For scalpel-sharp dissection of the most vapid parts of Hollywood/LA life, told with low-budget digital flexibility that itself critiques studio indulgences, British director Bernard Rose is your man. He hit the note most viscerally in Ivansxtc a decade ago with a story of the drug-induced implosion of one of the city’s top agenting talents. As parallels with a real-life career melt-down were all too obvious to the in-crowd, sourcing to the Tolstoy story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” may have crept in as a cover-up.
Rose is back with Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata, as well as Ivansxtx lead Danny Huston as hero Edgar Hudson (the actor is the son of John, supported here by half-sister Anjelica, and a family horse). The opening scene finds everything in the Hudson household looking rosy in a particularly horrible LA way – a charity concert benefit for Africa at a lovely Beverly Hills home, where wife Abby (Elisabeth Rohm) recaptures her concert piano skills in a recital of the eponymous Beethoven work, paired with attractive Chinese-American violinist Aiden (Matthew Yang King). Elephant in the room – and it’s quite a big one – is Edgar himself. His voiceover declares his “rage and horror” at the scene he is witnessing. Clearly, more than the appetisers have gone wrong.
Cut back four years to the beginning of their relationship, as Edgar seduces Abby away from her previous partner. Sex, quite a lot of it, energetically. Children, not initially wanted. More sex, less happily. A move to an even nicer property that engenders angst in Abby that she will lose her potentially brilliant music career (she’s finished at Juillard, of course – is there any other music school in America?). Edgar meanwhile is s doing just great, it seems, in that most demanding of jobs, managing the family foundation, except for the odd scrap with big sis over how best to channel the dynastic dosh.
So husband's suggestion that Abby goes back into practice for the big day would look a kindly one, if only we didn’t guess that days of concentrated rehearsal à deux might kindle more than he bargained for. Does Edgar guess that at some level, too? Or does jealousy just take its hold inexorably, if predictably? A final-act aside has Edgar wondering whether the couple has actually strayed any further than enthusiasm over what to choose as the next opus to conquer. Obsession being what it is, does he even care? Viewers’ engagement being what it is, do we?
Frequent use of hand-held camera (from Rose himself, who also edits) is handy and appropriate enough, but leaves the impression of being somewhat throw-away. But then this is a throw-away world, so why doesn’t Edgar just move on to a follow-up wife, instead of working up an Othello-shaped strop? When it's called for, Huston doesn’t pull out stops (if indeed there are many to tug at), while the other two leads have even less to work with. Maybe Rose’s final critique is that an empty society can only produce empty passion. Maybe.
Any pegging to the centenary of Tolstoy's death this year looks a trifle forced (see also The Last Station), but Rose must rate as the writer's biggest screen admirer, with past work including the less-than-applauded Anna Karenina. For the record Rose and Huston return soon with the final instalment of their Tolstoy trilogy – the “self-destruction” trilogy, maybe? – adapting the writer’s story “Master and Man”. That’s the one which ends with death and a bit of posthumous redemption thrown in. Something uplifting at last, then.
We know the grammar now by rote. Some local institution is on its uppers. A traditional way of life is threatened by changing times. Sic transit etcetera and so forth. What’s wanted is a shot in the arm, a kick in the seat, preferably administered by a famous well-known celebrity star, one if at all possible followed at all times by their own bespoke camera crew. And yea, lo, not to mention verily, they will sprinkle their fairy dust, twinkle their pixie bits, and an impossible task of a horridly hard nature will by some completely predictable miracle be achieved, all thanks to grit, graft and the consigning of many hours of unusable footage to the cutting-room floor because it doesn’t quite stick within the narrative's tramlines. A Band for Britain could have been awful. Instead, it’s almost entirely enchanting.
Why? Well, it’s not about what television can do for you. It’s about something more authentic than that, which derives from the participants on view. Amateur musicians don’t want to be stars. Especially brass ones. They are content on the whole with making a little talent go as far as required, with being a cog in the wheel. The X Factor is a very long way from the mind of a euphonium player in an ailing colliery brass band in a Yorkshire pit village that no longer has a pit. If it’s never quite so far away for those who toil in factual television, A Band for Britain is rare proof that tired formats can bloom again if the content is right.
The set-up in this. Dinnington Colliery Band is on its uppers. There are only a few members left to wheeze into their instruments, and one brassy old trouper on percussion. They’re mostly full-bodied ladies of a certain vintage, natural performers all. Not sure about their playing, mind. In situations of such dire emergency, who you gonna call?
In another lifetime, if they wanted to record the life of an ailing brass band and its place in society, the BBC would have sent a trained documentary filmmaker to live among its subjects for months on end and produce a moving, crafted fly-on-the-wall portrait of a community. But that ship has long since sailed, the skills forgotten, a way of working consigned to yesteryear. Forget brass bands. The documentary is the dodo. (Hey, they should make a documentary about it.) Meanwhile, this artificial insemination of urgency via outside agency is the only way anyone left in TV knows how to tell a story any more.
But I digress. Five years ago you’d never have come up with the name of Sue Perkins. Having spent much penitential time in reality TV’s trenches, which teem with assorted desperadoes on the comeback trail, her reward in 2008 was to win the BBC’s slebs–learn-to-conduct batonathon (the name escapes me) in which she revealed that she can swish a stick at least as well as Darius Danesh can caterwaul an aria.
It's appropriate, given that the Oscars remain the mother of all awards shows, that Sunday night's ceremony made a point of honouring both a mother from hell (Mo'Nique in Precious) and another from Inspirational Movie heaven (Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side). But it was clear there was one thespian earth-mother who reigned supreme as a long ceremony went on. And on. And on. That, of course, is Meryl Streep, now the most-nominated actress in Oscar history and a touchstone of sorts throughout the evening. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin may have been the night's nominal hosts, but Streep seemed to define the event without once rising from her seat.
Le tout Hollywood paying homage to Dame Meryl - let's face it, that's what she more or less is - lent structure to a notably stodgy Oscar show that lurched along for well over three hours, doling out one predictable award after another. Until, that is, the Best Actress category brought on stage five former colleagues and co-stars of the various nominees to extol those in contention. And before we knew it, suddenly everyone wanted a piece of Meryl (pictured right, taking photos of her own at the Governors Ball: credit, Richard Harbaugh ©AMPAS). Not least that category's winner, Bullock, who finished her ripely emotional acceptance speech by joyously (and comically) extolling "my lover, Meryl Streep". Even losing (yet again) in this category, Streep somehow looked as if she had won.
That's more than can be said for a telecast that even more than usual coupled flashes of exhilaration with long stretches of tedium and the occasional welcome foray into the hallowed realms of Oscar kitsch, of which every ceremony should partake at least once. (The ne plus ultra on this front surely remains the pairing of Rob Lowe and Snow White in 1989.) Just when it looked as if proceedings were going to settle for the lamely unfunny or the sober-sided, along came the film score category that featured lots of rumbustious break dancing tethered to the nominated films. Sherlock Holmes meets b-boys? And why not, especially when you've got them miming explosions during the segment devoted to The Hurt Locker. No wonder George Clooney was shown immediately afterwards giving the camera a giant "Huh?"
To that extent, Clooney was doubtless echoing a broader public that could only stare slack-jawed at missed opportunities for real impact. Why bother to bring on Demi Moore to deliver the annual tribute to those no longer living - Oscar's "I see dead people" moment - if the whole reason for her being there, namely the passing of her Ghost co-star Patrick Swayze, was badly shot and edited in the visual medley that followed? In that vein, it seemed utterly perverse to seat directing competitors, and onetime husband and wife, James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow directly behind one another and then to cut away from whatever interaction there was between them at the very moment that Bigelow won.
