Poème: Chamber Landscapes

UKARIA Cultural Centre
Adelaide Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn 

This year’s Chamber Landscapes weekend at the Ukaria Centre in the Adelaide Hills was curated by Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen, who says in a program note that he chose the title ‘Poème’ as a guiding theme to explore the interrelationships between music, text and myth. 

I was there for three concerts last Saturday 11^th March, and found myself in various states of rapture and contemplation, as well as consuming large amounts of local produce from Ukaria's copious larder and excellent wine cellar.
 
The day's activities kicked off at noon with a concert entitled ‘The Transcendental’. This began with Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 10, which Jumppanen introduced as one of his favourite pieces, before being joined onstage by fellow Finnish violinist Elina Vähälä. The serene beauty of the work – with its lovely opening birdlike trills echoing in call-and-response between violin and piano – was a perfect match for the venue and its bucolic surroundings. However, I felt that Jumppanen’s playing was a little too compressed and abrupt to allow for the work’s expansive lyricism in the first two movements, while Vähälä remained a little too poised and aloof; although both players took more risks and had more fun in the rough-and-tumble of the Scherzo and Finale.  

 
After interval came a stupendous performance by Russian émigré pianist Konstantin Shamray of the rarely tackled Piano Sonata No.2 ‘Concord, Mass., 1840–60’ by Charles Ives. The work’s four movements are named after American writers associated with Transcendentalism – Emerson, Hawthorn, the Alcott siblings (Louisa May and her brother Bronson) and Thoreau – and are musically linked by references to the opening theme of Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony. It’s a wild and wide-ranging work by a unique outsider voice in musical history, and Shamray has the necessary trifecta of spiritual focus, heart-on-sleeve passion and sheer pianistic chops to pull it off. For me this was the musical zenith of the entire day.
 
After a fortifying lunch and glass of wine, I was back for the second concert of the day, entitled ‘Myth and Passion’, which Jumppanen introduced by speaking of three major currents in musical modernism represented by Schönberg, Scriabin and Bartok/Stravinsky. He invited us to consider the second and more ‘mystical’ current as being less well-known but perhaps having greater longevity and influence – at least as currently measured by contemporary sensibilities – after the respective heydays of serialism and neo-classicism had apparently run their course. Although in my humble opinion such historicist judgements are inevitably proved wrong by history itself, it was a telling way to frame the program that followed. 
 
This began with Szymanowski’s three ‘Myths’ for violin and piano, played by the formidable duo of Shamray and Polish violinist Jakub Jakowicz. The two players were perfectly matched in their fearless virtuosity and sense of spirit, both of which are required by the post-Symbolist idiom of the pieces, which follow in the footsteps of Debussy as well as Scriabin, their ambiguous harmonies opening suggestively onto atonality.
 
After this cellist Timo-Veikko Valve – another member of Jumppanen’s Finnish circle – took the stage for a dazzling rendition of Kitty Xiao’s In Flesh for electrified cello. This introduced another stream of modernism in the form of electronic music by augmenting the rich natural tones of the instrument with various processing and sampling techniques. Personally, I found the work a little lacking in substance, but it certainly added a note of Frankenstein-like techno-horror to the palette of the afternoon. 
 
Jakowciz then returned to the stage and was accompanied by Jumppanen for a fiery account of Lutoslawski’s ‘Subito’, a compressed and dramatic work for violin and piano that advanced further into the increasingly chromatic realm of Polish modernism pioneered by Szymanowski. 
 
The final item on the menu for this second concert was American late Romantic composer Amy Beach’s Piano Quintet. A contemporary of Ives, Beach was something of a pioneer as a female composer and pianist, whose career and genius suffered from similar restrictions to those endured by Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann. In fact the sense of tension and yearning in this work reminded me of the Piano Quintet of Brahms, but with an added dimension of almost Wagnerian ecstasy. Along with the Ives sonata, this work was another high point for me, especially in the ardent performance it was given by pianist Andrea Lam, with strong support from Vähälä and Jakowicz on violins, Christopher Moore on viola and Valve on cello. 
 
After another round of refreshments in the form of an unfeasibly large cheese platter, I was ready for the final concert of the day. