrift. It's like being asked to asses the effectiveness of a car whilst it's skidding and aqua-planing across a wet road. However, it must be said that the facility to amplify gave real dramatic weight to Radames' (offstage) trial in the vault, along with a typically simple idea for the staging with steam pouring up out of subterranean vents.

Despite this - and the other tricky issue in the round, that of ensemble, largely conquered - there is clearly super singing at hand. The cast I saw on this opening night was Marc Heller as Radames, Tiziana Carraro as Amneris, Stanislav Shvets as a wonderful, copper-bottomed Ramfis and Daniel Lewis Williams as The King. Above all I would have loved to have heard Indra Thomas' Aida au naturel, as the sound gave the impression of being rather special but the technology conspires to separate out the overtones in the voices before they can blend in the auditorium. Strangely though, David Kempster's magnificent, punchy Amonasro needs no further qualification. Catrin Aur's Priestess was as High as described, uncoiling beautifully from the gallery and offering the chance to hear the excellent women of the chorus at closer quarters. Andrew Greenwood's conducting was of a part with the staging of the drama, lean and to the point but not without colour. A surprising, rich production.

The Future's Miniature

English National Opera today have announced their intention to get out and find interesting new talent for creating opera. The venture is called Mini Operas. They're going to do it online, with a competitive edge, asking for submissions from 'the three disciplines'. Though one might make the assumption that these are writing the music, writing the text and directing, the final discipline is in fact given as film making (a reasonable distinction from directing, given that the completed operatics will be uploaded for video view).

So yes, despite the finished work not being acoustic, doing everything online is a perfectly reasonable idea. It means the reach is large, people who want to work together will have the competition as a forum for finding one another, and the entries will necessarily be shorter than the typical two hour opus (both for practicalities of uploading and judging, one expects).

Moreover, Mini Operas streamlines nicely with the current vogue for producing scaled-back work. The stuttering success of OperaUpClose, the magazine-style festivals of new work in Tête à Tête and Grimeborn and the Exposure and Opera Shots showcasing at the Royal Opera House are all making an effort to put on new work, often in chunks that are not only manageable for the (modern, shorter attention-span) audience but also for the company's increasingly finite resources.

It should be noted that Tête à Tête are market-leading here. The Exposure evening I attended recently at the Royal Opera House was essentially a franchise of Tête à Tête work, and a series of new opera to be shown at the Royal College Of Music in May, Great Expectations, is also in conjunction with this company.

All this interest follows in the community-marketing opportunities that social media and media sharing foster. The likes of the Mark Ravenhill/YouTube/Guardian film short competition or Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir performance of one of his works bears testament to its effectiveness at convening enthusiasm, at least. One also bears in mind that the content overlaps too - Nico Muhly's recent co-production with ENO, Two Boys, is partially set in the social networking hinterland and the production itself had spectacaular video effects projected onto the set. Muhly will be assessing entries to the project (alongside Will Self and Terry Gilliam).

Exposure, Linbury Studio, Royal Opera

'Snapshots of New Opera'. Hmm. Well, 'snapshots' meaning anything from a glimpse of an opera already slated for production to new sketches. It wasn't always easy to discern the purpose of the evening which was part opportunity to hear new work, part advert for future performances and even part sales pitch, with at least invitations for financial support.

In the end it was difficult to make the case for the evening being intended as entertainment. Even the standard opera scenes performance one might be familiar with from the conservatoires are intended as potted dramas, vaudevilles in size perhaps but nonetheless coherent and involving.

The numbers simply didn't lend themselves to this end for Exposure though. Orchestrations (such as there might have been any) were slimmed down to the piano reduction plus percussion; an additional violin (for the opening fragment) or staging-integral woodwind were the only exceptions.

We were also told, with peculiar pride, that the production team had only three days in which to prepare the show. Clearly this information was designed to turn an embarrassing lack of resources into a virtue. Of course, one of the other purposes of a comparable conservatoire opera scenes evening is that it is a showcase for the performers, meaning the singers. With only three days to prepare, irrespective of how long the singers had had their scores, it was never going to be about showcasing their talents, but relying on them - and their professionalism - as a vessel for the works.

With these significant qualifications laid out then, what was on offer? I enjoyed Michael Zev Gordon's Icarus, (right, click here for information about the 2011 Tete a Tete work-in-progress production) music somewhere in the orbit of both John Adams and Jonathan Dove with its economy and rhythmic drive, using small units of notes as well as the sudden shifts between meter. Gavin Wayte's The Neighbour had a good sense of dramatic temperament and Tom Armstrong's Do The Right Thing wasn't afraid of rhythmic complexity to assert shifting moral temperaments. I had particularly looked forward to celebrated tenor Tom Randle's excerpt, from his opera The Sculptor. Although denied any dramatic or narrative context (a natural pitfall of the evening's exercise,  reasonably requiring forebearance and imagination from the audience) the chief appeal of this was in the economy and deliberately limited palette of the music's colour. I would have liked to have heard an act. Conversely, Cafeteria was a self-contained sketch by Helen Porter (to Eleanor Knight's text, the only one of the evening that made its own impression on me) which, with its perky, briskly arrived-at point and clear ensemble writing was the perfect way to finish the first half.

In the second, a cross section of Samuel Hogarth's David And Goliath was nicely paced with a fine ear for the temperament of the drama not only in the differing music between characters but also the percussive, edgy music that was shown up so well at the piano. The evening closed with an extract from The Trial Of Jean Rhys, the snippet best suited to the cabaret feel of the staging of the evening's show (set in 1920s Montparnasse).

Inamongst these extracts peformed by the corps of ROH2, there were two clearly better-rehearsed productions. A Fetus [sic] In America features the mature voice of a formerly aborted foetus to mount a surreal, time-and-space suspended perspective narrative. Luke Styles' music is a Berio-like tumble of idiom and works hand-in-glove with Peter Cant's text to pinball through a witty repartee. The mezzo-soprano Jessica Walker (last seen here in the superb OperaUpClose Coronation Of Poppea) performed the monologue of the scene in the style of Annie Lennox doing burlesque and the tableau benefitted from properly prepared lighting, as well as the considerable charisma of a better-than-the-rest prepared Walker. Here's the extract in performance at the 2011 Tete a Tete Festival, again with Walker:



Preparation was also the advantage of the interpolated extract in the second half, a scene from Stephen McNeff's take on Giles Foden's The Last King Of Scotland. A well-drilled group of students from Trinity Laban provided the support for a similarly charismatic turn from Rodney Clarke as Idi Amin, maniacally dismissing food in a fit of pique before demanding it returned, as the naive doctor Nicholas (Michael McLaughlin) shows him basic physical care. McNeff's music has the fresh bucolic tonality familiar from Lennox Berkeley but also the rhythmic DNA of jazz giving the music an attractive, suave character, rather like the dictator himself.

Respect is due the entire performing corps for undertaking the three-night run with insufficient preparation. It seems pointless to talk about individual performers, with one exception. The evening was musically directed from the piano by Lindy Tennent-Brown in an exemplary feat of idiom hopping, highly accurate playing and conducting, minor crisis management and, frankly, stamina.