Elsewhere, Kristen Stewart looked just as graceless on the LA podium as she had several weeks ago in London, while residual buzz surrounding the presenters focused on the utterly astonishing weight loss that has apparently been accomplished by onetime Best Actor Forest Whitaker. What's his diet of choice? I think we should be told.
The hosts, Martin and Baldwin, followed recent Oscar practice by seeming to do a slow fade from the night as it crept along, perhaps due to time constraints prompted by several absurdly rambling and ill-prepared acceptance speeches. Supporting Actor Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) got things off to a dispiriting start by reciting a dreary roll call of agents and execs, proving only that it doesn't take a newcomer to Hollywood long to learn just how many people you've got to keep sweet in that town.
Waltz, though, was nothing compared to Jeff Bridges's inevitable win (I was rooting for the brilliant Jeremy Renner), which led to a heartfelt ovation followed by lots of incoherent babble, punctuated throughout by the word "man", from Bridges (pictured left: credit, Matt Petit ©AMPAS). Far more affecting were the frequent shots of Bridges's wife of 33 years, Sue, who looked considerably sparkier and more fresh-faced than some of the nominees. On the other hand, it wasn't immediately clear that a Hollywood golden boy wasn't going to spend 33 years thanking everyone he'd ever come across, and Michelle Pfeiffer's lead-in to his nomination sounded more like a overripe eulogy than a fond tribute from one thesp to another.
Luckily, things improved on the distaff side, the emergence of Barbra Streisand to present Bigelow her now-historic prize an indication that the Academy had a pretty good sense of how things might turn out. (Under-reported throughout was that history could have been made in this category in an entirely different way, had Precious's Lee Daniels become the first African-American to take the Best Director prize.) Bigelow appeared every bit as gracious and articulate as she has throughout this entire awards season, the ultimate sight of her clutching two Oscars (one in each arm) suggesting a new fitness regime for Hollywood's super-elite.
Best of all, and coming just before Bigelow's triumph, was the fantastically funny and quotable Bullock (pictured right, ©AMPAS), whose ready charm upon winning showed in a stroke how it is that The Blind Side emerged out of left field to blindside erstwhile frontrunner Streep. "Did I really earn this, or did I just wear you all down?" she asked, furthering a love-in with the crowd that took some time to quit. It was around then that Streep was yet again seen throwing her head backwards, presumably having had a good laugh. Or maybe, and with no disrespect to Bullock, she had simply fallen asleep.
“Being a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England.” Upon its publication 75 years ago, J B Priestley’s English Journey became an important influence for writers, photographers and even, it has been suggested, the agenda of the post-war Labour administration. Cushioned by the success of The Good Companions (1929), Priestley embarked on his tour of the English regions at a time of economic Armageddon. In this new English journey, and in the teeth of a new recession, photographer John Angerson set out to follow in Priestley’s footsteps to document an England which exists now. He takes Priestley’s subtitle as his own.
It is a work in progress, to be exhibited next year and collected into a book. Among the themes of the journey are the growing impact of homogenisation, of the primacy of technology and the national obsession with celebrity. “But,” says Angerson, “the open-hearted spirit of the people I encountered whilst wandering across England has made me believe, as J B Priestley did, that we work as individuals towards a common goal of co-operation never forgetting that we are all dependent on one another.” This gallery of portraits focuses on people he met on his continuing journey.
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A fool of my acquaintance told me, “This is the most racist movie I’ve ever seen.” The Blind Side patently isn’t racist, but anyone of a PC, liberal or atheist bent will feel a little queasy at times during the film, dealing as it does with a black teenager being “rescued” from a life of financial and emotional poverty by a Southern Christian woman, Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock giving a towering performance, which won her the Oscar for best actress last night).
John Lee Hancock's film is a fairly straightforward adaptation of Michael Lewis's biographical book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. Michael Oher is virtually homeless when Leigh Anne spots him wandering the streets of suburban Memphis one freezing night, dressed only in shorts and T-shirt. When her daughter Collins (Lily Collins) tells her he attends her Christian private school (because of his bulk, the gridiron coach had persuaded the school’s governors to offer him a free education), Leigh Anne invites him home for the night. But what was a simple offer of a bed becomes a lifetime commitment as the Tuohys learn Michael’s backstory in Memphis’s mean projects; he is literate but cannot settle in a classroom, having attended 11 schools in nine years. He is one of 12 children, his father is dead and his mother a crack addict, and he is severely introverted.
We soon realise that Michael and the Tuohys are both benefiting from this arrangement. They become his guardians, he thrives through learning to play American football, and they encourage him to have ambitions of gaining a college scholarship, while they learn something about the responsibility that comes with fabulous wealth and privilege. But Michael’s grades are abysmal, so they hire tutor Miss Sue (Kathy Bates) who has one of the film’s best lines, which feeds another. Seated in the Tuohys’ Southern mansion, deep in all-white Republican territory, Miss Sue accepts the job with the words, “There’s something I have to tell you... I’m a Democrat.” Later Leigh Anne’s husband, Sean (country singer Tim McGraw), says, "Who ever thought we would have a black son before we knew a Democrat?"
But it isn’t a first-straight-to-last-base (to introduce a different sporting metaphor) success story, as conflict comes when college authorities question whether the Tuohys have put undue pressure on Michael to accept a place at their alma mater, where they met and to which they donate considerable amounts of money. It’s in this segment that we can question whether Leigh Anne's actions are driven by a truly Christian ethic or because she’s a control freak. We see also the sneering, racist hypocrisy of some of Michael’s teachers and Leigh Anne’s Southern-ladies-who-lunch friends. While they push $18 salads around their plates, one of them asks, “Aren’t you worried about a black boy sleeping in the same house as your teenage daughter?” It’s a shocking, horrible moment.
Quinton Aaron as Michael, who says very little but is required to do a lot of acting, has a beautifully expressive face and manages to convey a huge range of emotions - love, disappointment, confusion, anger, to name a few - with just a flicker of his eyes or a shift in his body. When we first meet him he looks lumpen; when he is delivered by the Tuohys to his new college he has grown into his bulk and has already begun changing into the commanding athlete he now is. Oher graduated last year with a degree in criminal justice and now plays for National Football League team Baltimore Ravens.
This is the role of Bullock's career, and McGraw gives great support as Sean, who has long since learned that his force-of-nature wife is best allowed to have her own way. Jae Head provides much of the film’s humour as their young son, SJ, delighted to have gained a big (in every sense) brother overnight and I’m delighted to report that his scenes, while always touching, are never cutesy.
And back to the racist charge. Unless you are willing to accuse Oher - who cooperated with the makers of this movie and news footage of whom appears at its end - of being a self-hating African-American (and he’s a big guy, so I wouldn’t), then you have to accept this is a true story with which some dramatic licence has been taken. Rather, The Blind Side neatly exposes America’s two-nation statehood, which divides just as much along class as colour lines. More disturbing for many is that the film shows what their faith demands of a true Christian (or, for that matter, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, etc) when they are faced with someone who desperately needs their help. And the possibility of faith-based humanity being a force for good sits uneasily for some, I believe.
For the rest of us, however, The Blind Side can (odd awkward moment aside) be enjoyed as something Hollywood does reassuringly well - the redemptive, feelgood movie.
What would you imagine the composer John Adams might choose to conduct – apart, that is, from a little something he himself made earlier? Well, the first of two London Symphony Orchestra concerts this week brought no big surprises: Sibelius’ Sixth Symphony was in essence a little like returning to his minimalist roots – a bunch of insistent melodic cells and dancing ostinati. Flanking it, as if to reassert that everything Adams writes is essentially operatic, was orchestral music born of opera: Adams’ own Doctor Atomic Symphony and the “Four Sea Interludes” from Britten’s Peter Grimes. Adams, the conductor, had his work cut out.
On a day when the sadly premature death was announced of a truly great Peter Grimes – the remarkable Philip Langridge – this astonishing music might have unfolded with an added poignancy. But as dawn broke over the Suffolk coastline and upper strings cast their first glinting reflections of early light, it was plain that Adams’ composerly precision was going to mark out too many barlines for the music to “evolve” in any meaningfully evocative way.
This is technically treacherous music for any and everybody performing it and the light only catches the water convincingly when the time-beating becomes unobtrusive. Adams spent too much energy ensuring that the devilish syncopations of “Sunday Morning” or the flecks of “Moonlight” landed where they should. He and the orchestra did not make light of anything. It was like someone said of Toscanini in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony – Adams was just waiting for that storm. And when it came it was pretty full-on – until that glorious moment just before the final squall where the violins recall Grimes’ haunting phrase “What harbour shelters peace?” Adams really opened this out and in so doing at last made music.
He and the orchestra were much happier surfing Sibelius’ Sixth Symphony. There isn’t a composer alive who doesn’t think that the opening measures of this marvellous piece constitute the most beautiful polyphony we have. It is like turning the pages of some ancient illuminated manuscript – nothing, but nothing, prepares you for the dancing allegro molto which follows. Adams had a ball with it, locking into those motoric repetitions (or doing what comes naturally) and really making rhythm sing. Composers love the gamesmanship and intrigue of Sibelius’ music and Adams revelled in the obliqueness of the first movement’s strange closing measures, its indecision about how to end punctuated with gaping silences. And was there ever a bigger question mark hovering over the final diminuendo in violins and violas?
Adams’ own Doctor Atomic Symphony has slimmed down by 20 minutes since its Proms premiere in 2007. Its continuous one-movement span (echoes of Sibelius’ Seventh) is truly an attempt to make something convincingly symphonic of the opera’s “innards”, opening like the main title of some 1940s sci-fi movie – all gothic rhetoric and master-the-universe brassiness – and ending with the most beautiful music Adams has ever penned: his quasi-baroque setting of John Donne’s “Batter My Heart” which is about as memorable an act one curtain as anything written since Peter Grimes.
Kathryn Bigelow made Hollywood history last night at the 82nd Academy Awards by becoming the first woman to be named Best Director for The Hurt Locker, which also won for Best Picture. Her brilliant, low-budget Iraq war drama was the big winner at the ceremony, bagging six statuettes as against three Oscars for the co-favourite, Avatar, the sci-fi extravaganza directed by Bigelow's ex-husband James Cameron. The four acting awards were utterly unsurprising and it was a lean night indeed for the Brits, although the respected costume designer Sandy Powell - previously a laureate for Shakespeare in Love and The Aviator - won her third Oscar for The Young Victoria. A full list of nominees follows below.
What a joy to welcome Dara O Briain back into the stand-up fold. The Irishman has been away from live performance for five years because he has been busy hosting the panel show Mock the Week and mucking about in boats on various Three Men... series, both on the BBC, and writing a travelogue, Tickling the English, which is about to be released in paperback. His hunger to interact with an audience is almost palpable as he strides to the front of the stage.
O Briain is one of the brightest and most quick-witted comics around as the first half of this show (which I saw at the glorious Winter Gardens in Margate) attests. He picks on various people in the front row - not in a horrible way, you understand; he may be a big guy, but he’s no bully - and strikes comedy gold. A science teacher - whose mathematical shortcomings are cruelly pointed out - and then a non-commercial toilet-fitter (yep, I didn’t know there were different kinds of toilet-fitters either) try to outwit him with arcane details of their jobs. But O Briain trumps them each time, seamlessly fitting jokes and anecdotes around each piece of information he elicits from them. He’s also done his research and makes much fun of the venue’s history and its locality.
The immediate good humour in the room is helped by the fact that O Briain is currently carrying an injury. He recently badly scalded one of his feet and so takes to the stage in socks. “It’s not a Sandie Shaw thing,” he tells us. “Just that I can’t put my left shoe on. And if I can’t put my left shoe on there’s no fecking point in putting the right one on.” Fair point, well made.
There’s no theme to this show - just O Briain talking about stuff that moves him to irritation or bemusement, whichever comes sooner. So we hear that he thinks Ben Fogle and James Cracknell are twats - “What’s the point of them?” - and he doesn’t rate chiropractors, but he isn’t going to diss Muslims because, unlike Catholics, they don’t make him give up sweets for Lent. He mentions becoming a father since he last did stand-up, but says he won’t be doing material about it because it’s puke-forming when comics do that. He does, however, manage to get about four non-soppy jokes in that statement.
In the second half of the show O Briain does more extended routines, including one in which he hilariously skewers the modern middle-class mores of birthing children. He also talks about video games and the idiocies of apocalyptic film 2012, neither of which subjects in any way interests me (and I suspect a fair share of his audience), but here O Briain is entering newer, more surreal territory than previously, and as both build into bizarrely logical unreality one has to admire the clever constructs and his passionate delivery.
After an almost three-hour set that never palls and in which neither warmth nor energy drop, O Briain draws together all the threads of the evening in a riff that he must have composed in the interval. At Margate, he was on such a buzz he started sliding across the stage like a six-year-old at a wedding and this delightful and frankly bizarre sight of a 6ft 4in man sliding aaround in his socked feet is one that I will carry in my head for some time. For future audiences’ sake, I hope O Briain retains the joys of doing his Sandie Shaw impression for a while longer.
“The Mob made Vegas,” says its mayor since 1999, Oscar B Goodman. And he should know, having defended plenty of mobsters in his time when - he and I are equally quick to point out - he was a defence attorney and didn’t know what they were really up to. What a trick presenter Alan Yentob missed here; he could have simply chatted to this wrinkly, wily New Yorker transplanted to the Nevada desert and The Lure of Las Vegas (shown as part of BBC Two’s Vegas night), produced and directed by Janet Lee, would have been a whole lot more entertaining.
What we got, this being an Alan Yentob documentary, was a lot of shots of Alan Yentob talking, Alan Yentob walking, Alan Yentob driving and Alan Yentob lying on his hotel-room bed thinking out loud. Which is a shame as Las Vegas is an extraordinary American city, a contradiction in every way; a place called Sin City that was settled by the Mormons, a one-time Mob town that has transformed itself into a family holiday destination, and a location once known for offering quickie divorces that is now the country’s top wedding destination (there are 120,000 nuptials solemnised there each year).
Yentob was trying to do too much in 75 minutes - part travelogue, part arts documentary, part history programme - and ultimately disappointed on each score, offering us only tantalising glimpses of what The Lure of Las Vegas might have been if presented by a journalist with a nose for a story or an arts critic with an interest in the subject.
Vegas is, after all, a film-set in its own right, and has invented both a genre of pop art in its neon-bedecked Strip and a style of architecture - “architainment” - in its fantastical hotel creations, which reference everything from North Africa and New York to Venice and the Pyramids. These subjects all had a talking head to give a sentence or two to explain (sometimes rather dismissively), but Yentob, while almost ever-present, appeared often irritatingly unengaged.
Vegas is also known as an outdoor museum of American culture, and is a city that once boasted a Guggenheim museum and still has a restaurant with Picassos on its walls. But not a flicker from the presenter; even when he visited a junk-yard where he came across old neon signs from long-demolished hotels and casinos - pieces of Las Vegas history that count as its crown jewels - Yentob appeared to be about as turned on as a 20-watt bulb.
