lang lang, youth and age

Once again I queue in the afternoon sunshine outside the Albert Hall as tonight’s Prom concert features megastar Chinese pianist Lang Lang. The audience is very much younger even than for the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and there is something of a rock concert feeling about it all. The queue for day tickets is actually very mixed, contrary to the stereotype of slightly weird middle-aged men on their own. Naturally, I group myself as part of the youth crowd… The season ticket holders are another matter and there is much clannishness there.

Lang Lang is a media phenomenon; interviewers and their cameramen prowl about.

After a beyond-parody opening piece sans Mr Lang (a premiere – all subtle clanging, ominous scraping of cellos and abrupt screeches), we had the arrival of the idol of the ivories to do his Chopin Piano Concerto. Lang Lang plays with great aplomb and it sounds remarkable, if a little kitsch. But the man’s performance style has to be seen to be believed! He looks like another virtuoso, Jamie Cullum (small and dark, artfully spiked hair, ‘cool’ clothes) but his mugging to the front row, his exaggerated emotional gestures, his self-satisfaction, his invitation for you to appreciate the music as much as he does puts me in mind of no-one so much as Liberace. And once you’ve had that thought it’s very hard to un-have it.

The highlight of the evening, then, turns out to be the Staatskappelle Dresden under Fabio Luisi playing Strauss. For a start they look so interesting: serious, modest, intellectual, a bit shy. Artists. The LSO the other night looked like a lot of chiropodists doing it in their spare time by comparison. And Mr Luisi is impressive. Smart, controlled, sharp; then suddenly very animated as necessary. Strauss can sound creamy and become rapidly too rich: this was peppery and a little sour. (Food metaphors will have to do. I ain’ no music critic). It was exciting to hear this huge piece given such life in front of me by the orchestra whom Strauss dedicated it to. Unlike the premiere which started the programme or, frankly, the sugary Chopin, this was the real thing.

I stood next to a woman who had come to her first concert here in 1945 when she was 15. Her and her friend had come on a whim because the pianist then (also playing Chopin) looked like their favourite actor in the publicity – James Mason. But once there she was hooked and has been every year since, except for 1988, the year her husband died. The group of whooping teenagers on the other side of me presumably might do the same.

UPDATE: I largely agree with Martin Kettle on this (there was indeed a crying baby – who the hell takes a baby?) though to leave room for no more than half a sentence for the meat of the concert is a typical Guardian touch.

in the hall

So tonight I added Valery Gergiev conducting the LSO in Schnittke and Shostakovich at the Proms to my Friday night’s Liszt, Wagner and Berlioz under Barenboim. At both I was right up the front, no more than a few feet from the band and the man in charge.

And two very different men: Barenboim a lesson in dignity without pomposity, Gergiev brooding, filigree, dramatic and complex.

But the real lesson of both experiences is how my taste is changed by virtue of being present. At home I wouldn’t really feel much either way about Liszt or Berlioz if they came on the radio. In the hall they were exciting, vivid and showed off the orchestra; the Tristan, which I might easily listen to (to indulge a sombre moment…) seemed a little less interesting. Perhaps the youth of the band showed in this one. Tonight the Schnittke, which would trouble me with its difficulty as I reply to emails or read the news online, was electric and accessible. The Shostakovich trumped the lot: a composer I like which also worked thrillingly in the hall, Gergiev seeming to embody it in all its tortuous solemnity and drama.

However, my calves ache from so much standing. I think it might be back to the gallery for Thursday’s Lang Lang Chopin. If I can face the queue, which will be even longer than for the two maestros.

UPDATE: I agree with this.

life at the front of the queue

Spent most of the day outside the Albert Hall queuing for the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s concert tonight. The great Daniel Barenboim conducting. Liszt, Wagner (the Tristan prelude) and Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique. The first time I’ve stood in the famous Proms arena (scene of much Union flag costuming and silliness on the Last Night). In the past I’ve always gone up to the gallery; in each case the tickets are £5 on the day. It’s a traditional part of the English summer: the Ashes’ score was being passed around by people in radio contact.

