24-hour contemporary music concert in Barbican Hall, London

The music was performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra, some pieces with live instruments, some electronic music by KMRU, by Actress and by Powell, and some a combination of the two. The concert lasted from 6 pm Saturday to 6 pm Sunday, including a 6-hour string quartet by Morton Feldman, throughout the night. I didn’t attend this, but spent most of Sunday in the venue, where one could come and go as one pleased.

It was dark throughout, apart from occasional lights on the music stands when there were live performers, but the whole concert was accompanied by an abstract video installation at the back of the stage that responded to the music. Some of the lighting effects from this were quite beautiful.

As for the music, some was interesting, some less so. I particularly liked an electronic piece by Alvin Lucier I am Sitting in a Room, in which a spoken description of a simple experience is gradually transformed bit by bit to remove the reverberations produced by the human voice and leave only the reverberations produced by the room. Over a period of one hour, the spoken word is transformed into a form of music. The effect is to make one think of the difference between spoken word and music, how close they can be and how one can still retain the memory of the words even after they have become unintelligible.

In the final piece, the conductor Mica Levi directed the orchestra to play by switching on the lights on the stage. On each occasion, each member played one note, forming chords, played at apparently irregular intervals. It was unclear if the notes were already pre-determined (the orchestra had no lights to see their music by) or were improvised. The concert was surprisingly well attended, at least during the times I was there. ****

The Lost Daughter, a film by Maggie Gyllenhaals at Barbican Cinema 1, London

This film is based on a short novel by Elena Ferrante about a female professor of Literature, Leda, aged 48,  played by Olivia Cloman, who is holidaying alone on a Greek island. One immediately gets the impression that this kind of holiday isolation is a kind of penance for some past experience that she regrets. We soon find out about this in flashbacks of her earlier self when we see her in her early thirties,, played now by Jessie Buckley, married to an apparently reasonable man, struggling to deal with combining her well recognised career and being a mother of two young daughters. As the plot switches back and forth between the present and the past, we see that Leda's mental state remains adversely affected by her past experiences, by her having to choose between an affair and her family. 

The title of the film relates to an incident of a missing child in the holiday resort and Leda's involvement in this.  There is a continuous sense of menace and sexual tension surrounding her interactions with a group of American holidaymakers on the island, even although this is never satisfactorily resolved. That is one weakness of the film.  While Olivia Colman brings some of her best acting to the screen here (probably worthy of award nominations) the use of two actresses to portray the same character not many years apart is difficult to accept, however good both of them are in their role. I left the cinema feeling disappointed. ❤❤                                                 

Monteverdi Vespers by L'Arpeggiata at the Barbican Concert Hall, London

The Vespers are a musically strange combination of songs, settings of religious texts, quartets and motets, with little obvious connection.

The Austrian conductor Christina Pluhar presents these pieces in a remarkable setting for 10 singers and 12 instrumentalists, very dry (Barbican acoustics), very precise and, in some way, very modern. The exceptional talent of all the participants was obvious throughout.  Although repeated vocal adulation of the deity is not my favourite art form, this was clearly a rare and unmissable performance. ❤❤❤❤❤

West Side Story, a film by Steven Spielberg at Barbican Cinema, London

The full Leonard Bernstein musical filmed in a CGI-enhanced super-realistic set representing the Puerto Rican slums of New York being bulldozed in the1960s to make way for the Lincoln Arts Centre. 

The choreography and the dancing of the chorus and primary characters were exceptional.   Also particularly impressive was the fact that the supposedly Puerto Rican characters were played by Hispanic actors, who spoke a fair amount of the libretto in Spanish, sometimes without English subtitles. Of the two main characters, Ansel Elgort as Tony and Rachel Zegler as Maria, Tony was the less persuasive;  although a brilliant acrobat and perfectly fine singer, his demeanour didn't quite convince as an ex-prisoner tough guy and potential murderer.  