Many of the above - not to mention the honourable Mayor Goodman - would be worth a programme in their own right, but instead we got the usual Vegas by numbers: archive footage of its massive post-war development by the Mafia, the Rat Pack, Elvis and Liberace, who established it as an entertainment centre, present-day wedding chapels and gaming tables, but no development of a central thesis.
Some more original strands certainly excited my interest. For instance, Vegas’s increasingly monolithic, monochrome architecture is, we were told, a sign that a city once known for its hedonistic excesses is now aiming to go upmarket and attract rich, celebby high-rollers who value their anonymity at the gaming tables and in spa hotels. And I shall be listening to The Killers’ song lyrics rather more carefully after hearing their frontman Brandon Flowers talking briefly about how being brought up as a Mormon in Vegas (followers of the faith form 12 per cent of the local population) has influenced his music. Listen to “Somebody Told Me” with that knowledge, by the way, and it takes on a different meaning.
Fascinating, too, but surely deserving of more airtime was Jerry Weintraub, one-time Las Vegas music promoter and producer of Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen (2001-2004), the first of which was a remake of Ocean’s Eleven (1960), in which Frank Sinatra et al made criminals look super-cool. He visited the set of the 1960 film, as he knew many of those involved back in his native New York, and two of Weintraub’s Ocean’s films are a love letter to a place that clearly fascinates him to this day. Ultimately, though, The Lure of Las Vegas was a frustrating watch for anyone who knows this weird and sometimes wonderful city, and for anyone who hasn’t been there its attractions remained unexplained.
How far is too far? That’s the question which underlies the nihilistic versifying of Bobby Spade, white-suited barfly bard, the laureate of oedipal self-loathing who swims in a miasma of misogyny. Spade is the deeply strange, deeply funny creation of Phil Nichol. In this show the no doubt decent Nichol doesn’t get a look in. Where Rich Hall brings on his alter-ego Otis Lee Crenshaw in the second half, Nichol comes on as Spade and goes off as Spade. And, boy, does he go off.
It’s hard to credit that Spade bubbled up in the head of a Canadian comedian. Without wishing to stereotype, you expect something a little more sweet-natured from that quarter. Before two minutes were up Bobby Spade had told a series of defiant jokes about deafness, blindness and Parkinson’s. He took some getting used to. His first grim-faced recitation was greeted with bewildered silence, evidently anticipated. “Don't spoil it with applause!” he commanded. As the performance wore on, it became necessary to disobey.
You don't need to have spent your nights being harangued in smokey clubs by jazz-backed beat poets spouting doom-laden worldviews to appreciate the subtleties, such as they were, of this startling parodic creation. Nichol evidently has a dark side which he puts into the mouth of a character who, being manifestly dysfunctional, can get away with it. Jimmy Carr does it, argued Spade as he trampled another taboo underfoot. In his pristine two-piece, episcopal shirt and carefully slicked mop he even looked a little like Carr’s demented doppelganger.
Unlike Carr, Spade sings, like a deranged Baptist preacher, possibly possessed and speaking in tongues. His songs and rhymes are unremittingly dyspeptic messages from the front line of misery and hate. “Life is grim,” proclaims one. “You can’t say that to me” screams another. He concluded with a song which enshrined the only logical response to an hour of gazing into the abyss of his own navel. Its title: “Kill Yourself”.
But not before doing damage to others. Although he claims to hate both sexes equally – in a typically adroit play on words, he’s “bi-furious” - Spade is mostly fixated on mining his catastrophic relationship with women. Naturally it all goes back to the mother who, in one free verse paean, he claims to have dispatched. Then there are the wives. He’s been married four times, divorced once, leaving open the question of how the others exited the contract. We discovered that they were all reliably unfaithful. Spade told a series of boiler-plate jokes – why did the chicken cross the road?/knock knock etc – and each time the answer led back to marital betrayal. Hilarious. One song was called “Helen Keller’s Fella”. A poem referred to Snow White’s nether topiary arrangements. “You have the most boobs” was the smoothest compliment in his locker. The only people Spade seems inclined to look up to got their own song, “Haemophiliac Albino Cowboys”, which is of course a hedge-betting exercise in scattergun offence. Spade is an expert at that.
It’s not quite true to say that Nichol is unseen in all of this. Declaiming Spade’s lyrics in rapid-fire bursts from a crumpled cribsheet, he sometimes mangled the punchline and, edging out of character, would even admit it. So how far is too far? One song got a little bit too fallopian for my taste. But others in the room carried on rocking with laughter, and not all of them sad lonely women-hating losers. Maybe even none of them.
Mastery was always going to be the overriding virtue of Mariss Jansons's latest appearance; his many visits to London with one or other of his continental superbands guarantee nothing less. But would it, to paraphrase Callas's immortal masterclass question, favour expression or fireworks? The options remain open, for Jansons at least, even in as severe a work as Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, unquestioned masterpiece but also a tour staple. Jansons steered his cultured, mobile Bavarian players neatly, not dispassionately but a little weightlessly through every gear change of the titanic first movement. It was a Sarah Waters novel, an elegantly negotiated page-turner, rather than a Hilary Mantel epic written in blood. Then, with the liberating horn cry of the pivotal third movement, expression conquered all and never let go.
There was I, up to that point, very grateful to be hearing so fresh an approach to a heavyweight, admiring the way the crack Bavarian players sang and danced in every line that so often stays numb until the mechanics of horror let rip, but wondering what the many younger listeners in the audience might be taking from the masterclass. They would sense the shape and urgency of Shostakovich's symphonic argument, but would they feel what the likes of Rostropovich and Svetlanov always told us about the infinite suffering of the late Stalin years, followed by the ambiguous transcendence of 1953, when the symphony was completed? Jansons not only dared to beam as he urged on the players in his energetic guidance; he even seemed to be having fun with the unstoppable machine of the whirlwind scherzo. For once, the ghost of Stalin didn't have to rear his ugly head; this was symphonic rhetoric pure and powerful.
You couldn't fault the muscle and the inner fire of adaptable strings, the sense of physical freedom which has come late to these German orchestras - I only first saw it in the Berliners when Rattle arrived on the scene - and which was so superbly embodied in the youthful woodwind section: first flute reaching to very unusual alto colours in his low register, clarinets on creepy tiptoe in pairs, later the most vocal and expressive oboe solo I've ever heard in the finale's introductory yearning for release.
But everything changed at that point two-thirds of the way through the symphony when Shostakovich, having yanked his personal signature of four notes into marionette mode and rictus smiles, opens a window on a stifling room with the first horn. It doesn't matter whether his emancipating call is another musical acronym, this time of a student love-object, or the opening of Mahler's Song of the Earth - though that seemed even more likely to me in a performance like this, where artificiality suddenly came smack up against open skies. Jansons held the tension, and could have gone on to the further battles of the finale without a break, so intriguingly did the unresolved conflict between horn and woodwind hang in the air . He didn't, but having placed that crucial change of light so unerringly, the argument could afford to relax towards a genuinely exuberant last dance.
It was, of course, Mahler who paved the way for Shostakovich's bigger symphonic canvases, and so it made sense last night to plunge first into the regrets of his early Wayfarer songs which sowed so many seeds in his own symphonies. Given once-easy baritone Bo Skovhus's disconcertingly hardened, bony sound, all the warmth, sensuousness and sympathy had to come from the orchestra. And it did, Jansons pinpointing like few Mahler interpreters every fleck of psychological detail from the hard metal of the wedding triangle which rings so bitterly in the jilted lover's ears to the little group of first violins leaning on the funeral trudge of the wayfarer's farewell to his village. Skovhus was certainly attentive to what his orchestral conscience was telling him, and cut like the knife of the third song; but brief euphoria and the few moments of spiritual ease could not hope to scythe through his physically tense delivery.
