Above: Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's Faun, from The Spirit of Diaghilev at Sadler's WellsMUSIC
Take the risk South Bank Centre, 2nd-4th October, Tel: 0871 663 2500, www.southbankcentre.co.uk
Most of the world’s music is improvised, even if there’s a melodic formula or mode or rhythm that guides the rhapsodic outpourings of the musician. We think of western classical music as the great exception. It’s the tradition that’s governed, or some would say tyrannised, by the written note. But this is a myth. Improvisation played a big role in performance right up to Mozart’s time, and even into the early 19th century. Lately there’
s been a revival of improvisation in the Baroque era by singers like Cecilia Bartoli, and pianists like Robert Levin have brought back to life the thrill of improvised cadenzas in Mozart concertos. Yet improvisation in earlier times is still mostly terra incognita. This series, curated by the lutenist Paula Chateauneuf, aims to bring it out of the shadows. It roams across the varieties of improvisation that were current in medieval and Renaissance times, including such exotic repertoires as Spanish medieval song. It promises to be a revelation.
Ivan Hewett is the Telegraph’s music critic
FILM
Katalin Varga dir Peter Strickland. On general release from 9th October
What’s strange and most arresting about Katalin Varga—a rural revenge tale set in Hungarian-Romanian Transylvania—is that it looks and sounds as if it could be part of the recent flowering of Romanian cinema that brought us California Dreamin’ and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. It’s strange because its director is an Englishman from Reading and a member of the Sonic Catering Band (who record the sounds of cookery and turn them into electronic music), who funded his shoot with a £30,000 inheritance from his deceased uncle. And it’s arresting because the story is given a vibrant and atmospheric treatment that recalls Tarkovsky—not something you usually hear said about a British film. Katalin, the titular mother, and her 11 year-old son are forced to flee their village when her husband discovers the boy is not biologically his. She realises her only choice is to return to the dangerous backwoods to find the men who raped her, one of whom is the father. Her horse and cart journey through into the Carpathian mountains quickly moves into a thrilling mythic register, aided by a complex sound design that includes some of the most haunting film music I’ve heard in years.
Nick James is editor of Sight & Sound
ALBUM
Embryonic The Flaming Lips (Warner Bros)
Originality is not a virtue normally associated with contemporary pop music but the Flaming Lips’s ceaseless innovation, both live and in the studio, continues to set them apart in the world of alternative rock. Their ability to mix vast tympanic beats with studio electronica, grungy guitars and orchestration, has won them three Grammy awards, including one for best engineered album. But it is Wayne Coyne’s vulnerable, lofted vocal which provides the band’s emotional core. Lyrically, his blend of philosophical inquiry and quirky sci-fi imagery are delivered like troubled missives from a technocratic dystopia, in which anything from a festering spider bite to a fight with a pink robot may occur.
In their early career, the Flaming Lips released a quadruple album, whose four discs are to be played simultaneously on four separate machines. This new double album Embryonic is somewhat less experimental. Three tracks already pre-released on a digital EP, including the groovy “Silver Trembling Hands,” are more traditionally psychedelic than their 1999 classic album, The Soft Bulletin, though still proffer the same dynamic and stylistic extremes for which the band is known. Live, on the other hand, their shows are as wild as ever, more akin to concept-art spectaculars than drab, alt rock services. Their latest performance has the band being born from an animated, 6ft vagina projected onto a screen, with Coyne himself emerging to surf the crowd in a 10ft see-through bubble.
Nick Crowe is a music writer
ART
The Dark Monarch Tate St Ives, 10th-October-10th January 2010, Tel: 01736 796 226, www.tate.org.uk/stives
Surrealism, though the reference books do not always tell you this, was often profoundly informed by the occult. André Breton, the movement’s leader, may have thundered against it from time to time, but the other leading surrealists were passionate students of the western esoteric tradition. This penchant for the magical and mystical was, if anything, even stronger in the British wing of surrealism, most spectacularly in the case of Ithell Colquhoun, who was not merely an artist but a proper, practising witch.
Colquhoun and her cohorts are being given their place in the sun once more by this exhibition at Tate St Ives, subtitled “Magic and Modernity in British Art.” The modernity side will be familiar enough—works by Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth; it’s the magic that will be the novelty. Expect plenty of menhirs and stone circles, ley lines and geomantic patterns—but also to find out, for instance, how Derek Jarman was a follower of Dee and Paracelsus as well as an angry gay polemicist. And for those who care for such things, there is a Damien Hirst piece in untypically whimsical mode: a vitrine display, featuring not a shark or sliced cow but a cute unicorn.
