The Daily Telegraph - Features
A riotous triumph of surreal silliness
Classical Everyday Non-sense
Purcell Room, London SE1 ★★★★★
More than a century ago, the Dadaists decided that art was a cheat and a lie, and set out to mock it with nonsense poetry, ballets for mechanical dancers, and a moustache painted on the Mona Lisa. Half a century later, their descendants, the neo-Dadaists of the 1960s, went further. At one of their elaborate “happenings” a naked cellist played; at another, the artist Nam June Paik jumped on stage and cut off John Cage’s tie.
There was no cutting of garments at Everyday Non-sense, Wednesday night’s homage to neo-Dada, and no naked cellists. But we did get some “classics” of neo-Dadaism, mingled with some proper (but silly) music, including Mozart’s very strange A Musical Joke, a delicious parody of a salon waltz from the French composer Jean Françaix, and fragments of the opera Le Grand Macabre by Hungarian mischief-maker György Ligeti.
Among the nonsense pieces were four composed by the well-known violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja (or “Patkop”, as everyone calls her), who conceived the whole event, and was at the centre of it. She’s become famous as the puckish soloist who infuses a spirit of folkish waywardness into performances of classic concertos. These days, she seems increasingly impatient with her role as a proper violin virtuoso, and last night she had the gleeful naughtiness of someone who’s finally thrown caution to the wind.
Patkop was just one of a dozen
The players’ opening gesture was to hurl screwed-up bits of paper at the audience
or so eccentrics on the stage of the Purcell Room, dressed as harlequins or cleaning ladies or wrapped in a dressing-gown. These were members of Aurora Orchestra, best known for their perambulating, choreographed concerts. Their opening gesture was to hurl screwed-up bits of paper at us, which on inspection turned out to be the evening’s programme – a witty way of saying “we don’t give a damn about the programme”, but which was also a performance of Mieko Shiomi’s Falling Event of 1963.
After that, the players roamed among the props, which included a dining table set up for a kiddies’ tea-party, a piano, an ironing board, and a kitchen. As they roamed, they hurled short pieces at us, often simultaneously.
A Musical Joke dominated proceedings for the first 20 minutes – maybe the evening’s only miscalculation, though it was played by Aurora with entertainingly madcap precision.
Meanwhile, Patkop – immersed in a bathtub – would burst out occasionally with some extravagant bit of violin virtuosity, or György Kurtág’s mad homage to Tchaikovsky on an upright piano. At one point, everyone started to bang rhythmically on pots and pans; at another they all started to sing, while processing in a circle.
Everything was performed with razor-sharp timing, and the show was cunningly contrived to move from calmness to hilarious frenzy. The last few minutes, with Patkop shrieking nonsense poetry and the orchestra jabbing and feinting in support, brought the house down. To tread such an exact line between desultory chaos and precisely controlled nonsense must have taken hours of patient rehearsal. As the Dadaists knew, being silly is actually a serious business.
No further performances