Ease, marshalled with paradoxical care, was the lovely keynote of the first, perfect encore: the gentle spirit of Tchaikovsky's Lilac Fairy hovering in the wings to dissolve Shostakovich's high drama with the Panorama from The Sleeping Beauty, albeit at a daringly slow speed and with a slightly arch but incontestably dewy pianissimo reprise that would have startled the composer. As would the kick up the fairy's backside administered by the drunken Shabby Peasant of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, a final riot that might have had a little more threat behind it than an encore should but which nevertheless set a lucky, very happy audience roaring again.
The career of Simon Russell Beale (b. 1961) needs little introduction. It took wing with the Royal Shakespeare Company but, give or take the odd foray into other buildings, including work with Sam Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse and more recently with the Bridge Project, he has made the National Theatre his home. Of all the Hamlets seen in the past 20 years, his seems to be the one that more than any remains unforgettable in the collective memory. Meanwhile, anyone who saw him as a camp King Arthur in Spamalot may not have guessed that long before Russell Beale took acting seriously, he took singing seriously. Hence Sacred Music.
The first series of Sacred Music was shown on BBC Four in 2008. Its quartet of films focused on French plainsong and polyphony, moved to Rome to investigate the heated atmosphere of intrigue against which Palestrina composed, then returned to England to celebrate the work of Tallis and Byrd. It finished with Bach. Leaving his box of thespian tricks unopened, Russell Beale proved an enlightened, engaging guide, while alongside him the conductor Harry Christophers and his choir The Sixteen (pictured below) explored the music in performance.
The second series of Sacred Music, also featuring The Sixteen, brings the choral story up to the present day. The first film compares the German Requiem of Brahms with the masses of Bruckner. In the second, Russell Beale returns to France to explore the religious compositions of Fauré and Poulenc. For the third, which examines the role of liturgical music under communism, he meets Arvo Pärt in Estonia, and in Poland visits the intensely Catholic world of Henryk Górecki, whose Symphony of Sorrowful Songs became a sudden and unlikely pop chart hit when championed by Classic FM. Finally, Russell Beale returns to Britain to interview three living composers: James MacMillan, John Rutter and John Tavener.
The interview took place in the National Theatre, where Russell Beale is performing opposite Fiona Shaw in Dion Boucicault's 19th-century romp, London Assurance. Through the window he could look down the river to the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, where from seven to 13 he was a chorister. He talks to theartsdesk about the making of Sacred Music and reflects on his own decision to veer away from music and into theatre.
JASPER REES: To begin at the beginning, how did your involvement in Sacred Music come about?
SIMON RUSSELL BEALE: My agent got a phone call. I don’t know whose idea it was but I presume they must have known I was a choral scholar. They said, would I present it? And that was it. I didn’t really have any choice over the composers in the first series. In the second series we did have a meeting where we talked about options. Whether there’ll be a third series I don’t know, but if there were there are certain things we missed out. We go up to the present day so it looks as if we’ve completed the story, but of course we’ve missed out Monteverdi, we’ve missed out Gabrieli, we’ve missed out Gesualdo. And I thought the Wesleys would be fascinating - that story of Anglican church music in the 19th century which wasn’t its heyday but then ended up with marvellous things in the Edwardian period by Elgar and Parry and all that, and even late Stanford. That’s all missed out.
Did you sense you were listened to in the meeting?
I think I was, but I was only saying things that they were perfectly well aware of, like, “This is unaccompanied music you’re talking about, so you’re going to miss out the whole of the late 18th, early 19th century, the great Viennese composers, because they all had an orchestra." We were allowed an orchestra for Fauré’s Requiem.
And, instead of a full orchestra, four hands on a piano for the German Requiem.
Which actually was Brahms’s arrangement.
You chose the German Requiem as one of your Desert Island Discs.
I can’t get over Brahms. I think Brahms is just astonishing. And some of the soundtrack on the Brahms programme, the D minor piano concerto which they use as part of the soundtrack although it’s got nothing to do with sacred music at all, just makes me weep. And that has an emotional impact that I think is probably the most intense of all the composers we look at, even the French ones, which I love. Bruckner is a mystery still, actually.
Can you explain why?
Erm, oh God, why is it? These three great masses - I like the second one, the E minor one, which is actually with an incomplete orchestra. In the programme we used brass instruments for that. He doesn’t feel released in the way that Brahms does. His sense of history and his sense of writing within the Catholic tradition are so intense and so important to him that I always feel he’s slightly hemmed in by the requirement to be accurate. We know that he did this extraordinarily intense training with Simon Sechter of harmony and counterpoint, and he was obsessive about correct voice leading and correct technique. And I get the slight feeling with the pieces that he is composing to another agenda. Whereas Brahms is much more released musically, I think.
Would this disparity have anything to do with the fact that, as you say at the start of the first programme, one of them composed sacred music as an affirmation of personal faith and the other disavowed belief in God?
Absolutely. I think that’s the theme of the programmes, actually, in the end. All of them. It became obvious that that was the underlying question. I mean, there were two underlying questions. Firstly, can a non-believer write convincing religious music? And the second one is, who is this music for? - which is asked in the last one directly. I think they are sort of related.
Do you reach a conclusion about who these living composers are directing their music at?
John Rutter is the most fascinating character in that last story, I think. Even a choir as sophisticated as The Sixteen, let alone choirs that are less accomplished – he is absolutely beloved by them, and they appreciate his phenomenal skills even in pieces that people regard rather snobbishly as not great music. And he has written some wonderful music that’s serious. And he is the agnostic in the programme. Oddly enough, he is writing directly with a sense that this is a personal expression of the praise of God for those choirs who are singing it. He has an absolute understanding of that. James [MacMillan] does the same thing, perhaps even more directly, because he writes for his own choir like Bach did. Tavener is slightly more remote and I think Tavener would see that he’s writing for God rather than the choir.
Picture left: Simon Russell Beale plays the temple bowl at the Greek Orthodox cathedral of Saint Sophia (photo Mark Allan)
There is a lovely phrase of MacMillan’s in the final film: “Singing prayers is the best way of praying.”
“He who sings prays twice.” Is that Augustine? I think it is. Tavener’s writing within the Orthodox tradition where music has a slightly different function: it’s a portal to heaven and the ikon is a method of meditating on the godhead. Whereas John’s writing and perhaps James’s even is about our yearning for God rather than an expression of God. I’m treading on dangerous ground here because I’m theologically not acute. Also of course I’m not a believer, which I say in the last programme, which I thought was very important to say. There does come a moment where you end up talking about God and you think, it sounds as if I believe it as well.
So the state of your faith is officially what?
Agnostic, still. Can’t do it.
‘Twas ever thus?
‘Twas ever thus. And I can’t do the big leap. I cry at Songs of Praise on Sunday afternoon. In fact the only time I have time to watch television is on Sunday evenings and so I have this indulgent safe two hours of Antiques Roadshow, Songs of Praise and Lark Rise to Candleford or something and go to bed in a haze of comfort. No, it still has an enormous emotional power.
Did you for a while as a boy, singing in that church you can see through the window, at least try to believe?
I remember in Confirmation I tried. There is a yearning though. If only something would happen. I don’t mean something ghastly. If only something would happen to my brain. I’d be perfectly happy to be a believer, if it could just click.