Kevin Jackson is a writer and broadcaster
DANCE
In The Spirit of Diaghilev Sadler’s Wells, 13th-17th October, Tel: 0844 412 4300, www.sadlerswells.com
One hundred years ago the great Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev founded his itinerant company, Les Ballets Russes. Based in Paris, but largely composed of Russian dancers fleeing political turmoil at home, Les Ballets Russes brought a wild creative energy to ballet at a time when, in Europe at least, it had nearly died of boredom. Charismatic and inspired, Diaghilev persuaded leading artists, composers, dancers and choreographers to collaborate on works that changed modern ballet for good. All this year, different institutions have been honouring his achievement, reviving ballets where records remain. Alistair Spalding at Sadler’s Wells has taken a different tack. Emulating Diaghilev’s own generative genius, he has commissioned four of the world’s leading contemporary choreographers to create four new ballets. Each of the four—Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Javier De Frutos, Russell Maliphant and Wayne McGregor—has been matched with contemporary composers, costume, theatre and lighting designers, and, in the case of McGregor, artists Jane and Louise Wilson, to come up with four very different takes on Diaghilev’s legacy. Cherkaoui has the brief to reinvent l’après-midi d’un faune, Vaslav Nijinsky’s legendary tour de force; De Frutos has imagined how Jean Cocteau might have used Ravel’s music, La Valse, which was commissioned but then rejected as “undanceable” by Diaghilev; Russel Maliphant’s AfterLight is inspired by Nijinsky’s own geometric drawings and paintings as well as photos of him dancing, while Wayne McGregor has taken Ernest Shackleton’s epic Nimrod expedition to the South Pole in 1909 as the starting point for Dyad. Together they will give us a perspective on what Diaghilev unleashed and where it might yet take us.
Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writer
PLAY
Comedians
By Trevor Griffiths, dir Sean Holmes, Lyric Hammersmith, 7th October-14th November, Tel: 0871 221 1722, www.lyric.co.uk
No playwright of the 1970s wrote more passionately on politics and revolution than Trevor Griffiths. But both Occupations, about Gramsci, and The Party, on the media’s channelling of the Paris événements (which saw Laurence Olivier’s final stage appearance, as a Glaswegian Trotskyite) were eclipsed by Comedians in 1975.
First directed by Richard Eyre at the Nottingham Playhouse, this study of a working-class night school for clowns run by a fading old pro made Jonathan Pryce a star, launched Eyre’s career in London and was performed all over the world. It questions the nature of laughter and what dark secrets within us trigger those mirthful responses to dangerous subjects like sex, ethnic minorities and physical disability.
Sean Holmes, the impressive new director of the Lyric Hammersmith, revives the Comedians in the wake of political correctness, celebrity culture, and the transformation of light entertainment on television into a long-running amateur talent show. A new generation of theatre-goers should relish one of the best plays of a previous era. Former game show host Matthew Kelly—whose revived stage career in Albee and Shakespeare has been one of the year’s highlights—takes the role of the gnarled old comic, with David Dawson, a recent Nicholas Nickleby on stage, in the Pryce skinhead role.
Michael Coveney is a theatre critic for Whatsonstage.com and an author
Take the risk South Bank Centre, 2nd-4th October, Tel: 0871 663 2500, www.southbankcentre.co.uk
Most of the world’s music is improvised, even if there’s a melodic formula or mode or rhythm that guides the rhapsodic outpourings of the musician. We think of western classical music as the great exception. It’s the tradition that’s governed, or some would say tyrannised, by the written note. But this is a myth. Improvisation played a big role in performance right up to Mozart’s time, and even into the early 19th century. Lately there’
s been a revival of improvisation in the Baroque era by singers like Cecilia Bartoli, and pianists like Robert Levin have brought back to life the thrill of improvised cadenzas in Mozart concertos. Yet improvisation in earlier times is still mostly terra incognita. This series, curated by the lutenist Paula Chateauneuf, aims to bring it out of the shadows. It roams across the varieties of improvisation that were current in medieval and Renaissance times, including such exotic repertoires as Spanish medieval song. It promises to be a revelation.
Ivan Hewett is the Telegraph’s music critic
FILM
Katalin Varga dir Peter Strickland. On general release from 9th October
What’s strange and most arresting about Katalin Varga—a rural revenge tale set in Hungarian-Romanian Transylvania—is that it looks and sounds as if it could be part of the recent flowering of Romanian cinema that brought us California Dreamin’ and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. It’s strange because its director is an Englishman from Reading and a member of the Sonic Catering Band (who record the sounds of cookery and turn them into electronic music), who funded his shoot with a £30,000 inheritance from his deceased uncle. And it’s arresting because the story is given a vibrant and atmospheric treatment that recalls Tarkovsky—not something you usually hear said about a British film. Katalin, the titular mother, and her 11 year-old son are forced to flee their village when her husband discovers the boy is not biologically his. She realises her only choice is to return to the dangerous backwoods to find the men who raped her, one of whom is the father. Her horse and cart journey through into the Carpathian mountains quickly moves into a thrilling mythic register, aided by a complex sound design that includes some of the most haunting film music I’ve heard in years.
Nick James is editor of Sight & Sound
ALBUM
Embryonic The Flaming Lips (Warner Bros)
Originality is not a virtue normally associated with contemporary pop music but the Flaming Lips’s ceaseless innovation, both live and in the studio, continues to set them apart in the world of alternative rock. Their ability to mix vast tympanic beats with studio electronica, grungy guitars and orchestration, has won them three Grammy awards, including one for best engineered album. But it is Wayne Coyne’s vulnerable, lofted vocal which provides the band’s emotional core. Lyrically, his blend of philosophical inquiry and quirky sci-fi imagery are delivered like troubled missives from a technocratic dystopia, in which anything from a festering spider bite to a fight with a pink robot may occur.
