Shanghai Symphony Orchestra
Usher Hall JJJJ
It’s hard not to be aware of the many levels of irony and self-awareness in a Chinese orchestra playing music by a Soviet composer that either conforms to or subverts (depending on how you look at it) the brutal strictures of a totalitarian state.
But that aside, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony proved an ideal showpiece for the sonic brilliance of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. It’s China’s longest-established classical orchestra, and its history shows in the sweep and sheen of its strings, its piquant wind, its bright, blazing brass. But despite the symphony offering a canvas on which all those could shine, it felt like a strangely detached performance, one whose notes were dispatched dazzlingly, but one whose story was perhaps struggling to be heard. Conductor Long Yu was in his element in the symphony’s ferocious, loud music – its coruscating conclusion almost threw the roof off the Usher Hall – but his slower music seemed rather flat in comparison, and somewhat lacking the depths of angst and despair Shostakovich surely intended.
Beforehand, Alisa Weilerstein gave a forthright, muscular account of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, high on power and projection if low on fragility and tenderness.
The concert’s opener – the piquant miniatures of Qigang Chen’s The Five Elements – showed off the orchestra’s remarkable finesse and balance magnificently.
DAVID KETTLE Britain, said Peter Hitchens, has been brought up on a diet of myths about the Second World War. It wasn’t glorious, because no war is. We weren’t at risk of imminent invasion because Hitler hadn’t even got round to assembling any landing craft. Dunkirk was an appalling defeat, not a glorious victory. We certainly weren’t fighting to save the Jews, our bombing of civilian targets was monstrous even at the time, and our guarantees to Poland were made knowing that we couldn’t possibly fulfil them. The war transferred all of our national wealth to the vaults of Fort Knox, and when peace was finally made, all we could really claim was that we had defeated the worst European power with the massive help of the second worst one.
He is, as chair Ruth Wishart introduced him, a “serial controversialist”, and an audience with him is rather like signing up for the Argument Clinic in the Monty Python sketch. You expect to be challenged, not just in the big questions but in the throwaway remarks too. Thus any discussion about appeasement is absurdly widened to take in the Good Friday Agreement, and he throws in the pressure on Israel to barter land for peace for good measure, while the EU is “the continuation of German power by other means”, essentially a peacetime version of Wilhelmite foreign policy.
Whatever about that, there
is at least a tiny kernel of truth to some of his critique of Britain in the Second World War, though it is far from the whole truth – which is, surely, as a questioner at the end pointed out, that wars are messy and, when examined in detail, it is always easy to find mistakes in their conduct. And even Hitchens, while keen to demolish the Finest Hour myth, had to admit that, in 1940 at any rate, Churchill really was indispensable.
The myth that David Nicholls was reacting against is a lot less contentious – basically the one that old age tells about youth, that it was forever care-free. “I don’t remember it like that,” he said. “More that all the practical jokes and gawkishness concealed something sadder and lonelier.”
He has written about love and coming of age before in Starter for Ten, but in his new novel Sweet Sorrow – of his five, the one he feels proudest of, he told interviewer Sally Magnusson – he wanted to do so again. “Because that time when you’re 16 or 17, is when you are still in a state of flux and just about beginning to ‘set’. And it’s important to be honest about how awkward and painful it can be. I did things then still make my shoulders rise to my ears.” He declined to elaborate, but he did at least read the funniest passage about that great teenage rite – The First Kiss – that I’ve heard at any book festival.
He was, he said more of a booky geek than his fictional characters, endlessly reading and watching TV and films in his teens and soaking up structure and the process of story-telling in his twenties as a slowly failing actor, then as a script reader and scriptwriter. Because he learnt this craft before he started writing novels, he said, his fiction is still dialogue heavy, and relies on a basic threeact structure and withholding information. He still hasn’t cracked screenwriting, he said (though anyone who saw his Bafta-winning adaptations of the Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels will disagree).
What he has cracked is the fine art of talking engagingly, informatively and modestly about his craft. Check out Sunday Morning with Sally Magnusson on Radio Scotland at the weekend, just after the ten o’clock news, and tell me if I’m wrong.
DAVID ROBINSON