Have you discovered in the making of these programmes that the state of the composer’s faith makes no difference to the heavenliness of the music?
I suppose it’s quite a simple answer to that question. These are in many cases geniuses that can do it and make us see God. Brahms is an interesting one because I think he did believe in a transcendent something, even if it was only a transcendent humanity or human beings’ ability and potential. And the Requiem is a passionate exploration of human need in times of grief. It would be too simplistic just to write him off as an atheist. Bruckner is a steady stream whereas Brahms is more fluid in his emotional impact. Like with Beethoven, there are moments where you go, how did he think of that? How did he get that? And that’s when heaven opens. And he must have been aware of that. That’s when the human spirit wants to fly, and that’s a religious impulse, isn’t it?
To what extent did Fauré’s experience of the Franco-Prussian War have an impact on his music?
Apparently it was a pretty terrible experience. In our construction of Fauré as a figure that’s not often mentioned, because he is seen a society figure. He’s seen as dapper, as a ladies’ man. And he writes this incredibly elegant tangential music, it’s all shrugs and sighs, and the Requiem itself is so delicately placed as a piece of emotional manipulation. I was always brought up to believe that the Requiem was for the death of his father. It’s about small-town France, I think. I know it’s Parisian through and through but it always sums up for me the world of Madame Bovary, small French towns and understated grief. We forget the impact that war had, but it must have been enormous.
And in the second film you talked to the broadcaster Michael Berkeley who thanks to his father had known Poulenc.
Obviously Lennox Berkeley knew him very well and Michael was obviously terribly fond of him. That’s the other big question about all of these great composers: what they were like to you and me, as opposed to what they wrote. And Poulenc was obviously a really fun guy.
There is a moment in the first programme where you extract a supposition about the personality of Brahms from looking at his portrait. Is it possible to look into the eyes of a composer and find there an explanation for his work?
I think Bruckner is the fascinating one. Part of the reason we showed the Brahms portrait is he was such a beautiful young man. And that’s again something one tends to forget. When he arrived at the Schumann’s house he must have looked like an angel. And there was sentimental old Schumann and tough old Clara sitting there and they were bowled over by this glorious angel who could also write this fantastic music. I mention the set of his mouth only because I had to play Schubert once in a film and it’s quite difficult playing a genius because you think, well does he know? Did Brahms know that he was a great composer? I think he must have done actually. Whereas I don't think Bruckner did. I think Bruckner’s portrait is much more disturbing (pictured right), because he’s got these rather fierce eyes and a beaky nose and is terribly insecure.
You weren’t able to meet Górecki.
No, he was ill.
However, as part of his story you interview Paul Gambaccini. I somehow never expected to see you two in the same room.
No. We’re like that [he crosses his fingers]. That was completely new to me, that story of the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. It’s an astonishing story, a completely random piece of radio marketing basically.
Can you see what it is in that music that Classic FM were able to excite in their listeners?
What I found odd was the idea of “relax” - relax and listen to a piece based on a poem scribbled on a Nazi wall. That’s what I found slightly odd. I’d never really listened to it. I had heard it like we all had during that period. And actually I have to confess that I was a little bit snobbish about it. I’ve had some wonderful experiences with minimalist music. Nixon in China, for instance, which was a fantastic evening in the opera house. I’ve always been slightly confused about minimalism. But having listened to all those pieces properly, and read analyses of them and all the rest of it, actually listening to them again was a completely different experience. It isn’t about “relax”. It’s a very taut piece.
Picture left: Simon Russell Beale and Arvo Pärt in Tallinn (photo Luke Finn)
You did meet Arvo Pärt.
It was a bit scary because I’m not a journalist and the thing I’ve loved most about these programmes is interviewing people. I didn't realise I really loved interviewing people. But you have to adopt a persona before you do that of confidence. I’m not an expert. I say to all these interviewees, “I know nothing.” I remember interviewing the Fauré expert who had lived for 20 years with Fauré’s music and just apologising, saying, “Look, this is not going to be an academic interview and it’s not to be a newspaper interview either because I’m not particularly interested in digging dirt or anything.” But Arvo Pärt - everyone had said he’s just impossible to get hold of and Simon Broughton who was filming that programme organised a lunch, just to meet him, which took place in Tallinn. It sounds sentimental but his eyes twinkled. This gorgeous man strode forward and said, “Ah, the great Simon,” which is of course incredibly flattering and he put me at ease. And from then on he and his wife Nora were just enchanting. I can’t tell you, they were just lovely. And also stupid things, like he got a parking ticket outside the restaurant. So we had this lovely lunch and then Simon said, “Would you mind coming to the Estonian radio studios just to hear this old interview you did?”
An old interview which under the Soviet regime had not been broadcast?
It was broadcast but the big question was cut. “Who was your greatest influence?” “Christ.” It was very moving watching it because it’s moving watching anybody listening to themselves 20 years ago. We just asked if the cameras could roll and I found it a really really really intensely moving afternoon. There was an extraordinary moment when he talks about leaving [the Soviet Union in 1974] after he wrote Credo. He uses a strange image like “entering a tunnel and then emerging naked”. So we just sat and chatted and then at the end he gave me a great big hug and wanted a photograph. And I thought, you’re a sweetheart.
You do a bit of participation. You play on Fauré’s organ in Saint-Sulpice in Paris.
Picture right: Simon Russell Beale at the organ of Eglise Saint-Sulpice in Paris with organist Daniel Roth (photo Luke Finn)
Yay! What’s wonderful is that it’s always late at night after the church has finished its duties for the day. I played some Bruckner on Bruckner’s organ in Linz. And then this extraordinary organ in Saint-Sulpice, with its amphitheatre-type layout which is oddly secular, you feel.
How good an organist were you?
I’m not an organist at all! I didn't do the pedals. I was playing a piano piece that I happened to have in my head. As you see in the clips, I haven’t completed a piece for years. There’s always some point in the middle where I go, “Oh fuck it, I can’t continue this.” In that particular instance I was playing a Bach fugue from The Well-Tempered Klavier. I get about eight bars in and go, “I can’t go on, it’s too complicated.”
When did you start the piano?
Five or six.
And when did you stop?
Seventeen. When school stopped I stopped having lessons. In fact I am in contact with a piano teacher but I’m doing a course in harmony and counterpoint, so that’s my obsession that is entirely as a result of the programme. I have a teacher called Robert Saxton who is a professor at Oxford. He takes me once a month and puts me through my paces.
What do those paces actually involve?
Lots of exercises in counterpoint and harmony. And we’re analysing the Goldberg Variations and some Haydn quartets.
Other than pure pleasure, is there a public goal?
Bless him, Robert said, “After a year ago you should compose something for a choir and see what happens.”
When you joined in with The Sixteen for the Fauré, it was a surprise to see you join the basses.
I can’t sing tenor any more. Actually to be honest that was a bit of a cheat because it’s a passage where the tenors and basses sing the same line anyway. I could say I was a tenor, but I can’t.
But when you were singing more seriously...
I wasn’t an easy tenor. I was a second tenor and I hated the upper range. This is part of the reason I never felt comfortable. I always said I was a baritone.
Could it be said that there is such a thing in theatre, as there is in opera, as a set of tenor roles and bass roles?
A Fach. Isn’t that what the Germans call it? Terribly pretentious word that people in England use. Your Fach – you are the soubrette, you are the lyric soprano, you are the Heldentenor, and you stick with that and it’s all you do. Singing out of your Fach is not often done. I’ve been extremely lucky in that I’ve been pretty Fach-less for most of my career, thank God.
Have you sometimes felt that you’re acting out of your Fach?
Yes, of course, and I’m sure lots of critics would think there have been many occasions out of my Fach. Hamlet was not out of my Fach but it was a borderline Fach moment.
I thought it was entirely within your Fach – a tenor role which vocally felt very right for you.
Well, actually psychologically it probably was within my Fach. Physically, probably not. I’m very pleased we don't have that restriction. I think it would be rather dull to be an opera singer, to be honest.
Picture left: Simon Russell Beale with John Rutter at St Bartholemew the Great (photo Luke Finn)
Which leads to the question... In the final programme, John Rutter describes writing for a choir as returning to his earliest roots. Does that phrase of his ring just as true for you? He describes the idea of watching a choir as being welcomed into a family. You of course come from a very musical family.
I think my attitude is a little bit more wary. I mean I don’t miss the singing at all, you see. And I don't miss that world at all. So when I watch The Sixteen they’re breathtaking in their technical skills and I keep on thinking, Gosh, I used to sing in choirs nearly as good as that like the Cambridge Chamber Choir, or whatever. But because I don't have any desire to be part of that world, I don't feel like John. I used to have a love-hate relationship with the whole singing thing. I never really felt relaxed doing it. My father was so extraordinarily skilled – it’s his life-blood, all that. Still is at 75. And it wasn’t mine, actually.
What I would say about John’s remark is I share his passion for its importance. He is passionately concerned about where the next generation of great musicians is coming from - and they are great musicians, The Sixteen – and the cathedral scholar culture and the organ scholar culture. I don't share his returning to the family thing. It’s more like we’re distant cousins.
For several years you were a chorister in that building you can see through the window.
It’s funny, I don’t long for it. I look at it and I think, God, a lovely building, and somehow it’s not really anything to do with me.
Has it anything to do with you as an actor? Did it somehow feed into your career?
I have absolutely no doubt that the discipline that they require of extremely young children is something that you never, ever, ever forget. I don’t think you can treat children for on an average two hours a day as professionals without having that effect on your professional life. When you watch an adult choir and occasionally you see people who hold up their hands, they are choir-school trained. It’s when they make a mistake. It means you know that you’ve made a mistake, you won’t do it again, the director of music or conductor can see that you know you’ve made a mistake which means that you won't need to go back over it. Now, eight-year-olds were doing that. The idea at the age of eight onwards that you can take responsibility for your own mistake – I think that induces some sort of professional attitude.
How good a singer were you when your voice broke?
Not.
Were you better as a treble?
No, I was a worse singer as a treble. I wasn’t a good treble. I was never given a solo, ever.
But you were good enough to be in that choir.
Yeah, but I think at seven almost any child can potentially sing.
I’m not sure that’s right.
There was a documentary made about the choir school about 10 years after I left and Barry Rose was head of music at that time and he said, “What I look for is very bright-eyed children. I look for bright faces.” Famously I was never ever given a solo. Ever. That’s quite something in six years. I think my relationship with the director of music there wasn’t the easiest. I loved the headmaster. I thought he was a wonderful man, and he had faith in me. I don’t think the director of music at the time had a lot of faith in me, to be honest. I was steady enough. I was made head boy and head chorister and all of that. But I was never a soloist. And I think that sort of affected my future musical performing level, including the piano.
And ultimately impacted on your decision not to sing professionally?
I never felt confident. I always at school felt confident on stage as an actor. My adult voice was quite pretty, quite elegant. It was tiny. God knows, I could have trained myself to become a bigger singer. I had a wonderful singing teacher at the Guildhall, a big Russian-type bass baritone. He gave me very strict talkings-to and said, "You are going to have to build it up again."
By that time you had already committed to training as an actor.
Well, in my head I had, yeah. But I hadn’t made the jump.
Had you made that decision quite a long time before?
Probably. But after university there is that funny period where I got a place to do a PhD and applied to merchant banks because that's what you did in the early Eighties. I didn’t know what I was going to do. And then did this funny thing of swapping over at the Guildhall, and phoning Dad up and going, “I want to be an actor,” and him going, “Thank God for that.”
So you swapped over after how long?
About six months. I can’t really remember but it was within the first year. And it was regarded as not done, really. I wouldn’t do it now. It’s amazing what you do when you’re young. I’d be more aware that this is simply not on, really. I wrote to the drama department and said, “Would you audition me?” And they wrote back and said, “Not really the way to do things but yeah, we’ll see you.”
How much of a relief did it feel to switch?
Actually it was huge.
Why?
Because I was doing something that I didn't feel anxious about. Singing is very anxious-making, it really is. Even in the very first series, the Byrd programme, I remember we were in a house in Essex where the family that Byrd worked for lived, and for a bit of fun some of the guys said, “Let’s sing a five-part. Go on, Simon, you sing the baritone line.” Which was fine for sight-reading. But I could feel the anxiety level rising. And listening to them doing the three-part mass and the alto entering first, I interviewed them afterwards and said, “Does it terrify you to have to sing the first note that’s heard.” How does the brain work to know what the first note is? When you’re singing a huge operatic role or something as tiny as the first entrance of the alto in the "Agnus Dei" of a Byrd three-part mass, that type of control is beyond me. Whereas “To be or not to be” I can actually say without worrying about “To”.
Watch a clip from the Sacred Music episode on Bach:
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It was Brian Wilson who started it. Eight years ago he toured Britain with a show that had at its heart a triumphant performance of his classic Beach Boys album, Pet Sounds, played – in a phrase that has become de rigueur when describing such events – in its entirety. Many more followed suit: David Bowie with Low, Sparks with Kimono My House, Lou Reed with Berlin (which in turn became a terrific Julian Schnabel film), while later this year Primal Scream will perform their epic Screamadelica album at the Olympia in London. And now John Cale is at it.
Last year in Cardiff Cale mounted a show featuring a performance of his classic 1973 album, Paris 1919, and here at the Royal Festival Hall the craggy Welshman repeated the trick, playing the album, as he announced at the start of the evening, “in its entirety”. And very lovely it was, too. Paris 1919 is easily the most accessible album from a man notorious for his seriousness and musical bleakness – it’s melodic, lush with strings, pleasing on the ear – and Festival Hall was the perfect place to mount such an undertaking: an immaculate acoustic, a stage big enough to accommodate the strings and brass of the Heritage Orchestra, a suitably serious ambience.
Slightly annoyingly for those of us with a disposition towards authenticity (some might call it pedantry), Cale toyed with the album’s running order, rejigging it to place “Macbeth” at the end. This was presumably so that it would serve as the big rock-out finale. In fact it was too restrained, too polite, lacking the glam-rock stomp of the recorded version.
But the rest of it was gorgeous. Cale – who managed to look both dapper and dishevelled in a grey suit, white shirt with the top button undone, skinny silver tie, his long hair streaked badgerishly with a flash of white, a little tufty goatee on his chin – stood throughout behind his Kurzweil keyboard, backed by his three-piece band and the unfesasibly young players of the Heritage Orchestra. His voice has never been the most elegant of instruments, but here he sounded remarkably clear and true for a man of 67. He even hit the high notes – just – on “Andalucia”.
The highlight of this section of the show for me was the title track. Although the drummer had put his sticks down for this one, it turned out to be the most rhythmic, propulsive song of the night – the thrummingly insistent strings forming an urgent counterpoint to Cale’s floating vocal melody.
