Ezra Pound reveals his respect fro Walt Disney in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol 4
ORATORIO MessiahEnglish National Opera, 27th November-11th December, Tel: 0871 911 0200, www.eno.org
This being the 250th anniversary of Handel’s death, it’s been a bumper year for productions of his operas. But the boldest anniversary celebration may be scraping in at the year’s end. ENO hopes to crown its reputation as Britain’s “house of Handel” by dramatising his oratorio Messiah.
Is this wise? Messiah is a national treasure. Its tunes are remembered, or half-remembered, by millions. And it’s worth recalling that Messiah arose out of Handel’s desire to get away from the opera house and focus on oratorios; putting it back in the opera house seems somewhat perverse. There’s also the problem that the Messiah is not like a Bach Passion—it doesn’t tell a tightly circumscribed narrative. It sweeps across the whole of Christ’s life story and into the Book of Revelation, and much of the story is rendered in the “foretelling” mode of the Old Testament.
Still, the dramatic thrust is clearly discernible, and there are recent precedents for dramatising oratorios. Jonathan Miller’s St Matthew Passion was generally held to be a triumph. Deborah Warner’s St John Passion had a more mixed response, but there were telling ideas, such as having the chorales sung by an amateur chorus representing “the people.” Warner is a director who has a way of revealing the raw emotion at the heart of whatever she touches. In opera, this sometimes comes as a rude shock. But it has yielded wonderful things, such as her recent Glyndebourne production of Fidelio, which revealed the ethical ambiguities at the heart of something that strives so hard to be black-and-white.
Warner says she’s only interested in texts which frighten and alarm her—which may well frighten and alarm anyone who loves Messiah for its power to console and uplift. But let’s see. If nothing else, this production will shake the dust off a monument and invite us to listen with fresh ears.
Ivan Hewett is the Telegraph’s music critic
FILM Avatar On general release from 17th December
Most of the innovators in cinema, the people who do fresh things with the medium, are artists like Lars von Trier, Claire Denis or Terence Davies. But sometimes it’s the movie world’s big pharma, not its avant garde, that comes up with new ideas. And you don’t get much bigger film-pharma than Titanic director James Cameron, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox studio, and George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic effects company. On 17th December, they release their state-of-the-medium bid to change the look of cinema. I haven’t seen Avatar, and I try to ignore the Hollywood studio loudspeaker but, in 1991, Canadian Cameron’s combination of hubris, techie and visual thinking produced Terminator 2’s liquid metal effect, which freed big budget 90s cinema from realism. High-end Hollywood is promising that Avatar’s digital 3D effects will change cinema the way the coming of sound did in 1928. Nonsense. But we’re likely to see innovation nevertheless. Also, the idea of the avatar—the second self, the proxy existence—is the digital age’s biggest gift to dramaturgy. The word is Sanskrit, but William Gibson started using the concept of the digital self in the 1980s and, since then, it has spread through the culture. Will Cameron’s film think inventively about digital reincarnation? I’ll be in the front row to find out.
Mark Cousins is a film critic
LITERATURE
The Paris Review Interviews, Vol 4 Introduction by Salman Rushdie, ed Philip Gourevitch (Canongate, £14.99)
“Do you work best at any particular time of day?” the interviewer asks Philip Roth. “I work all day… every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.” “Do you think other writers work such long hours?” “When writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, Is he as crazy as I am? I don’t need that question answered.”
However, as this typically pithy and entertaining exchange shows, lots of us do like to know how writers work and why. The Paris Review has been running these interviews since its launch in 1953 and this volume collects some of its best: PG Wodehouse, Orhan Pamuk, Marilynne Robinson, VS Naipaul, among them.
It’s about writers as writers, of course, but it reveals as much about writers as people. The delight is in the detail. Who’d have thought EB White had never managed to read Ulysses? That Maya Angelou sometimes kicks off her writing day with a sherry at 6.15am? That Ezra Pound thought Walt Disney a genius for the Confucian aspect of his animation?