More anon, perhaps, about the concert itself, and about Hamlet which I saw last night. Civilisation: people scraping and banging bits of wood, animal skin and metal to make noises, or pretending to be other people saying things to each other.

Barenboim: “Either we all kill each other, or we share what there is to share.”

health care reform

From over here the current summer hysteria about the Obama adminstration’s attempt at health care reform all looks barmy. Our papers only really focussed on it when the NHS became the subject of attention from the Republicans, who claimed that Stephen Hawking wouldn’t be alive today if he were British and had been treated by the NHS. Except he is and he was.

The press here, too, just sense a possible ‘Obama fails’ story which would satisfy them after last year. So we don’t really get any of the truth about what is a fascinating and complicated political struggle. The Huffington Post always offers this hour’s new headline but it’s hard to get the facts from it. The key ‘go-to’ blogger on it all if you want to find out what’s actually going on is Ezra Klein. He’s moved from The American Prospect to the Washington Post. He’s a domestic policy wonk and health care is his thing. He gets the whole picture and can write about it in detail without drowning it. He’s also refreshingly unhysterical. His latest thing is trying to get everyone to calm down a little about the so-called ‘public option’, which the broad liberal left has fetishised as the coming betrayal. [update: back at American Prospect, so does Paul Starr. Remember all this when the press start screaming about Obama's 'inevitable' climbdown.]

He also just posted a clip of a favourite US pol of mine, Barney Frank, at one of the notorious ‘town hall’s. Why isn’t our political life a bit more like this:

England People Very Nice

Richard Bean’s play about racial and cultural integration in this country has been received with some degree of squeamishness amongst certain critics, and outright condemnation elsewhere.  And there has been much agitated chatter around town, often between people who’ve actually seen it. Only once or twice has there been something a bit more (i.e. at all) nuanced said about it (take a bow Andrew Haydon).

In one of this blog’s previous incarnations, I described (in an entry beyond parody) teasing Richard as ‘our most successful right-wing dramatist’. And some of this sentiment seems abroad now, only this time without irony. The waters were slightly muddied, it has to be said, by the man himself when he appeared to align himself with the writers of the Euston Manifesto, the group which was ready to assert that the invasion of Iraq should be supported. But looking at that interview again it is clear he is inquisitive, troubled and dryly mischievous. In other words he is, like all gifted playwrights I’ve ever known, very like his plays.

He describes himself as a ‘liberal hawk’, whereas I think I’m probably a more classic old liberal. I’m suspicious of this business of ‘people are afraid to say what they think’. What exactly is it that they are afraid to say? It’s possible that those people’s views, once unleashed from the fetters of the liberal Stasi who run our country, might be pretty ugly and best perhaps left unsaid. But maybe that’s my Sussex upbringing at work. So much has been said about Islamic radicalism in particular that I can’t quite imagine what has been left out. And I’m not alone, as I realise looking back at another previous post: ironically it is Nicholas Hytner (director of the play) who best sums up what I feel.

I had a great time at the play. It’s become a cliché to describe this kind of work as Jonsonian (meaning, in this context, densely populated, rumbustious, rude, character-driven, linguistically ripe). It is all of that, I guess, but the more relevant cliché is Swift. Anyone who thinks that Bean is attempting a description of Huguenot, Jewish, Irish and Bangladeshi immigrants’ lives in verismo terms is either being wilfully disingenuous or just wasn’t paying attention. (One of the most public detracters said, in a sensationally accurate shot at his own foot, “the play creates new stereotypes about Bangladeshis that I have never heard, that we marry our cousins, which is complete rubbish. That is the Pakistanis.”) The play within a play device allows him to send up stereotyping but also to demonstrate that it even has its place in the English way of drawing in immigrant communities – within a generation or two, no-one can recall the fuss.