The Paris 1919 album formed the first part of a show that went on to delve into Cale’s back catalogue, and to explore the darker side of the man. “Amsterdam” was drifty and sinister. “Femme Fatale” – the night’s only acknowledgement that Cale used to be a in a group called the Velvet Underground – was a bit too plinky and angular for my taste. But “Heartbreak Hotel”, Cale’s vision of Lonely Street as a place of screams and nightmares, was genuinely scary, all clanging synth and howling guitar. “Fear”, meanwhile, was glorious, its almost jaunty keyboard riff becoming deliciously nasty as the song progressed.
Relief from all this mental torture came in the shape of the dreamy “Hedda Gabler”, with the strings back in action, and “Dirty Ass Rock’n’Roll”, in which the band finally got a chance to really go for it. Cale, now sans jacket or tie, was rocking on his heels, his hair swinging, having fun. And once, right at the death, he even grinned.
Watch a clip of John Cale performing Paris 1919 at the Paradiso in Amsterdam:
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Benjamin Franklin once said that fish and guests start to smell after three days – and something similar happened to BBC One’s latest “event drama”, Five Days. The odour was that of decaying promise, and, if duty hadn’t called, I probably wouldn’t have hung around until the final episode of Gwyneth Hughes’s week-long saga. Not that it was boring exactly – in an unhurried, linear kind of way, Hughes’s storytelling pulled you in and kept you there. But the longer it went on, the more it felt like being held under false pretences.
It was all to do with some sort of seedy drugs mess in the end - the men in burqas, Afghan refugees and home-grown terrorists having been red herrings, lending local colour, as it were, to the plot without really being that integral to it. The final episode had an anti-climactic air, even with baby Michael being snatched from the hospital by the hard-faced whore Maureen, love of miserable misogynist traindriver Pat’s life. My biggest question wasn’t why she had taken the child, but when she was going to feed it, because by my calculation the bairn hadn’t supped all day.
The hot-headed Jamal meanwhile got arrested at a Remembrance Day service, Laurie (Suranne Jones) was hobbling around with her ankle in plaster, feeling teary after the death of her lover Mal (David Morrissey), while her mother Susan and her new boyfriend Gerard decided to get married. Bernard Hill and the great Anne Reid should get their own spin-off sitcom out of this – a wry comedy of ageing disgracefully. By the same token, if Suranne Jones doesn’t now get inundated with policewoman roles, then my name is George Dixon – the name, as it happens, of the BBC’s Head of Scheduling, and the man who decided we needed another of these five-night dramas.
How many of these “drama events” can we take before the gimmick loses its lustre? I’m not sure that this second series of Five Days doesn’t start to take the shine off the format, and it has been interesting to follow the nightly drop-off in viewing figures. Six hundred thousand viewers apparently decided that they had something better to do with their time than re-engage with the drama after Monday night’s opening episode, but that still left a respectable 6.8 million following the story. Wednesday’s England football game on ITV1 pushed that down to six million, but 400,000 returned for Thursday’s episode. Those are decent numbers for what was a decent drama, but had I, through choice, been one of those die-hards, then this series would have definitely made me feel wary about making the same sort of commitment in the future.
High summer in Paris. Jazz plays on the soundtrack, the boulevards are bright, leafy and humming and Grégoire, a good-looking man in his mid-forties, scuttles along the street, mobile phone glued to ear. He's troubleshooting on a truly international scale: the Koreans are arriving mob-handed, the Georgians are so demanding and that nutty Swedish director's budget is spiralling out of control. Grégoire is a movie producer, and Father of My Children starts out as a light-hearted, slightly madcap addition to the capacious genre of films about film-making. Slowly, though, it shades into something much more complicated.
Mortgaged to the hilt, Grégoire has built his production company and ambitious slate of hardcore arthouse movies on a sandbank of debt. A model father to his Italian wife and three feisty daughters, he keeps them completely in the dark; indeed he seems himself in deep denial about his desperate position. Less than midway through the film, the crisis erupts in a shocking and violent event that changes everything and everyone around him.
It's no secret that Grégoire was inspired by the tragic case of Humbert Balsan, a leading French independent film producer (whose own credits include a film by a mad Scandinavian, Lars von Trier's Manderlay). As Hollywood studios shutter their speciality divisions and the market shrivels for subtitled movies, his story could scarcely be timelier.
Yet this is much more than a film à clé: it's the portrait of a personality who might be mercurial, charming and utterly dedicated but who also has a streak of ruthlessness and egotism in him (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, an actor little-known to British audiences, brilliantly captures these shadings of darkness and light). As it proceeds, the narrative switches focus to investigate the price of his obsession.
The director, Mia Hansen-Løve, started out as an actress for Oliver Assayas- who is now also her life partner - and her work has something in common with Assayas's Late August, Early September or Summer Hours: a fast, zesty energy and thrumming humanism. For all the undoubted melancholy in it, it's warmly recommended.
Arthur Schnitzler belonged to a culture of inquiry and experiment, in which dreams and desire were crying out to be articulated and delineated; sexual needs were the unexplored stuff of life - how well Vienna painters like Klimt and Schiele knew this - and, as Freud worked it all out for us, not necessarily dangerous. Where better to bring this to flesh-and-blood life than on stage?
In London drama of the same era, from Wilde to Coward, men and women expected private confusion to be allayed by social solutions. Snobbery and repression, moreover, were good. In Schnitzler's Vienna, men and women hoped uninhibitedly to go to bed together. So it was a fair ask of the Young Vic to offer London at the very least an honest rendering of his piquant Liebelei (1895), rather than a merely facetious or underheated one.
Luc Bondy, directing, has given us something in between: a studied, stylish production, built on a highly accessible, attractively colloquial new translation as Sweet Nothings by playwright David Harrower. If it isn't as sexy as one might have hoped, it's wholly absorbing nonetheless, or at least it becomes so. Four party animals, Fritz, Theodore, Mizi and Christine, start the play flirting and feasting in a manner only the idle rich know how - the setting is more Waugh than Wilde - and I don't think I was alone in wondering where the hell the tippling, frivolity and foreplay (fully clothed) were headed. The first thirty minutes or so seemed incoherent.
Enter "A Gentleman" (an eerily still, Commendatore-like Andrew Wincott) to challenge a suddenly sober Fritz - Tom Hughes - to a duel. The youngster has been carrying on with the stranger's wife. The fun and games are over. The genuine love Christine - Kate Burdette - is nurturing for the feckless tike looks imperilled. His raffish best friend Theo (Jack Laskey) understands that death is a real possibility, and Mizi (Natalie Dormer), dead drunk, probably doesn't.
The play's second half pushes deeper into Christine's soul, and her anguish, yearning and dread of loss are really affectingly caught by Burdette: Sweet Nothings turns into her tragedy. She wants to break out; Fritz seems to be the answer to her dreams, but her musician father and a bourgeois neighbour, Katharina, are full of alarm and warning. It's a tribute to Bondy's by now superb pacing all through Act Two, and to Burdette's supple, unsentimental embodiment of innocence, that we suspect the inevitable - Fritz's demise - while praying, viscerally, that Christine avoids suffering.
The acting as a whole is a pleasure - Hayley Carmichael is a stentorian Katharina, David Sibley creepy as Christine's smothering father Weiring - but special praise must go to stage debutants Tom Hughes as Fritz and Natalie Dormer as Mizi. He is naturally charismatic, she entertainingly sassy, even lewd. Moidele Bickel's costumes are a joyful, luxurious complement to the actors. If Sweet Nothings doesn't smoulder, then that's because Bondy, with his designer Karl-Ernst Herrmann, has gone for a very beautiful look at the partial expense of probing psychology. Maybe more of the latter will become unburied as the show tours briefly in England, then headlines at the Vienna and Recklinghausen Festivals later in the spring.