This headline’s about you

When I started this blog I waded with fervour into all sorts of topics du jour, including whatever barrow might being pushed on the day by, say, Miranda Devine. Remember, it was the Howard era, and we were “not happy.” (Not that, when it comes to refugees and asylum seekers, I’m much happier now, but I’m beginning to direct my discontent to a wider range of my fellow Australians.)

Since then, I’ve generally lapsed into an aestheticist quietism. My urges to express my indignation about some facets of the law and to expose some other more quirky ones have both subsided. I’ve left the press alone – everyone can read the paper, after all.

But I can’t resist drawing attention to this rather neat headline in the SMH just now:

Kevin, you’re so vain: Turnbull

Postscript:

Just in case the allusion is lost on some of my younger readers [if any], the allusion is to a song by Carly Simon, reputedly about her ex-husband, James Taylor (though the truly tragic Wikipedia link I have given allows that it may alternatively have been Mick Jagger). Just while we’re on this topic, I’ve long thought that the accusation in the song that someone thinks the song is about them contains its own elements of vanity, as well as being a strange kind of having cake and eating it too.

Tintin or Asterix?

According to an article I read a few years ago, you’re either for one or the other, and certain other choices line up with that. I’m a Tintin man myself, though I don’t think the rest of the hypothesis holds very well. For one thing, if you prefer Tintin, you’re supposed to be neat and tidy.

After my third concert in the SSO Prokofiev series (plus the preview at Shanghai – did I tell you I’ve recently been there?), I’m beginning to wonder if I’m a Shostakovich man myself. For me, Prokofiev’s piano sonatas are more interesting than quite a lot of his more public, symphonic music, at least going on what I heard tonight.

I might manage a more considered view later.

High Technology

Today, for the first time, I used one of those new automated checkouts – it was at Coles on the corner of King and George Streets in the city: the resort of the desperate when heading home rather late and in search of a prepared meal. I felt a bit bad about doing the checkout staff out of a job, and I’m sure that there isn’t any saving passed on to me. There were special attendants hanging around to tell me what to do, and when I mentioned my bad feeling, one of them claimed that staff weren’t to be had. That is always rubbish.

Last Friday, re-entering Australia from Shanghai (sorry to be a bore about this but I don’t get out of the country that often) I used my new e-chipped passport for the first time. You have to stare at the camera which checks that your physiognomy matches that when your photo was taken for the passport. I suppose I am throwing immigration officers out of work but strangely or not, I don’t feel so bad about that. Actually, they probably aren’t out of work yet, but just mounting more elaborate defences of Fortress Australia. Should I be grateful?

There was some saving of time, at least while the new mode of passport is in a minority, but it was all for naught by the time we had waited for the luggage to be unloaded.

Grimes revisited

I returned from Shanghai on Friday morning expressly for the purpose of catching the last night of Opera Australia’s Peter Grimes.  I am very glad I did.

This production has been extensively documented on the internet, including by a number of people who went more than my two times, to the point that there is little I need or could add by way of detailed observation. Had I not been going away, I too would happily have gone more than merely twice – and I, too, had the chance (which I couldn’t take up) of company rush to assist me in such a project.

That, too, as I have commented elsewhere, is a cause for concern and dismay. What is the basis of the resistance to such a work which makes such company rush tickets possible or necessary?

I asked a colleague, and I know she is an opera-goer, if she had been. She told me she hadn’t. She didn’t like Britten, she said, because somebody had told her he was a Nazi sympathiser. She is Jewish, so this is a determinative factor for her. I said: “Don’t be silly. He was a homosexual pacifist who ran away to America along with Auden and Isherwood!” [OK: I was simplifying things a bit.] She said: “Auden was a Nazi.” Let’s just say I was stupefied. It’s not immoral, I suppose, to be ignorant, but some ignorance can be pretty shocking.

But back to the work, and the production.

First the work.

Seeing and hearing it again, what struck me was its dramatic sense, particularly in the pacing and juxtaposition of different moods and genre-moments. As with the Sinfonia da Requiem, there are moments of Shostakovian (or post-Mahlerian) grotesquery (the policemen’s scene from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk came to mind). There is comedy, pathos, tenderness, loudness and softness. There is dramatic preparation (for the storm, for example, but also, has been pointed out, between the party music and the subsequent roar of the crowd). Less notably (because it is an easier thing to achieve) though not less effectively, there is recapitulation and reminiscence. Another thing which really strikes me is the room the work allows for a variety of interpretation and response.