Ian Irvine is a freelance writer and journalist
THEATRE
The Priory by Michael Wynne, dir Jeremy Herrin, Royal Court Theatre, 19th November-9th January, Tel: 020 7565 5000
Feel like an antidote to the seasonal cheeriness, the hectic round of parties? A night in The Priory could be just the ticket; not the celeb-haunted drying-out retreat, but Michael Wynne’s fictional haven where stressed-out thirtysomethings gather for a new year’s eve take on life, love and retro board games. Anyone up for a new start?
The play marks a main stage debut for Wynne, a product of the Royal Court’s invaluable young writers’ programme, and a well-practised chronicler of generational shifts and upheavals; he co-wrote the affecting movie My Summer of Love based on Helen Cross’s novel. Wynne’s director, Jeremy Herrin, is the newly appointed deputy director in Sloane Square, where he was responsible for Polly Stenham’s terrific first two plays, and David Hare’s The Vertical Hour. His cast includes the underrated Joseph Millson, so good in von Horvath’s Judgement Day at the Almeida this year; Rupert Penry-Jones of the BBC series Spooks; Rachael Stirling, who once said of her lesbian role in BBC television’s Tipping the Velvet that she was one of Greg’s dykes; and Alastair Mackenzie, Archie in the popular BBC drama Monarch of the Glen.
Michael Coveney is a theatre critic for Whatsonstage.com and an author
ART
Earth: Art of a Changing World Royal Academy of Arts, 6 Burlington Gardens, 3rd December-31st January, Tel: 020 7300 8000
Last year the Royal Academy staged the first in a series of three annual contemporary shows, sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline. Intended to allow the Royal Academy to take risks, that exhibition amounted to a great deal of clamour but rather less substance. This year, the Royal Academy’s new director of exhibitions, Kathleen Soriano, successor to the irrepressible Norman Rosenthal, has taken a strong curatorial grip. Her ambition is to make galleries “places of relevance,” where the art reflects, or pioneers, society’s liveliest conversations.
For this show she is tackling a topic easily mishandled—climate change and its cultural impact. In contrast with the Barbican’s retrospective look at Land Art, Soriano has chosen to host a mix of headline artists—Cornelia Parker, Tracey Emin, Sophie Calle, Gary Hume, Tacita Dean, Spencer Finch—and less familiar names, whose work addresses the theme from a variety of contemporary perspectives. Teaming up with David Buckland, director of the imaginative Cape Farewell project, they have included work by some of Buckland’s Arctic voyagers, but have been inspired more generally by the notion of the artist as explorer and witness. The ambition, in Soriano’s words, is to show work “neither preachy nor literal,” but ultimately “about beauty and the sublime.” With a distinguished line-up, this might well be a good post-Copenhagen pick-me up.
Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writer
FOLK MUSIC
The Graham Coxon Power Acoustic Ensemble Barbican Hall, 28th November, Tel: 020 7638 8891, www.barbican.org.uk
While a member of Blur, multi-instrumentalist Graham Coxon released four solo albums, mixing garage rock, folk and heavy riffs with the band’s trademark power pop. Since his departure from Blur in 2002, Coxon has made three more records. The latest is grounded in a passion for English folk music, heavily influenced by Bert Jansch, and widely regarded as his best to date.
Recorded on analogue equipment and featuring more than its fair share of detuned acoustic instruments, The Spinning Top picks and strums its way through one man’s journey from birth to death, a mythological tale of love, loss and autobiographical intrigue. Aided by unsung folk heroes Robyn Hitchcock and Danny Thompson (who played double bass on Nick Drake’s records), Coxon pursues the crooked, flawed beauty which folk music is so good at containing, capturing it through a careful use of loose rhythms and wavering vocals. This Barbican show, which presents the album in full, will feature revered folk veteran Martin Carthy, as well as renditions of some of the folk songs which have influenced Coxon over the years. Also appearing in this festive get together are soprano Natasha Marsh and sound artist Max Eastley.