And, while the stage sets were undoubtedly outstanding in their realism, I felt that that very realism detracted from the storyline, rather than adding to it; there was just a bit too much broken masonry, too many unemptied bins, too many stray dogs to look at to concentrate fully on the musical itself. A simpler set would have been equally effective. ❤❤❤ 

The Tragedy of MacBeth, a film by Joel Coen at Barbican Cinema, London

Interesting to see how the film could manage to add anything to so many previous film and stage productions, but it did. Filmed in black and white, it was stylised in a way that reminded of early Bergman. The set was pure Gothic, in keeping with the extraordinary witches’ scene, yet also stripped down to bare concrete, with all unnecessary props eliminated. Initially it was hard to accept the American accents from the supposedly Scottish characters, but that was soon forgotten — there were so many accents among the cast — and Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, who had a part in the direction/production were exceptional. A fine reading of the play. ❤❤❤❤

The Chairs, a play by Eugène Ionesco, at the Almeida Theatre, London

How well does Theatre of the Absurd age? When I was a teenager in Glasgow, I read it (and may have seen it) as if it was avant-garde theatre that had to have meaning read into it. Now it looks to me like a grotesque farce, but that is a result of the direction by Omar Elerian and the acting skills of the two main characters played by husband and wife Marcello Magni and Kathryn Hunter.

The plot is nonsensical: the anticipated arrival of guests at the couple’s house that requires the bringing in of chairs to accommodate them, even although they never arrive. Amid the humour of the situation there is a gradual emergence of pathos as we detect loneliness, past tragedy and the living out of empty lives. There is some fine acting here to maintain the comedy, complete with audience participation, and the belief, or assumption, that the author had serious intent. Whether it has aged well or not, it should never be lost from the repertoire. ❤❤❤❤❤

Folk, a play by Nell Leyshon, at the Hampstead Theatre, London

This is ostensibly a play about the collecting of English folk songs by the musicologist Cecil Sharp at the beginning of the 20th century, but it is about far more than that. We see Sharp as he accidentally discovers two half-sisters from Somerset as they mourn the death of their mother, who had an enormous repertoire of folk songs that had been passed down to her and which she passed on to her daughters. This was a treasure trove for Sharp, whose ambition was to become a great English composer. The relationship between the two half-sisters is not an easy one; one is more worldy and the other, partly disabled, is uneducated and reticent. It is the latter of these women whom Sharpe finally manages to befriend and persuade to release a range of precious musical material, which he then publishes without acknowledging the sisters’ contributions. Sharp’s reputation is damaged by the revelation of his behaviour, and the sisters’ lives continue in poverty, forgoing any fame that might have accrued.

The strength of the play lay in the interplay between the music, beautifully sung by the actors Mariam Haque and Sasha Frost, and the subtle portrayal of the complex and disturbing relationship between Sharp and the two sisters. ❤❤❤❤❤

Mark Simpson (clarinet), Leonard Eischenbroich (cello) and Richard Uttley (piano) at Kings Place, London

An interesting early Sunday evening recital of trios by Beethoven and Brahms and Mark Simpson’s own Echoes and Embers for clarinet and piano. The Beethoven was familiar (I have attempted the piano part in the past), the other two pieces not so, but good to become acquainted with the late Brahms, with its beautiful slow movement, and the first hearing of the Simpson work. High quality music making. ❤❤❤❤❤

London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda at the Barbican Hall, London A contrasted programme of Beethoven’s 5th piano concerto with a subtle performance by Beatrice Rana as soloist and a finely tuned and dramatic performance of Shostakovitch’s last (15th) symphony. ❤❤❤❤

Some lunchtime concerts at St. Bartholomew the Great, London:

Free concerts giving young professional players the opportunity to perform in public, always at a very high standard.

Alkyona Quartet playing a movement from Shostakovitch Quartet no. 7 and Mendelssohn Quartet no. 6. Also a work by Adam Kornas, Paradise Lost, who was present at the concert, where Rhiannon spoke to him about the location of various sites close by the church that are associated with Milton’s life. Turns out — we found out later he same day — that Adam will be a guest conductor in my (if I ever get back to it) Jan Modelski Community Orchestra in Chester . ❤❤❤

RCM Wind Ensemble. The talented ensemble played Fantasia on a theme of Corelli by Joseph Horovitz, who had died that same week, and the superb Symphony for 16 Wind Instruments by Richard Strauss. ❤❤❤❤