As to the production, my respect for it is enhanced. It is responsive to the text and the music in just so many ways. So much detail has been so very carefully thought out and executed.

I still have a niggling reservation about the postmodernish ramping up of the role of Dr Crabbe – is this really necessary? When he delights in the playfulness of the Borough boys (surely Crabbe as Britten here, nudge, nudge) I find it intrusive and even a little embarrassing, as well as heavy handed underlining – does the director think we won’t notice the lads without this? But conversely, despite all the business of clearing the hall of chairs during the passacaglia (which actually is co-ordinated brilliantly with the music), it is difficult to imagine the coup-de-theatre of the stage-within-a-stage moving forward working so well if it was simply left to the stage machinery to execute.

The ensuing scene in Grimes’s hut is the pithiest part of the production, and is masterful, both as to the circumstances of the boy’s death (caused by Grimes but, in a way, also by the mob) and the ending – both Balstrode’s detection of something amiss and Mrs Sedley’s.

Enough has been said elsewhere about the performances, which were uniformly excellent. Maybe Catherine Carby was on the youthful side for Auntie, but that is a question of casting rather than performance, and she did have a terrific 1940s look. I take back any earlier implicit criticism of Mark Wigglesworth’s musical direction.

It seems odd to complain, as Andrew Byrne does, that:

It seems unbalanced and unfair that most operas billed to be conducted by the musical director [ie: Richard Hickox] in recent years had internationally acclaimed casts singing with the best of Australia’s resident opera singers.

There have been expressions of regret that there has been no permanent visual record of the production made which might result in the issue of a DVD. If this were to require the use of the unsightly taped-on-head microphones preferred by the ABC for Cosi or Pinchgut (and, I think the ABC) for its own recordings, I could do without it: that is unthinkable. The use of such microphones is disfiguring and seems to me to be an example of management acceding to the easiest path proposed by technicians.

Apart from a revival (when can we get a cast to match this?) I am now looking forward to the less well-known opera, Marsha Grimes, about the lesbian vampire who abducted and ate all the little girls in the Borough and nobody even noticed. (Music by Ethyl Smith; libretto by Edith Sitwell or (maybe) Muriel Spark.)

Shanghai by Moonlight

On the fence outside the premises of the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra.

Continued in subsequent sections, and perhaps more clearly visible, if less accurate:

Johann Strauss also scores a spot on the adjacent corner.

I presume Johann is playing a waltz, but I’m not sure which:

I’m still puzzling over the identity of the disconsolate chap lurking by the columns.

Sydney Symphony Orchestra in Shanghai

I am just back from a little under two weeks in and around Shanghai.

The Great Firewall of China precluded (at least for a casual user such as I who has not mastered the art of internet proxies) any posts while I was there.

With a little difficulty (a craven and admittedly very last-minute request for assistance from the SSO having been met with the proud but not-quite-on-point response that the concert was sold out, as to which more later) I managed to get to hear the SSO’s Shanghai concert.

The program (which had already been given in Beijing and was to be repeated elsewhere) was:

Rachmaninov – Vocalise
Tchaikovsky – Piano Concerto No 1
Prokofiev – Symphony No 5.

Soloist was Behzod Abduraimov and Vladimir Ashkenazy conducted.

D (with whom and his mother I was staying in Shanghai) thought little of my desire to go to this concert, particularly as it necessitated a trip across town earlier in the day to the venue to buy a ticket in person. Why, having coming half way across the world, would I want to squander a day seeing something I could see at home?

The true answer is probably sentiment, coupled with a pathetically tragic element of I-can-blog-this. Aside from that, for the purposes of argument, the reasons and the content of this post can be divided into musical and extra-musical.

Taking the extra-musical first, there is this question of a “sold-out” concert. This may be true from the point of view of the official box office (there were perhaps 7 or 8 tickets for sale when I fronted at about 3 pm) but there is in fact an extensive secondary market, which is to say: touts. I spotted (and you can, too, in the picture below) a posse seemingly permanently encamped with booklets of tickets for numerous events in the afternoon. In the evening, between the metro exit a few hundred metres away and the concert hall, I estimate there were maybe 40 or 50. As a foreigner you are at a bit of a disadvantage in this market, being both presumptively rich and unlikely to walk away and also being unfamiliar with the vendors and with the indicia of an authentic tickets: forgery remaining a kind of sovereign risk. Having secured a ticket (at the top price of 680 rmb – more fool me), I didn’t put it the test, but in the past I have found it possible (preferably as undisclosed principal with a Chinese front man) to get tickets at 40 to 60% discount. I suspect that ticket prices are in truth a bit like airlines’ full fares – few really pay them unless it really is a hot ticket. This must also mean that the intermediaries in this market (ie, the touts) must get their tickets at an even bigger discount for the exercise to be worth their while.