Nick Crowe is a music writer
ORATORIO MessiahEnglish National Opera, 27th November-11th December, Tel: 0871 911 0200, www.eno.org
This being the 250th anniversary of Handel’s death, it’s been a bumper year for productions of his operas. But the boldest anniversary celebration may be scraping in at the year’s end. ENO hopes to crown its reputation as Britain’s “house of Handel” by dramatising his oratorio Messiah.
Is this wise? Messiah is a national treasure. Its tunes are remembered, or half-remembered, by millions. And it’s worth recalling that Messiah arose out of Handel’s desire to get away from the opera house and focus on oratorios; putting it back in the opera house seems somewhat perverse. There’s also the problem that the Messiah is not like a Bach Passion—it doesn’t tell a tightly circumscribed narrative. It sweeps across the whole of Christ’s life story and into the Book of Revelation, and much of the story is rendered in the “foretelling” mode of the Old Testament.
Still, the dramatic thrust is clearly discernible, and there are recent precedents for dramatising oratorios. Jonathan Miller’s St Matthew Passion was generally held to be a triumph. Deborah Warner’s St John Passion had a more mixed response, but there were telling ideas, such as having the chorales sung by an amateur chorus representing “the people.” Warner is a director who has a way of revealing the raw emotion at the heart of whatever she touches. In opera, this sometimes comes as a rude shock. But it has yielded wonderful things, such as her recent Glyndebourne production of Fidelio, which revealed the ethical ambiguities at the heart of something that strives so hard to be black-and-white.
Warner says she’s only interested in texts which frighten and alarm her—which may well frighten and alarm anyone who loves Messiah for its power to console and uplift. But let’s see. If nothing else, this production will shake the dust off a monument and invite us to listen with fresh ears.
Ivan Hewett is the Telegraph’s music critic
FILM Avatar On general release from 17th December
Most of the innovators in cinema, the people who do fresh things with the medium, are artists like Lars von Trier, Claire Denis or Terence Davies. But sometimes it’s the movie world’s big pharma, not its avant garde, that comes up with new ideas. And you don’t get much bigger film-pharma than Titanic director James Cameron, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox studio, and George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic effects company. On 17th December, they release their state-of-the-medium bid to change the look of cinema. I haven’t seen Avatar, and I try to ignore the Hollywood studio loudspeaker but, in 1991, Canadian Cameron’s combination of hubris, techie and visual thinking produced Terminator 2’s liquid metal effect, which freed big budget 90s cinema from realism. High-end Hollywood is promising that Avatar’s digital 3D effects will change cinema the way the coming of sound did in 1928. Nonsense. But we’re likely to see innovation nevertheless. Also, the idea of the avatar—the second self, the proxy existence—is the digital age’s biggest gift to dramaturgy. The word is Sanskrit, but William Gibson started using the concept of the digital self in the 1980s and, since then, it has spread through the culture. Will Cameron’s film think inventively about digital reincarnation? I’ll be in the front row to find out.
Mark Cousins is a film critic
LITERATURE
The Paris Review Interviews, Vol 4 Introduction by Salman Rushdie, ed Philip Gourevitch (Canongate, £14.99)
“Do you work best at any particular time of day?” the interviewer asks Philip Roth. “I work all day… every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.” “Do you think other writers work such long hours?” “When writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, Is he as crazy as I am? I don’t need that question answered.”
However, as this typically pithy and entertaining exchange shows, lots of us do like to know how writers work and why. The Paris Review has been running these interviews since its launch in 1953 and this volume collects some of its best: PG Wodehouse, Orhan Pamuk, Marilynne Robinson, VS Naipaul, among them.
It’s about writers as writers, of course, but it reveals as much about writers as people. The delight is in the detail. Who’d have thought EB White had never managed to read Ulysses? That Maya Angelou sometimes kicks off her writing day with a sherry at 6.15am? That Ezra Pound thought Walt Disney a genius for the Confucian aspect of his animation?
