OAE what a night...

A classical concert for the ipod generation


Coriolan Overture, Beethoven
Symphony No. 7, Beethoven
OAE/ Vladimir Jurowski

4 stars

Either the discoball or the orchestra were in the wrong place. Surely? For the latest in their Night Shift series, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment took to the stage in the Roundhouse, Camden – a building which later this week will be hosting the KERRANG! RELENTLESS tour. Something of a departure, then, for both parties.

Since 2006, OAE’s Night Shifts have been quietly re-tuning the strings of the classical world. Audience members can wander in and out of concerts, applaud in between movements and even talk during the performance. But mobiles must still be switched off: as Jurowski joked, “we’re not that relaxed yet”.

After a warm-up act which saw experimental young performers rapping over the top of Beethoven themes, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment took to the stage to perform Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture and Seventh Symphony. Conductor Vladimir Jurowski started by offering a commentary on the music and throughout the performance large screens behind the orchestra zoomed in to focus on fingers spinning and sweat flying. This, combined with Jurowski’s decision to “rewind” the closing bars of the first movement – so the audience could hear how they led into the second – created a concert experience for a technology-driven generation. Jurowski even referenced the ipod as providing a context for the decision to separate each movement: as one might hear them on an ipod shuffle.

Despite all these trappings, it was still the music which held centre stage: Jurowski was a tautened spring of energy, stabbing the air with his baton to emphasise the martial rhythms of the Coriolan overture. Feeding on this, the orchestra gave every ounce of energy to produce a performance of the high standard we have come to expect from the OAE. The second movement of the symphony was imbued with a visceral power, as a result of Jurowski’s emphasis throughout on the relentless rhythms of the symphony. ‘Rhythm is our entire life,’ he said at one point, ‘even death has a certain pace to it’.

The question, though, is whether this kind of concert is “the future” or merely a passing gimmick. The large screens, the commentary and the contemporary setting made a valuable contribution to the audience’s experience of the music. But as far as the “relaxed” atmosphere goes? People did occasionally creep out to get another beer and some audience members did, even, take up the invitation to talk – although they were often briskly hushed by their neighbour.

Most of the audience, myself included, however, sat in silence. Not because we had to – this, as the OAE stated, was “classical music minus the rules” – but because we chose to. This music has survived over the centuries; it still has what Jurowski called ‘the power, after 200 years, to engage people as if they know what is going on’. I passed on a second drink and gave this magnificent music my full attention, because it deserves no less.

The next Night Shift will be in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 25 May.

The Habit of Art: Review

As a follow-up to my previous post...

The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett
National Theatre
Dir. Nicholas Hytner

3 stars

Auden has become a bore; Britten is paralysed by artistic doubts. Humphrey Carpenter, who later wrote both their biographies, floats on the periphery to provide what JD Salinger famously called ‘all the David Copperfield kind of crap.’ In The Habit of Art, Bennett brings the two artists together for a final (fictional) encounter and, in so doing, creates a play which explores the difficulties of recording a life: ‘I want to hear about the shortcomings of great men, their fears and their failings. I’ve had enough of their vision.’

We watch this play, though, at one remove: through the murky glass of a rather shambolic rehearsal. Richard Griffiths portrays, not only Auden, but also Fitz – the actor playing Auden; Alex Jennings plays not only Britten, but also Henry, the actor putting in his usual ‘plodding’ performance. And while a “play-within-a-play” can be a means of adding philosophical depth or knowing parody, Bennett’s “Russian doll” structure appears to be largely an attempt to excuse the play’s flaws, and smacks, instead, of navel-gazing.

The considerable strength of the play, however, lies with the characters at its core: Griffiths as Fitz and Auden effortlessly communicates the world-weariness of both actor and poet. Jennings as Henry and Britten presents a masterclass in pained restraint: what Auden in the play calls ‘England…taste, modesty’. The first half often shows Bennett at his best: here a joke seemingly out of nowhere, there an astute observation about life and art. Nicholas Hytner’s production is polished and lets Bennett’s erudite script take centre-stage. This is a work in which wit permeates every line and which, like The History Boys, wears its learning amiably on its sleeve.

The end of the play, however, is misjudged. Bennett has not one, but two plays to end: and he manages to conclude neither convincingly. Fitz interrupts, the Author dictates while Frances de la Tour’s mother-hen of a stage manager coaxes them all to the finishing line (‘Come on. Last lap’). In the final moments of the play, de la Tour delivers a bizarre eulogy to the National Theatre. Given that so much of the play is concerned with the people who are ‘left out’ (the rent boy, the author, the “real” Humphrey Carpenter), the decision to include a speech which immediately and drastically shrinks the play’s circle of relevance, seems short-sighted. Apart from anything else, it wipes out, at one fell swoop, any chance of a nationwide tour.

The Habit of Art feels, appropriately enough, like a work-in-progress: the script gives the impression of being the preparatory notes to a more polished and decisive play. In a diary entry from 1999, Bennett stumbles across notes he wrote for his play The Lady in the Van and finds himself ‘feeling…that [the finished play] is slightly to the side of a play I wanted to write.’ The Habit of Art, it seems, is the marginal annotation to the side of what could have been a much better play.

The Habit of Art is on at the National Theatre until April.

The Habit of Art and the Importance of Theatre

I can only offer my most profuse apologies for the shocking time lapse since my last post. As my distinguished readers may or may not know, I have recently moved to the metropolis, with all the stress, travel chaos and culture shock that entails.

It is fitting, though, that my first post since the move (nb: new name needed. Thus far, I only have “Art in a slightly warmer climate. Suggestions on a postcard), should be about the work of a migrant who made the same journey south around 50 years ago.

The director is away.
“At a conference on theatre in the provinces. In Leeds.”
[Cue laughter.]
I laughed, of course: who could resist Frances de la Tour’s acerbic wit and right-on-the-nail comic timing?

The play is Alan Bennett’s latest: The Habit of Art and, as he is a playwright who knows better than any the value of art in the provinces, he had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he penned this line.

But Kay, Frances de la Tour’s mother-hen of a stage manager hasn’t. And nor has this London audience. A conference about theatre in the provinces sounds like something Sir Humphrey Appleby would suggest, to ensure nothing was actually done. The whole idea of “provincial” theatre, so laughable that a conference on it is the apotheosis of the ridiculous.

It’s easy to be sucked into this mentality: with such a profusion of theatres, art galleries, orchestras and concert halls, it’s easy to forget that there is artistic life elsewhere. But there is: oh, there is. In my own dear Sheffield, the Crucible is just warming up for what promises to be a knock-out first season since its renovations: Anthony Sher stars in An Enemy of the People and John Simm tries his hand at Hamlet. In Halifax, a new translation of Euripides’ Medea by Tom Paulin will be first staled by the stage and Rosamund Pike will be wielding pistols with abandon as Ibsen’s terrifying and magnificent heroine Hedda Gabler in Bath.

And that’s only the theatre: in music Simon Rattle will be returning to Birmingham, and in visual art the Liverpool biennale will be making a paint splash…well, you get the picture.

It’s just that in London, everything is more condensed and, more revealingly, London is the home of the media: the critics and reviewers who the theatres depend upon for publicity and promotion.

But to return to Bennett. I can’t help feeling that this line about the provinces is a cheap shot. It pleases the London audience, of course, but given that one of the messages of the play is that “someone’s always left out”, the line seems short-sighted. The rent-boy is the one left out in the play, but more generally Bennett is referring to the uneducated (to be honest, it may as well be the un-oxbridged, as far as this Oxford-based, steeped-to-the-gills-in-academia play is concerned), the uninitiated and those from the provinces. Anyone, in short, for whom this book-filled, quotation-heavy world is unfamiliar and intimidating.

The end of the play, therefore, disappoints: Frances de la Tour delivers a eulogy to the National Theatre, the building, its founder, its beginning. The speech not only wipes out at one fell swoop, any chance of a nationwide tour but also shrinks the circle of relevance of the play. It alienates all those even slightly outside it, and, unfortunately, one feels, not entirely consciously and certainly not in the Brechtian sense.

"How am I to dress up in my finery, and go off and away to smart parties, after the sorrow I have seen to-day?"

Returning to my native Derbyshire after a brief sojourn in the South, I could not but notice the large signs to “The NORTH” as we crawled along the M5. Something about the use of capitals suggests fear-mongering: why not go all out and write “Here be Hippogriffs”?

Someone who knew better than most the impact of the historical North/South divide was Elizabeth Gaskell. Born in London in 1810 but brought up in Cheshire, she later moved to Manchester, where she lived for the rest of her life and married a well-known church minister. She was a devoted wife, mother…and author.