There is a passage – say about ten minutes towards the end of the play – where Bean seems to become troubled by the rhetoric of his own play and questions whether radical, Wahhabi-inspired Islam might turn out to be different. But this is puzzlement, not dogma. In the end the play is celebratory: England’s earthy empiricism and lack of enthusiasm for ideological programmes of any sort (we must be the most secular rich nation in the world) will always exert an irrisistable force.

Some marvellous acting, too. Elliot Levey and Sacha Dhawan in particular catch the tone just right and have the physical technique to support it.

Oh, and great laughs as well. At a Richard Bean play! Who’d have thought it.

UPDATE: via Patrick Appel on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, this from The Spectator (of all places) is quite a good afterthought to the above: Oh No! The Muslims Are Coming!

restarting again

While I am sitting typing this, I’m listening to some music with the window wide open and thinking about all the times when I used to post so regularly here. Especially from Tokyo, in my hotel room at night. I stopped because… Why? I became very self-conscious for one thing. It became harder and harder to write anything which didn’t in some way reflect on someone else. And it became repetitive: after a certain point in the cycle of a theatre-person’s life, things do come round again. And again. Casting, design, rehearsals, technicals, previews, press, run, last night. What now? Oh, casting, design,… Bulletins from abroad were best. The new experiences in Tokyo: its manners, its food, its actors; all the things to photograph.

It has oscillated between being a professional diary and a commonplace book. Some political and cultural things commented on, even some reflections on films, exhibitions and plays seen. Originally I had thought that I would just jot down something – anything – each day. That the shape and meaning of things would only emerge with an accretion of little details, insignificant in themselves. I did that, a bit. But it seemed impossible not to give some context and meaning in the post. So the posts expanded but slowed in pace. And I censored myself more and more as I sensed more people looking over my shoulder.

Twice I became so paranoid about the impression it was giving that I not only abandoned it but tried to remove it all from the internet. This was ridiculous! Once out there, it’s out there. But it means that the continuity of entries is disrupted in the archive. Some repairs have been attempted. But there’s a gaping hole in 2005! Last year I became so distracted altogether by life stuff that I stopped posting about the theatre or anything, really, other than the US Presidential election. And when even that petered out (my posting, I mean, not the election!) I was content to let the whole thing hang there on the net, a sort of Marie Celeste to be visited by curious souls in search of, well, Long John Silver mobile screen wipers according to my latest blog stats.

The contradiction at its heart used to trouble me. Was it a ‘theatre blog’ about being a director? Or a more personal, intimate ragbag of stuff? Of course in so far as it had interest, it was this mix which was perhaps interesting. I came late to Facebook, and don’t really join in even now, but in many ways it’s a much more obvious place to post about enthusiasms and reactions to things than in this embarrassingly public way. But since this damaged, abandoned wreck of a thing is here, I may as well make some use of it. I started in August 2004. Five years is an eternity on the web! Shame to let it just drift off into space.

So it’s all going to be a little free-form, as before. The ‘why?’ is the same as it was 5 years ago: because I’d quite like to, and someone I don’t know might like to read it.

Moribund

french word for cigarette holder

who does paul miller play for

london trainee bus driver

i could be brown i could be blue

screw down hairdo

distance from tokyo to kyoto

complex shit power lines london times

chinese methodist church

ooiri

As you may have noticed, all is somewhat moribund around here lately. Yet some still make their way to the blog and the above is a sample of the searches which brought them. I hope all found what they were looking for.

Back soon with something more substantial. I hope.

Hitchens home to roost

After a very long sequence of crimes against political literacy, even Christopher Hitchens has been brought back to his senses by the Obama/Biden vs McCain/Palin campaign. Here’s the article. And here’s the money quote:

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured.

Biden

There’s a fourth candidate in the US election whom no-one seems to talk about anymore but who has been grafting away very effectively. If I’m being really honest, I think I actually warm to him more than Obama. It’s his VP nominee, Joe Biden. Ezra Klein puts it well:

When I argued for Biden’s worth as a VP pick, the center of the case was his ability to be a contemptuous, arrogant jerk when talking about the Republican foreign policy record.

That’s sort of what I was talking about.