Satisfaction in Murrayfield gig
The melodies of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto are not a long way down that list of familiar favourites, however, and if Kari Kriikku’s use of the basset instrument for which it was composed is less unusual these days than Suchet suggested, the Finn’s chosen performance stance, cross-legged on a piano stool on the sort of plinth more usually occupied by cellists, was more of a novelty.
So too, was his performance, accentuating the extra range of the longer clarinet but in other ways very measured and understated, and clearly with a careful ear to period instrument practice. The RSNO, with Maya Iwabuchi in the leader’s chair, responded in the way they had when playing Mozart with her as a soloist in their home venue a fortnight ago, showing what a fine chamber orchestra it can be – the pianissimo strings in the second movement perfectly poised.
This was the music that seemed to suit conductor Clemens Schuldt best as well. Come the Beethoven, following four of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances, he and the orchestra were as fleet-footed from the start, and the very deliberate pacing of the Andante suggested a conception of the work that could be memorably original. In the Scherzo, sadly, that verve was lost and by the finale there was a disappointing lack of focus in the balance between winds and strings and in rhythmic drive.
Dance
Ballet Black
Tramway, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
****
SMALL in size, but simply charged with far-reaching aspirations and brimming over with high end talent: that, more or less, sums up the Londonbased Ballet Black who have just ended a short Scottish tour. If the seven-strong company of black and Asian dancers can readily impress us with well-honed technique across a range of styles – including pointe-work – they can also channel narrative drama and deliver mischievous comedy with a similar elan. Their double bill featured both kinds of story-telling with Cathy Marston’s The Suit fore-grounding adulterous passions and tragic revenge while Arthur Pita’s A Dream Within A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2014) took Shakespeare’s comedy in wittily wayward directions.
Marston’s choreography, based on Can Themba’s 1963 short story, pivots on the mental torture a husband visits on his unfaithful wife. Her fleeing lover has left behind his suit:that suit becomes the badge of her shame, ever-present – almost a third person wherever the couple go. Jose Alves embeds the husband’s wounded pride in the controlling power-plays that drive Cira Robinson’s publicly humiliated wife to suicide. Various recordings by the Kronos Quartet underpin the shifting moods that are also echoed by the chorus of “watchers”whose own bodies cunningly amplify the turbulent lusts and wrenching rage succinctly expressed in Marston’s fast-moving work.
Tutus and a courtly balletic response to Handel are the springboard for Arthur Pita’s delicious upheaval of amorous attraction in The Dream. With flurries of glitter dust, Isabela Coracy’s Puck – a subversively helpful Boy Scout – pairs the wandering lovers off as same-sex couples, releases their inner groove-factor to seductive songs by Yma Sumac, Eartha Kitt, Streisand and others, thereby filling the stage with another kind of unexpected match: Pita’s flair for putting classical gambits in step with unlikely rhythms and lyrics. It’s tremendous fun, frisking along on some seriously clever choreography – sparkily performed by a company that we’d love to see come back again, soon.
Theatre
The Rise And Fall of Little Voice
Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Neil Cooper
****
IT’S the quiet ones you have to watch in Jim Cartwright’s scabrous treatise on grief and finding salvation through song, revived here by Gemma Fairlie as the second show of Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s summer season. At the start, at least, LV, the painfully shy young woman that gives the play its title, is all but ignored amidst the clamour caused by her drunken mother and the big-talking men she brings back to a house with dangerously shonky wiring.
While LV stays silent, she loses herself in the records once owned by her now dead dad. Shirley Bassey, Judy Garland and Edith Piaf were his favourites, camp icons all, and when LV sings, it’s as if she’s channelling the spirit of both them and him.
It’s local lothario Ray Say and sleazy club compere Mr Boo who have stars in their eyes, however, as LV runs terrified from the spotlight.
Written and set in a pre-internet and pre-reality TV talent show age, Cartwright’s play is a potty-mouthed riot. While a rites of passage for
V and telephone engineer Billy, who offers her light in every way, it’s a self-destructive screaming match of failed ambition for everybody else. With each scene segued by a slow-motion lurch into the next, the play itself dove-tails between sitcom, romcom and soap opera.
As LV’S mother Mari Hoff, Deirdre Davis is a ravaged explosion of back-street disappointment with a crow’s nest bouffant. Carl Patrick and Alan Steele cut a similarly grotesque dash as Ray and Mr Boo, with Irene Myrtle-forrester’s neighbour Sadie an amusingly silent witness. If life is a cabaret, only Laura Costello’s radiant LV and Isaac Stanmore’s Billy have a hope here, and when LV shines enough to finds her own voice, it’s electric.