A commonplace ‘book’ of notes which don’t fit in my futures blog
Apologies to those of you who follow this blog by email for the mystery posting earlier this week of a picture of Vasily Grossman’s The Road. WordPress has just upgraded its iPad application, and the whole business of saving drafts seems to have been changed in the process.
If you’re interested in reading the intended post, it can be found here.
One of the first pleasures of Strictly Gershwin at the Coliseum (it was someone’s birthday treat) was seeing – as the curtain rose – that the orchestra has been lifted out the pit and placed across the back of the stage. It was, immediately, a reminder of the big bands of the Jazz Age, of which Gershwin was unaguably the greatest composer.
Do ballet and jazz mix? The answer is: mostly. Ballet and show dancing are very different, as Darcy Bussell was reminded when she set out recently to recreate some of the great dances of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. The first is straight limbs and square ends, the second is more hips and bends. The dancer’s centre of gravity is in a different place.
The ballet sequences which worked best were the ones which allowed ballet to do what it does best – a a visual and physical interpretation of a piece of music. An American in Paris was all colour and movement, a tale of love found, lost and found again. Rhapsody in Blue was more stylised, more formal (as seen in the photograph at the top of this post), but also added a dimension to the music. A moment’s digression here: Gershwin kept procrastinating over writing the piece, until the bandleader Paul Whiteman, for whom it was being written, simply announced the concert at which it would premiere, forcing Gershwin to get on and finish it.
Some of the songs didn’t respond so well to treatment. The story of The Man I Love or Someone To Watch Over Me is all in the lyric, so dancing it as well added little. On the other hand, the more open lyric of Summertime made for a fine interpretation.
The company was augmented by a couple of champion ballroom dancers, whose tango, improbably to It Ain’t Necessarily So, was one of the highlights of the show. But the warmest applause was for the tap dancers.
I don’t know if it’s because tap dancing came of age at the same time as jazz, and remains one of America’s great contributions to dance, but when they were on the energy levels in the theatre increased decisively.
But back to the orchestra. There’s nothing quite like a 30-piece big band playing jazz standards, and the programme reveals that – as with the dancers – the ENO orchestra was augmented by jazz specialists, who led each of the horn sections. You could hear it as they traded dirty notes in some of the numbers, which reminded me of lines from Carl Sandburg‘s fine poem, Jazz Fantasia:
Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome treetops,
moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like a
racing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop, bang-bang!
you jazzmen…
Kudos, by the way, to the ENO Box Office. There was a problem with my tickets, which may have been my fault, and they swapped them in an instant for tickets elsewhere which had just as good a view, and without any of the eye-rolling or customer blaming you sometimes get in such circumstances.
The picture at the top comes via Georgina Butler’s blog, and is used with thanks.
I was prompted by an interview with Bobby Gillespie to dig out a copy of Screamadelica, a record I’ve always liked. Listening to it again after a while I was struck by – and maybe this is obvious – the extent to which it sounds like mid-period Rolling Stones reinvented through a haze of ecstasy. (I’m talking Exile on Main Street-era Stones here; the comparison is not a dismissive one). Certainly tracks like ‘Movin’ On Up or Loaded or Damaged could have been covered by the Stones before they descended into caricature, and without seeming out of place.
Primal Scream, of course, have marked the 20th anniversary of Screamadelica by reforming and playing the album in concert. Personally, I usually find this depressing: in the words of the Irish poet Paul Muldoon in Hay,
All great artists are their own greatest threat
As when they aim an industrial laser
At themselves and cut themselves back to the root
But I’m going to argue with myself here and cut Primal Scream a little slack. Perhaps playing concert versions of Screamadelica is just a way of acknowledging that they understand, in their 40s, that for a moment back then they were touched by greatness.
The picture at the top of the post is from the Bagging Area blog, and is used with thanks.
A BBC4 profile of the director David Lean last week had Steven Spielberg talking about Lean’s work, and in particular about the celebrated jump cut early in Lawrence of Arabia, possibly one of the influential films ever made. The trick in the cut, said Spielberg, is that the sound of the match bridges the edit by six frames, or a quarter of a second. Lean worked as an editor – a ‘cutter’, in the pre-war lexicon – before he became an editor, and would have understood the importance of this fraction of time instinctively.
