This dreamy dance double bill gets under the skin
Dance Winter, Again/Dreamers Traverse, Edinburgh Mary Brennan
HERE’S a chalk’n’cheese double bill from Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT) that really showcases the talents, versatility, and technical elan of the current company.
Jo Stromgren’s Winter, Again has an off-kilter, tainted edge – his characters go stir-crazy when it snows – while the new SDT commission, Anton Lachky’s Dreamers, has technicolour bounce and a larky comic energy akin to cartoon capers. In fact, both pieces click together neatly, for they both go under the skin, as it were, to pinpoint what’s going on inside people’s heads.
In Dreamers, for instance, Audrey Rogero comes over all “phwoar...!” when confronted by three bare-torsoed men. Thoughts become actions as Rogero gleefully checks out physiques, from pecs to crotch, with a graphic interest that is hilarious – so much for her “demure miss in little white frock” appearance!
What lies beneath the pale grey suit of Francesco Ferrari? A cross between a bossy-boots tyrant and the child who liked to play Simon Says – his “dream” is to make everyone follow his orders, even when he’s talking in a gibber of nonsense syllables. It’s anarchy, the kind we all imagine as an antidote to dull routine. Lachky sets it leaping, spinning and exploding into witty, mercurial movement against the ordered beauty of Bach, Vivaldi, Haydn, Chopin and Vanhal.
Lust is what seethes and corrodes the individuals in Winter, Again. Blood lust, where passing animals are killed for sport. Carnal lust, where couplings are urgent, loveless sport. A daily lust to be cruel, to be one-up, to be selfish or stupid because the dark nights and the snow cover up sins against nature and other people. Flagrantly dramatic, and yet Stromgren weaves dark humour into the acts of predation he sets to Schubert’s Wintereisse.
Theatre The Fair Intellectual Club Tron Theatre, Glasgow Neil Cooper
WHEN a white-clad young woman lights a set of candles at the opening of Lucy Porter’s sleeper hit of the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, she ushers us into a very different age of enlightenment to the world history normally allows us privy to. Our hosts, after all, are Polyhymnia, Thalia and Clio, the three founder members of The Fair Intellectual Club, a female-led secret society operating in Edinburgh in the early 18th century as a counterpoint to the men-only hellfire clubs and salons that proliferated at the time.
As our three fiercely intelligent graces engage with each other as much as their brand new world of history, philosophy and big ideas, their intellectual endeavours are distracted by affairs of the heart, the wild new indulgence of chocolate and a looming matrimony which, as is so often the case, may break up the gang forever.
Or not, as the case may be in what looks like a pre-cursor to the free university movement. Revived by the Stellar Quines company with the original cast, Marilyn Imrie’s production serves up Porter’s charming treatise on self-determination with a froth that isn’t afraid to show off its author’s stand-up roots in a more formal setting.
Samara MacLaren, Caroline Deyga and Jessica Hardwick hold court like Greek goddesses en route to a getting of wisdom that goes beyond mere book-learning.
Their thoroughly modern ideas owe more to the sass of Girls than Sex and the City’s terminal vacuity. As Polyhymnia blows out the candles a final time, the trio blaze a trail for both in a delightful meditation on truth, beauty and the power that comes from embracing both.
Music RSNO Glasgow Royal Concert Hall Michael Tumelty
WELL, he’s older by 30 years, and so are we who are still around. But in the three decades since he took over the reins of the RSNO, Neeme Jarvi has lost nothing.
He’s been everywhere, and has conquered the musical world. But he’s still got that shoulder shrug, that wrist-flick and that sway of the hips which ignites and releases something in the RSNO, some of whose younger members might have been playing for him for the first time last week.
The programme was tailormade Jarvi material, which saw him as spontaneous and piratically-colourful as ever in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol, and absolutely welded to the phenomenal French pianist, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, in a blisteringly-precise account of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, in which Bavouzet, who, en passant, will make a brief appearance in this Saturday’s music column, created a wonderfully-effective mix of Prokofiev’s gleaming melodic genius, richly-harmonic colouring, and diamond-hard percussive pianism. (The encore was by Gabriel Pierne.)
Jarvi’s Shostakovich Five was simply a classic, a continuum which rolled from the power of the first movement to the Mahlerian grit of the second, to the melting beauty, melancholy and passion of the third, and on through that blazing finale, with the RSNO in thumping, thundering mode in the steamroller coda. Jarvi is still a genius of the push and pull of symphonic momentum.
It was completely compelling, as though he had never left the stage in the last three decades. The charming, beguiling encore, during which the mischievous Jarvi left the stage (while the band played on) went for a stroll, and came back to collect leader Maya Iwabuchi, was Lyadov’s Musical Snuffbox.
Music BBC SSO City Hall, Glasgow Michael Tumelty
HAND on heart and be honest. Was that not one of the most magnificent Donald Runnicles/ BBC SSO concerts we were treated to on Thursday night, in what promised to be one of the great weekends of the season?
It had everything, from its bronzed, golden Sibelius Finlandia at the beginning, to its blazingly-heroic Beethoven Leonora no 3 Overture at the end, with the SSO in incendiary form and Runnicles in total command of an evening that exemplified his stated mission to me, some years back in an interview, as “refine, refine, refine”.
In short, Runnicles is a conductor who matters, with a band which, 30 years ago on the periphery of things, is now absolutely central to music in Scotland. And if that assertion needed demonstration, it was all there on Thursday, with the most delicate, exquisite account I think I’ve heard of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto which, in the intimately-expressive hands of soloist Alina Pogostkina, and the masterly, unhurried, close-up-and-personal care of Runnicles and his ultra-responsive SSO players, was like chamber music, drawing you into its thinking. It was quietly and undemonstratively heartstopping in its beauty.
But no less heart-stopping was Runnicles’ shattering version of Sibelius’s Seventh and last Symphony, which was molten in the ferocity of its temperature. It was like being in a hot, locked box in which the sheer intensity of the music was crushingly-inescapable. I found that intensity almost intolerable. Why? Because nobody, including the great Osmo Vanska, has ever enshrined Sibelius’s message of this extraordinary symphony so starkly in a performance. The message? “This is the end; there will be no more from me.”
A searing, unforgettable experience.
Music SCO Wind Sextet Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Michael Tumelty
THERE is no need to extol the virtues and brilliance of the woodwind players of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra: they are renowned. But what was extremely pleasurable, and indeed informative, was to hear them out of their orchestral roles on Friday lunchtime, in their sextet format (no oboes in this repertoire: maybe another time) and delivering a concert that, without being remotely heavy, none the less had a point to make.
And the point, made with loads of stylistic authority, oodles of effortless technique, and endless subtle characterisation by the six musicians, Maximiliano Martin and William Stafford (clarinets), Peter Whelan and Alison Green (bassoons) and Alec FrankGemmill and Harry Johnstone (French horns) was an obvious one: that there is more to the species of music, variously called hausmusik, table music, Occasional music, and other things, than immediately meets the ear.
Yes it’s lightweight stuff, with no heaven-storming. But, as the group demonstrated in three of Mozart’s charming wee Divertimenti, that man was a genius in sophisticated balancing: he at once elevated the compositional stature of every nuance in these pieces, without a trace of pretension or overloading of their significance. The playing represented faithfully their character and worth.
Mozart apart, we had the bassoonists singing soulfully in Viana’s Fate, the cheekiest musical wink from Maxi Martin at the very end of Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Clarinet, and the grungiest French horn playing from that pair in some raunchy and witty duos by Schuller and Jackson, the Schuller being the legendary Gunther. Superb playing, great characterisation and marvellous music-making from SCO wind gang.