Some things are universal: the cheaper seats (apart from a few opposite the piano and to the side) were pretty well fully occupied. The top-price bloc was much emptier, and given that this included VIPs (including the SSO team: I sat just behind the assistant conductor, Nicholas Carter and [graceless grudge alert] I’d say the official party could well have spared me a seat in their rows) the actual sales of this bloc cannot have exceeded 30%.

The Shanghai Oriental Arts Centre (pictured above), where the concert was held, is in Pudong (literally: on the eastern side (dong) of the Haungpu river), and after the Shanghai Grand Theatre at People’s Square is the city’s No 2 venue (In Beijing the SSO played at the Forbidden City Concert Hall, which is possibly No 2 aeq with the Beijing Concert Hall or maybe No 3). The nominal ticket prices were the venue’s standard prices, and included a 50 rmb price for students. By way of comparison, the top nominal price for the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, playing the next two nights at the SGT with Ricardo Chailly, was 1880 rmb.

There was an x-ray-style baggage search at the entrance. These are now becoming ubiquitous in China. D was stopped on our way into the box office in the afternoon and quizzed about a container of hair-gel he had just bought, which seems a little over the top, whatever the perils of peroxide bombs may be in aircraft.

A recorded announcement (in English and Chinese) broadcast at intervals in the foyer gave instructions on concert etiquette. It included:

• please remain seated during the performance;
• please remain silent during the performance;
• please do not applaud between movements;
• do not let children run around auditorioum lest they fall and hurt themselves; and
• smoking and chewing gum are strictly prohibited.

The last seems rather tough on anyone with a Nicorette habit, but such people are probably rare in Shanghai.

Adherence to the first four precepts was pretty good: no children ran around and there will always be some applause after the first movement of the Tchaikovsky. I didn’t spot anyone smoking in the auditorium.

D claims that, in Shanghai, there are two groups of people who are commonly held to be “difficult.” The first, unsurprisingly, is teenagers. The second is women of a certain age, say late 50s to early 60s – the lost youth of the cultural revolution. These are thought to be tough customers. Two such women not far from me upheld the Chinese tradition of in-concert commentary, ostensibly rendered inoccuous by masking with a hand held obliquely in front of their mouths.

Rule of law is laxer in China than Australia: seat hopping occurred even before the first half.

The ushers are definitely there to supervise the audience, and a few are specially assigned to stand facing it with a stern demeanour. Just before the concert began, they marched down the aisles bearing illuminated signs reinforcing the simultaneous recorded announcement forbidding photography. This was then flashed up on the tickertape-style illuminated signs at either side of the stage throughout the concert (visible in the picture).

At interval, Behzod Abduraimov came to sit next to Nicholas Carter. This prompted a little rush of autograph-solicitation and then the inevitable next step as one young woman left her seat and attempted to get a picture of herself with him with her mobile phone. At this point the orchestra’s managing director, Rory Jeffes, rose from the seat he had taken up for the second half and proclaimed rather lordlily [probably not a word] “No Pictures!” I bet Rory was a prefect at school.

As Shanghai-born SSO violinist Shuti Huang (promoted to acting principal for the tour) has already remarked on the SSO’s pseudo-blog of the tour, immediately the applause finished our egress was accompanied by loud recorded music of a vaguely crossover-popular Chinese style.

As to the live music, I didn’t think so much of the first half. The Vocalise is a confection. There were two conspicuous french horn fluffs or split notes in the Tchaikovsky, including, embarrassingly, on the very first note. Ashkenazy has been quoted as saying that Abduraimov, aged 19, and this year’s winner of the London International Piano Competition, has a great future, and this seems accurate enough. Perhaps this is sufficient justification for his choice of Chopin’s Etude Op 10 No 1 as an encore, which would otherwise be semiotically inappropriate and indeed a little vulgar. That’s probably snobby of me, because the audience lapped this stuff up.

The main point of interest was to hear the orchestra in a drier and hence clearer acoustic than its home venue. This wasn’t always flattering to the violins, because though it gave them a better chance to hear each other for the purposes of unanimity, it also revealed more clearly when they fell short, particularly in the Tchaikovsky. The woodwind were also much more clearly audible: heard away from home, Diana Doherty comes through as their star.

In the second half, it was clear that the hard yards [yuk: sporting cliche] had been put in, including by the violins, and the orchestra delivered a truly crackling perfomance of the Prokofiev. I’m looking forward to hearing that again in Sydney, albeit in the SOH concert hall echo chamber.

For an encore, Mr Ashkenazy asked the audience to guess the composer: it was Elgar’s Chanson de Matin. I understand this from VA’s point of view, and it was truly charming, but could we not have had something either Australian or Chinese? I know the latter would have required something else once the orchestra left China, and nothing characteristic by, say, Julian Yu, would be likely to be palatable, but I don’t think you can overestimate the value on tour of buttering up an audience by serving them a bit of their own fare by way of gracious, even if kitschy, tribute.

Cribbed from Crabbe

Tonight to the first night of Peter Grimes.

When the curtain rose, the assembled people of the borough faced us in contemporary-with-the-opera’s-composition garb for the inquest prelude in what seemed a loving tribute to OA’s rehearsal space, Marrickville Town Hall, masquerading as something more like the Aldeburgh/the Borough parish hall. Actually, Marrickville Town Hall is finer than that: it was more like Rockdale Town Hall, home of the Rockdale Opera Company. It was a spectacular (if spectacularly drab) set, but I knew that was the only one we were going to get.

As a result, there was a lot of necessary suspension of disbelief, as the hall had to stand for strand and pub. Oh, Mr Armfield, I thought to myself: do we have to have these actors’-exercise sorts of things? Maybe I’ve just not got over when NA wrote me out of a Sydney Uni production of Bartholomew Fair (he was tutoring in English and doing an MA in (I think) Ben Jonson at the time, though fame took him away, I think, before he ever finished it), because I didn’t come to enough rehearsals – which was, in turn, in part because I couldn’t see the point of all those exercises.

Enough of ancient grudges.

The production does manage a coup-de-theatre which I won’t spoil by revealing here.

But much is gained. Expectations have been high, and they have been met. Stuart Skelton is terrific as Grimes (more Vickers than Pears, though there is one colaratura spot in the writing which is ineluctably Pearsian), and Susan Gritton, apart from some oddly slow to speak higher soft notes, impressive as Ellen. I wished there could have been more for Peter Coleman-Wright to sing. The period setting adopted enabled Elizabeth Campbell to play Mrs Smedley as a kind of crazed Miss-Marple-wannabe, though this was more comic than threatening. The lesser parts were all strongly cast and well-delivered – the men get a better go than the women in this. I did think there was the occasional ensemble scrappiness. Mark Wigglesworth was not much inclined to let the heart-stopping moments linger.

The thing is: Grimes really is a great work, and not just in the euphemistic sense. It has wonderful moments for the orchestra, and when the chorus of borough inhabitants’ ire is raised, it has some of the loudest and most thrilling noises in the repertoire. Perhaps there are just a few twee bits: “Joe has gone fishing” makes me think of “Old Abram Brown,” and Britten managed the idea better in Billy Budd. Which is to say that a lot of the credit must go to the work. I also remember that the last production (pictured above) made a similarly strong impression on me.

The libretto is based on a poem by George Crabbe, and includes, as a non-speaking part, “Dr Crabbe.” This is the one aspect of this production that I do have misgivings about, as “Dr Crabbe” – the author within the action – assumes the role of stage manager and even eventually cradles the crazed Grimes in his madness. (The original poem is rather less sympathetic to Grimes.) I didn’t warm to this. It was fiddly and distracting, both as a source of business during the interludes for the scene changes which weren’t needed and as an authorial commentary on Grimes’s fog-harried (we had to imagine the fog, of course) confusion.

There is a lot of drinking of cups of tea in the parish hall. As a matter of design, I thought the choice of teacup was totally wrong. It should have been Beryl, as found in every English parish hall from the period and featured in Foyle’s War:

In a re-run of the last first night I attended, I really am off to Shanghai tomorrow. I have made sure that I will be back just in time for the last night of the run. That’s because I expected it to be good, and, despite the little gripes above, it really is very, very good. I cried twice.

Avenue Q & The Founding of a Republic

On Friday night to see Avenue Q at the Theatre Royal.

It’s taken a while for this show to reach Australia. Had D (who is still away) been in town we would almost certainly have gone to see this earlier, as we’ve enjoyed some of the better-known songs on you-tube and the premiss (muppets and sesame street for young adults) is beguiling. The “Q” is a take on the alphabetical avenues of Manhattan, though the plot does have a gay angle which was thought sufficient to warrant an ACON preview gala and ACON volunteers collecting at the end (a la Priscilla).The twin announcements of the end of the Sydney run (18 October) and $50 tickets ($49.90) for all seats finally forced my hand.

I hope this discounting doesn’t mean the promoters are losing money on it. Tickets were only being sold for the stalls.

But that is too gloomy to contemplate.

The show doesn’t really pretend to be profound, but it is funny and smart and at this price I’d say pretty well irresistible if you can get to it before it closes. It is memorable without needing to be a “blockbuster.”

It is certainly better value for money than the Chinese anniversary-of-1949 spectacular, The Founding of a Republic. (建国大业). That’s the People’s Republic, of course.

This was showing in Sydney on one screen only, at Hoyts Broadway, surely by some special arrangement with the Chinese consulate (when do you see Hoyts doing single-screen releases?). Amidst numerous shots of Chairman Mao looking helmsmanish, piggy-backing children through fields of flowers, etc, the chief interest in the film for me and I suspect quite a lot of the audience, judging from their responses, turned out to be spotting the familiar faces of actors and even film directors popping up, often in quite tiny roles.

The ticket to this cost me an astounding $17 on the Monday public holiday. I don’t know if this included a holiday surcharge. Otherwise it seems that this is about what a film costs these days if you are silly enough to front a mainstream cinema unarmed with the relevant discount voucher or membership card.

A long and tortuous history

Last week, judgment was given in the latest instalment of Wentworth v Rogers. Judges often say it but in this case when Rothman J stated in his opening sentence that:

These proceedings have a long and tortuous history

it could almost count as judicial understatement. The proceedings commenced in 1982. They are well-known, arising from an incident in 1977 when Mr Rogers (as was subsequently found by a jury after a civil trial in 1994) assaulted Ms Wentworth, his then wife – though the amount of the jury verdict suggests that not all of Ms Wentworth’s claims about the incident were believed. (Click here for a bit of nostalgia about the level of court reporting once provided by the Daily Telegraph.)

His Honour dismissed Ms Wentworth’s various applications, which were said to be in aid of the enforcement of the judgment of $2,000 for the assault and costs of $184,000. Those amounts were never paid by Mr Rogers and, Mr Rogers having since gone bankrupt on his own application (naming Ms Wentworth and the present Mrs Rogers as his creditors), it is not possible to take further enforcement action in the Supreme Court in relation to them in the face of the over-riding (Commonwealth) provisions of the Bankruptcy Act. Accordingly, Ms Wentworth’s application was fundamentally misconceived.

Which makes it all the odder that his Honour ordered that Mr Rogers (who did not appear or take part in the present notices of motion) pay Ms Wentworth’s costs of the motion. No order for costs was made in the present Mrs Rogers’ favour against Ms Wentworth.

No particular reasons are offered for this. There are some rather weasel-worded observations about the “seeming injustice” of Ms Wentworth being unable to enforce the judgment and the “the ability of the fraudulent to hide behind the bankruptcy laws,” though in his next breath his Honour adds “I do not, by that comment, find or suggest that Mr Rogers has been fraudulent.” This does not strike me as in any way a satisfactory exercise of the court’s discretion in relation to costs.

The jury is still out

On Monday 15 September, Justice Anthony Whealy, who has been presiding at Parramatta over Sydney’s own lengthy terrorist trial, completed his summing up. The trial itself has been going on since early last year, though the jury was only empanelled in about November.

My own informant (obviously, from what follows, on the defence side) claims that his Honour was perceptibly deflated when the foreman announced that the jury proposed to deliberate Monday to Thursday for a full (court-length) day, and only until 1pm on Fridays. How could it take them so long? Wasn’t the right verdict obvious?

The jury is still out.

There are five defendants. There has been remarkably little reportage of this trial. Once the verdicts are in, we can expect the usual flood: Hold the front page! It would be best for the press if the verdict came out on a Friday: then we can all have a big Saturday splash.

Afterword:

Verdict came in on Friday 16 October. All guilty. I missed any press splash as I was on the plane to Shanghai by then.