I’m going to Prague soon, so I’ve been doing some research. One thing I stumbled on was an entertaining review of Václav Havel‘s memoir of his time as President of the fledgling republic. Two quick extracts, one reflective, one largely metaphorical. The first is about the different between politics and drama, no matter how dramatic politics sometimes is:
As a playwright, he understood the theatrical nature of politics. All politicians must have “an elementary dramatic instinct”, he writes. But a major theme in this book is how often this desire for structure and order is thwarted by events, dear boy, events. Whereas drama gives meaning and structure to existence, “Politics is more of a strange, never-ending process with no clear turning points and no unambiguous and immediately recognisable outcomes.”
He found the Presidential Castle full of concealed wires and microphones when he arrived. But one theme cropped up again and again in his memos:
One repeated request appears to symbolise the continued presence of the former regime: “In the closet where the vacuum cleaner is kept, there also lives a bat. How to get rid of it?”
The bat and the vacuum cleaner. You could make it up, but it seems he didn’t have to.
It’s a few years old now, but I couldn’t help smiling when the LCD Soundsystem’s track ‘Losing My Edge’ popped up on my Shuffle this morning. If you don’t know it, it’s a tongue-in-cheek account of the history of what’s cool in music – by someone who thinks he’s lost it:
I hear you’re buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record.
I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.
I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.
I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know.
But have you seen my records?
It must be LCD’s best moment. Click on the image at the top to remind yourself.
I’ve just come back from a trip to Estonia (my first) and I visited the independence monument in Tallinn which was unveiled earlier this year. It stands 24 metres high and commemorates Estonia’s first independence in 1918 (from the Russians in the wake of the revolution; their second, from the Soviet Union, was in 1991). The cross is based on the Cross of Liberty, awarded for military and civilian service during the War of Independence.
The picture doesn’t quite capture the appearance of the monument, which looks as if it is built on a column of glass.
Why glass? It’s a deliberate choice.
“The glass column symbolises freedom, which is difficult to attain as well as fragile and easily destroyed”.
The Red Shoes isn’t the best of Powell and Pressburger’s movies – that title would come down to a duel between A Matter of Life and Death and Colonel Blimp. But it was certainly the most profitable, and also the most influential.
In Pressburger’s biography there are accounts by both men of why the film was so successful.
Powell put it down to timing; it caught the change in the post-war mood:
I think the real reason The Red Shoes was such a success was that we had all been told for ten years to go out and die for freedom and democracy, for this and for that, and now that the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for Art.
Pressburger, with less of eye to a good aphorism, thought that audiences were able to understand the sense of the whole film – in a way that critics were not:
Michael and I have made several good films, among them several better films than The Red Shoes. Why then is The Red Shoes by far the best known film that we have made? Those who try to see it with magnifying glasses (like most critics) see only the rough, the crude, the immature bits (especially the last sequence between Vicky and Julian in her dressing room). But audiences understand better; they inhale mechanically the air of the whole thing and find something disturbing, something mysterious, almost – dare I say – religious, something which they feel must be true, without having been told what.
Famously, the film inspired Gene Kelly to make An American in Paris. And it inspired others, too. In 1988, I produced for Channel 4 a series called Comment, which filled with opinion pieces the short gap between the end of the news and the start of the soap at 8pm. It was usually recorded in the studio, but I had a small budget for location filming. Through his publisher, a then very frail Michael Powell agreed to record a Comment, and we drove to his house in the Cotswolds to film him. He had prepared soup for the crew; his wife, the film editor Thelma Schoenmaker, kept an eye on him to make sure he didn’t tire himself.
I’d worked with the same crew before, on other shoots. Afterwards, the sound recordist was quite emotional. When he’d seen the name “Michael Powell” on the call sheet, he said, he hadn’t imagined for a moment that it would be the film director. It’s quite a common name. But seeing The Red Shoes as a youngster had made him want to go into film and television production.
The picture at the top of the post is from the blog Verdou, which has a fine long post on many aspects of The Red Shoes.
I wrote earlier this year about my ageing cat. Today she made her last journey to the vet’s. At least she had ‘another living summer’ before she died.
Photo by Peter Curry
‘A man who had not seen Herr K. for a long time greeted him with the words:
“You haven’t changed at all.”
“Oh!”, sais Herr K., and turned pale.’
(From Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Herr Keuner).
