Benedetti shines as RNSO tour hits bullseye in US
Music
pianist Elliot Galvin’s trio. The Glasgow-born, London-based Dick, who won the Young Scottish Jazz Musician of the Year title in 2013, did not play drums on the album Galvin is touring to promote, Punch, but he has assimilated himself in its twists, turns and idiosyncrasies so well it seemed as if he’d been involved in its conception.
Galvin presents a deeply involved and thoroughly evolved musical experience. There are pieces that sound as if drawn from the soul of Eastern European folk melodies. Others touch on African folklore and instrumentation in the shape of a thumb piano, or completely reinvent items from the standards repertoire. Still others take an original theme and develop it through a multitude of variations, and that’s before we get to the sheer theatre of the trio interacting with a Punch and Judy soundtrack or Galvin’s virtuosic extemporising on a melodica.
A particular favourite involved Galvin literally tearing strips off a roll of gaffer tape at the microphone while Tom McCredie played a muscular bassline and then improvising with jaw-dropping facility on piano keys whose strings were dampened with said strips of tape.
Lulu’s Back in Town featured similar keyboard brilliance, sounding like the product of a liaison between Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Cecil Taylor and Scott Joplin, and Mack the Knife, with its familiar melody whistled over a juddering, reconfigured rhythm, took an engaging walk on the wild side.
That all this passes to the listener so easily, and often so entertainingly, is a tribute to Galvin’s wit, wisdom and inclusive musicality. Mary Brennan THEMES of identity, of home and belonging, have often intensified the work of Frank McConnell, co-founder and artistic director of Plan B, the Ross-shire based company known for dancemaking with dramatic edge and a liking for quirky designs. This time, it’s a guest choreographer who is taking those themes forward in a new touring production.
In fact, Chrissie Ardill has danced with Plan B in the past, so she comes to Citizen with an awareness of how McConnell and his team like to nudge boundaries aside. Ardill has brought in a live composer/musician, Mariam Rezaei, who mixes the soundtrack in real time and who joins in the fabric of the piece, even as the four (female) dancers join their voices in the harmonious hums that have such a bitter-sweet tinge to them. That could well be the cadence of home-sickness, for these are all women who – by choice or from necessity – have become strangers in a strange land.
Letters home, always upbeat and reassuring, are spoken aloud by the performers; costumes – the domestic’s overalls, for instance – tell other stories, as does the body language with its recurring crumplings of despair and weariness.
There is a cyclical feel to Ardill’s movement vocabulary of stretches, lunges, turns: maybe these outsiders haven’t yet fallen into the other steps of those who already belong? At times the need to emphasis the “us and them” barriers of exclusion leads to the screams, wrenchings and heavy falls losing impact through repetition.
Yet there’s no doubting the sincerity of purpose here, as the women try to find their uncertain way by the light of Karen Tennent’s inspired lava-lamp sign-posts. Marianne Gunn AS epistolary fiction is more than a little outdated, it was interesting to note a “comedy of correspondence” in the listings for the Glasgow Live International Comedy Festival. To facilitate such a premise, there has to be a twist: letter writing, it seems, is the last bastion of comic communication for those receiving hospitality from Her Majesty’s Prison Service.
Written and performed by local stand-up talent Gary Little and Julia Sutherland, it is a gentle meander with two characters – Gerry and Jenny – who have been dealt a less-than-ideal hand in their post-40 years. Gerry has been locked up for stealing books (a somewhat unusual crime) and Jenny is a newly divorced mum who has been forced into moving back “home” to her parents (in thinly veiled Newton Mearns).
Under the direction of Richard Melvin, Little has no problem in generating laughs with his deadpan delivery peppered with brief glimpses of a hidden high camp factor. His monologues of the Stag “do” ending up in Auschwitz and the Dance Your Depression Away class for inmates both seemed to have the best lines, leaving Sutherland’s tales of woe about being naked in a hotel foyer seem a little lacklustre.
The piece effectively explores the loneliness and self-imposed incarceration people can inflict upon themselves due to mental health. Where Sutherland shines is in her honest reflections of a woman who has learned to live with disappointment and thinks she doesn’t deserve anything more from life. Ultimately, more tragedy than comedy. Marianne Gunn WITH the Cold War serving as the backdrop, tensions between the US and the Soviet Union building, and back-room dodgy dealings and secret handshakes, perhaps there has not been a more opportune year to re-stage Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Chess. The Musical Theatre cohort, under the superb direction of Professor Andrew Panton, can be proud of such a technically adept production, which explored the strategy game on more than one level. Binaries do not exist in this black and white world but, in the end, there’s no room for grey either.
Considering the central performance of Daisy Ann Fletcher as Florence Vassy it would be a crime if there is a free seat before the run ends on Saturday April 1, which seems unlikely in view of the strength of sales. Fletcher’s vocals were expressive in Heaven Help My Heart but it was her choked-up I Know Him So Well (a duet with Hayley VerValin as Svetlana Sergievsky) which was truly electrifying.
Some diction issues aside, the masculine world of Championship Chess was admirably portrayed by Barney Wilkinson as Freddie Trumper and Jamie Pritchard as Anatoly Sergievsky. Wilkinson’s physical energy was offset by Pritchard’s statesmanlike demeanour. Evil machinations were expertly executed by Alexander Molokov (a smooth yet sinister Shane Convery) and balanced by a tour-de-force Arbiter (Emma Torrens).
Darragh O’Leary’s inspired choreography, David Higham’s precise musical direction and Grant Anderson’s pack-a-punch lighting design, all highlighted the collaborative nature of this acrossdiscipline production. Another high-quality Conservatoire show.
Dance Comedy Theatre
city was having a party! A woman and her daughter offered me chips!” It doesn’t get much scarier, Frank.
If Jenni Murray had recently caused a storm claiming transgender women weren’t “real women”, you wouldn’t have known it from this genteel session about her book, The History of Britain in 21 Women. I like the idea of Murray being controversial but there was little argument about a book that takes us from Boudicea to Nicola Sturgeon by way of Mary Seacole, Mary Quant and, erm, Margaret Thatcher?
Again, the audience was the star – when a questioner asked who was the first person Murray had met who’d called herself a feminist (her French teacher, sticking up for Madame Bovary).
I wonder what Val McDermid, above, would have done with the Madame Bovary story; something feistier, I suspect. Astonishingly, this year sees the publication of her 31st novel. When she started, there was a sense the literary novel was too academic, too theoretical, and no longer about telling stories. Genre, she said, was where you went for that, and her own literary influences are stylistic masters such as RL Stevenson and mistresses of plot like Agatha Christie.
Often having three books on the go at the same time (promoting one, writing another and thinking about a third) can’t be easy, but you suspect she likes to keep herself on the edge as much as she does her readers.