In their early career, the Flaming Lips released a quadruple album, whose four discs are to be played simultaneously on four separate machines. This new double album Embryonic is somewhat less experimental. Three tracks already pre-released on a digital EP, including the groovy “Silver Trembling Hands,” are more traditionally psychedelic than their 1999 classic album, The Soft Bulletin, though still proffer the same dynamic and stylistic extremes for which the band is known. Live, on the other hand, their shows are as wild as ever, more akin to concept-art spectaculars than drab, alt rock services. Their latest performance has the band being born from an animated, 6ft vagina projected onto a screen, with Coyne himself emerging to surf the crowd in a 10ft see-through bubble.
Nick Crowe is a music writer
ART
The Dark Monarch Tate St Ives, 10th-October-10th January 2010, Tel: 01736 796 226, www.tate.org.uk/stives
Surrealism, though the reference books do not always tell you this, was often profoundly informed by the occult. André Breton, the movement’s leader, may have thundered against it from time to time, but the other leading surrealists were passionate students of the western esoteric tradition. This penchant for the magical and mystical was, if anything, even stronger in the British wing of surrealism, most spectacularly in the case of Ithell Colquhoun, who was not merely an artist but a proper, practising witch.
Colquhoun and her cohorts are being given their place in the sun once more by this exhibition at Tate St Ives, subtitled “Magic and Modernity in British Art.” The modernity side will be familiar enough—works by Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth; it’s the magic that will be the novelty. Expect plenty of menhirs and stone circles, ley lines and geomantic patterns—but also to find out, for instance, how Derek Jarman was a follower of Dee and Paracelsus as well as an angry gay polemicist. And for those who care for such things, there is a Damien Hirst piece in untypically whimsical mode: a vitrine display, featuring not a shark or sliced cow but a cute unicorn.
Kevin Jackson is a writer and broadcaster
DANCE
In The Spirit of Diaghilev Sadler’s Wells, 13th-17th October, Tel: 0844 412 4300, www.sadlerswells.com
One hundred years ago the great Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev founded his itinerant company, Les Ballets Russes. Based in Paris, but largely composed of Russian dancers fleeing political turmoil at home, Les Ballets Russes brought a wild creative energy to ballet at a time when, in Europe at least, it had nearly died of boredom. Charismatic and inspired, Diaghilev persuaded leading artists, composers, dancers and choreographers to collaborate on works that changed modern ballet for good. All this year, different institutions have been honouring his achievement, reviving ballets where records remain. Alistair Spalding at Sadler’s Wells has taken a different tack. Emulating Diaghilev’s own generative genius, he has commissioned four of the world’s leading contemporary choreographers to create four new ballets. Each of the four—Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Javier De Frutos, Russell Maliphant and Wayne McGregor—has been matched with contemporary composers, costume, theatre and lighting designers, and, in the case of McGregor, artists Jane and Louise Wilson, to come up with four very different takes on Diaghilev’s legacy. Cherkaoui has the brief to reinvent l’après-midi d’un faune, Vaslav Nijinsky’s legendary tour de force; De Frutos has imagined how Jean Cocteau might have used Ravel’s music, La Valse, which was commissioned but then rejected as “undanceable” by Diaghilev; Russel Maliphant’s AfterLight is inspired by Nijinsky’s own geometric drawings and paintings as well as photos of him dancing, while Wayne McGregor has taken Ernest Shackleton’s epic Nimrod expedition to the South Pole in 1909 as the starting point for Dyad. Together they will give us a perspective on what Diaghilev unleashed and where it might yet take us.
Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writer
PLAY
Comedians
By Trevor Griffiths, dir Sean Holmes, Lyric Hammersmith, 7th October-14th November, Tel: 0871 221 1722, www.lyric.co.uk
No playwright of the 1970s wrote more passionately on politics and revolution than Trevor Griffiths. But both Occupations, about Gramsci, and The Party, on the media’s channelling of the Paris événements (which saw Laurence Olivier’s final stage appearance, as a Glaswegian Trotskyite) were eclipsed by Comedians in 1975.
First directed by Richard Eyre at the Nottingham Playhouse, this study of a working-class night school for clowns run by a fading old pro made Jonathan Pryce a star, launched Eyre’s career in London and was performed all over the world. It questions the nature of laughter and what dark secrets within us trigger those mirthful responses to dangerous subjects like sex, ethnic minorities and physical disability.
Sean Holmes, the impressive new director of the Lyric Hammersmith, revives the Comedians in the wake of political correctness, celebrity culture, and the transformation of light entertainment on television into a long-running amateur talent show. A new generation of theatre-goers should relish one of the best plays of a previous era. Former game show host Matthew Kelly—whose revived stage career in Albee and Shakespeare has been one of the year’s highlights—takes the role of the gnarled old comic, with David Dawson, a recent Nicholas Nickleby on stage, in the Pryce skinhead role.
Michael Coveney is a theatre critic for Whatsonstage.com and an author