Gaskell’s most famous novel, North and South, hones in on the moment in history when the North, as a result of intense industrialisation, begins to impinge on the Southern consciousness. Margaret Hale, from the fictional southern town of Helston, is abruptly uprooted to Milton – a Manchester by any other name; John Thornton, played by a suitably brooding Richard Armitage in a recent adaptation, is one of the mill-owners of the North. However, it would be all too easy to argue that Gaskell’s novel embodies the North / South divide, or that it was proof positive that life in the North really was grim.

Enter Charles Dickens. Dickens was a great supporter of Gaskell: he recognised her talent and indeed North and South was published in the magazine he edited, Household Words. Dickens too is famous for his social novels which, aside from the wonderfully imaginative character names and unbelievably long sentences, also boast (although “boast” is perhaps not entirely appropriate) some of the most vivid and horrifying descriptions of life on the streets, in the prisons and in the workhouses…of the South. Things were not grim “up North”, then: they were just grim, full stop.

Gaskell’s novel does, of course, force its readers to look at the poverty and deprivation behind the cotton and riches of the North. But it also destroys the myth of the North / South divide. Margaret’s misery comes not from living in the Northern mill town, but from her loneliness, her mother’s illness, her still-raw sense of poverty: the list goes on. Her happiness, at the end of the novel, comes not from a return to the South, but from finding a friend, a kindred spirit and, finally (PLOT SPOILER) a husband in the form of John Thornton. The book can be – and has been – read as a crass morality tale in which the North and the South finally learn to overcome their differences and get on: Gaskell is more subtle than that. The book is not a lesson in overcoming differences but rather puts forward the theory that no such differences exist.

Pope and Swift; Scarthin and Scrivener's

Coffee arrived in England in the seventeenth century, sparking a profusion of cafes - the one in Oxford's Queen's Lane, est. 1654, still survives. These steam-filled, aromatic coffee houses became centres of intellectual activity and a symbol of the Age of Enlightenment – as Swift satirizes in his passage:

Sauntering in Coffee-house is Dulman seen;
He damns the Climate, and complains of Spleen

Starbucks may have conquered the capital but in a wet, windy and wild corner of the country, the coffee shop spirit still holds sway. Scarthin Books in Cromford, Derbyshire, complete coffee shop, may not look impressive from outside, but inside it has the logic-defying layout and fantastical dimensions of a J K Rowling creation.

Five-foot-high piles of books defy gravity, bookcases swing aside to reveal hidden rooms and staircases stretch seemingly endlessly upwards. Instead of the usual "mind your head" signs, pinned to the low ceilings, here one finds notes reading "Entirely unfair prize for tall people" - bang your head and win a book. It's not so much that this is a different kind of bookshop but that, once inside, you are forced to admit that you have never before encountered a true "bookshop". Waterstones, Borders and even, dare I say it, Heffers, are but shadows on the wall of Plato's cave compared to this wonderful, wacky establishment.

But that's just by way of introduction. Now onto the books. In his Areopagitica, Milton wrote:

'Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are'

and that same belief in the power of books is seen throughout both Scarthin and its rival and near neighbour, Scrivener's in Buxton, Derbyshire. Here, books are cared for in their frail, old age and even the oddest volume is prized for its quirks, its feel and, possibly most importantly, its smell. New books are too often all shine, sparkle and superficiality - the "it-girls" of the book world. The volumes that people the shelves (see Milton, above) of Scrivener's and Scarthin have character: personal notes to loved ones in the front, newspaper cuttings tucked inside the cover, line drawings coloured in by a child, now long grown-up.

These are not books to read and then discard: these are books to which one can return for reassurance and reference; books to pass on to the next generation; books which can be placed proudly and prominently on a bookcase. In short, books to be treasured. A visit to Scarthin or Scrivener's is a trip back in time and their beckoning armchairs, a welcome escape from the rain-lashed fields of a Derbyshire October.

'My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky'

‘In that county, there was enough to be seen, to occupy the chief of their three weeks…all the celebrated beauties of Matlock, Chatsworth, Dovedale, or the Peak…[but] It is not the object of this work to give a description of Derbyshire’

If only she had. Jane Austen’s fleeting reference to the ‘celebrated beauties’ of Derbyshire, in Pride and Prejudice, always leaves me wishing she’d elaborated. But is her instinct correct?

Derbyshire, and in particular the Peak District, is world-renowned as a place of natural beauty and as a hot-spot for every imaginable activity involving lycra. From mountain-biking to climbing, from caving to hiking, the Peak is the place to go. Rock climbing enthusiasts, for example, flock to the area for the bouldering (both indoor and out).

Is it wrong, therefore, to expect the area to be a fertile ground for the arts too? One doesn’t expect Stratford-upon-Avon to invest in a world-class bouldering wall: why should we, then, expect the Peak District to produce poets?

Because landscapes demand a response. Cows, sheep and horses may stare blankly at the view: humans feel an impulse to react, to interpret, to communicate; even if that communication is only a breathless “Wow!”

Of course, it’s often much more than a “wow”, as in the painstaking landscape paintings of John Constable. The effect of a landscape spread out before the eye was not lost on Constable: ‘There has never been an age, however rude and uncultivated, in which the love of landscape has not been in some way manifested.’ Whether it’s Constable’s depiction of cumulus clouds or Wordsworth’s description of a frozen lake, the impulse ‘to turn landscape into art’, as Margaret Drabble writes in her book A Writer’s Britain, ‘seems a natural one’. Drabble, however, suggests ‘it is hard to say precisely why painters and writers should labour to reproduce in paint or words what each of us can see with our own eyes’.

To my understanding, there is nothing strange, unexpected or baffling about this impulse: Forster grasped the kernel of the matter when he wrote ‘Only connect’; Alan Bennett’s Hector understood when he proclaimed ‘Pass it on, boys’. The need to share an individual experience lies at the very heart of the creative impulse: it drives writers to write and painters to paint.

When Wordsworth describes ‘O Derwent! winding among grassy holms’ or ‘the morning light…yellowing the hill tops’, we see the landscape as he did: that precise moment is captured in his words and recreated each time it is read. And that, to me, seems to be the point.

A Portrait of the Artist

It may not be the Uffizi, the Tate collection may dwarf it and it can’t touch the Louvre for sheer grandeur, but the Graves Gallery in Sheffield has its own attractions.

‘Art’, as Alan Bennett so concisely puts it, ‘is hard on the feet’: I vividly remember willing the endless corridors of the Uffizi to end so I could have a sit down. The Graves exhibition space spans no more than seven rooms and, Alan Bennett would be pleased to know, there are plenty of seats.

The Gallery opened in 1934 from the support of a local businessman, John Graves, who also donated his private collection. In a space high above the hustle and bustle of the city of Sheffield, the visitor to the gallery finds him or herself in a hidden treasure trove of masterpieces – ancient and modern – and with peace, quiet and semi-solitude in which to ponder them. People know about the Graves Gallery, of course, but visiting with one Sheffield resident (“I must have been before, on a school trip perhaps”) it became clear that these works – whose artists include JMW Turner, Pisarro, Gauguin, Cézanne and Lowry – remain a well-kept secret. At the more modern end, there is the well-known and controversial marble sculpture by Marc Quinn, Kiss.

These works are all in the permanent collection, but let’s turn our attention to one of the current temporary exhibitions: A Picture of Us? Identity in British Art. The exhibition organisers asked a host of writers, artists and musicians this question:

“Every picture tells a story. Which one tells yours?”

The result is a wonderfully eclectic collection ranging from a Henry Moore maquette chosen by Lisa Cheung to a drawing by William Blake chosen by one of the founders of the fashion label Red or Dead. There is no coherence to the collection – but this is no criticism – the artworks themselves are only one, rather small, part of this exhibition. This is an exhibition which examines why we like particular pieces of art, what it means to ‘like’ a painting, why and how we identify with a piece. Alan Bennett’s own view on this is that it’s ‘hard to divorce appreciation from possession, so I know I like a picture only when I’m tempted to walk out with it under my raincoat’. Kate Rusby chooses her painting (The Grey Mare, Alfred Munnings) because it reminds her of the shire horses she saw at country fairs when she was a child. Two of the pieces have been chosen by students from Sheffield: a huge mahogany Eve by Edna Manley was chosen by a student from Firth Park Community Arts College because ‘she is an African woman like me’.

The best element of this exhibition is not what the writers and artists tell us about the paintings, but what each chosen painting tells us about that particular writer or artist. Barry Hines, the author of A Kestrel for a Knave, chooses a painting of two Buffer Girls by William Rothenstein. Buffer Girls were an integral part of the Sheffield steel industry and have since become a symbol of both this history and the character of the city. Hines writes of the women, ‘they are not subservient, bucolic, or in chains, but gaze out strongly and with hope’. Hines went to school in Sheffield and, the exhibition tells us, has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Hines’ chosen picture captures something of the fabled pride, toughness and practical stoicism of the people of Sheffield; this choice, whether consciously or unconsciously, betrays a desire to tap into this strength in the face of his own personal struggle.

This exhibition runs until 5 December 2009.