Ian Irvine is a freelance writer and journalist
THEATRE
The Priory by Michael Wynne, dir Jeremy Herrin, Royal Court Theatre, 19th November-9th January, Tel: 020 7565 5000
Feel like an antidote to the seasonal cheeriness, the hectic round of parties? A night in The Priory could be just the ticket; not the celeb-haunted drying-out retreat, but Michael Wynne’s fictional haven where stressed-out thirtysomethings gather for a new year’s eve take on life, love and retro board games. Anyone up for a new start?
The play marks a main stage debut for Wynne, a product of the Royal Court’s invaluable young writers’ programme, and a well-practised chronicler of generational shifts and upheavals; he co-wrote the affecting movie My Summer of Love based on Helen Cross’s novel. Wynne’s director, Jeremy Herrin, is the newly appointed deputy director in Sloane Square, where he was responsible for Polly Stenham’s terrific first two plays, and David Hare’s The Vertical Hour. His cast includes the underrated Joseph Millson, so good in von Horvath’s Judgement Day at the Almeida this year; Rupert Penry-Jones of the BBC series Spooks; Rachael Stirling, who once said of her lesbian role in BBC television’s Tipping the Velvet that she was one of Greg’s dykes; and Alastair Mackenzie, Archie in the popular BBC drama Monarch of the Glen.
Michael Coveney is a theatre critic for Whatsonstage.com and an author
ART
Earth: Art of a Changing World Royal Academy of Arts, 6 Burlington Gardens, 3rd December-31st January, Tel: 020 7300 8000
Last year the Royal Academy staged the first in a series of three annual contemporary shows, sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline. Intended to allow the Royal Academy to take risks, that exhibition amounted to a great deal of clamour but rather less substance. This year, the Royal Academy’s new director of exhibitions, Kathleen Soriano, successor to the irrepressible Norman Rosenthal, has taken a strong curatorial grip. Her ambition is to make galleries “places of relevance,” where the art reflects, or pioneers, society’s liveliest conversations.
For this show she is tackling a topic easily mishandled—climate change and its cultural impact. In contrast with the Barbican’s retrospective look at Land Art, Soriano has chosen to host a mix of headline artists—Cornelia Parker, Tracey Emin, Sophie Calle, Gary Hume, Tacita Dean, Spencer Finch—and less familiar names, whose work addresses the theme from a variety of contemporary perspectives. Teaming up with David Buckland, director of the imaginative Cape Farewell project, they have included work by some of Buckland’s Arctic voyagers, but have been inspired more generally by the notion of the artist as explorer and witness. The ambition, in Soriano’s words, is to show work “neither preachy nor literal,” but ultimately “about beauty and the sublime.” With a distinguished line-up, this might well be a good post-Copenhagen pick-me up.
Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writer
FOLK MUSIC
The Graham Coxon Power Acoustic Ensemble Barbican Hall, 28th November, Tel: 020 7638 8891, www.barbican.org.uk
While a member of Blur, multi-instrumentalist Graham Coxon released four solo albums, mixing garage rock, folk and heavy riffs with the band’s trademark power pop. Since his departure from Blur in 2002, Coxon has made three more records. The latest is grounded in a passion for English folk music, heavily influenced by Bert Jansch, and widely regarded as his best to date.
Recorded on analogue equipment and featuring more than its fair share of detuned acoustic instruments, The Spinning Top picks and strums its way through one man’s journey from birth to death, a mythological tale of love, loss and autobiographical intrigue. Aided by unsung folk heroes Robyn Hitchcock and Danny Thompson (who played double bass on Nick Drake’s records), Coxon pursues the crooked, flawed beauty which folk music is so good at containing, capturing it through a careful use of loose rhythms and wavering vocals. This Barbican show, which presents the album in full, will feature revered folk veteran Martin Carthy, as well as renditions of some of the folk songs which have influenced Coxon over the years. Also appearing in this festive get together are soprano Natasha Marsh and sound artist Max Eastley.
Nick Crowe is a music writer
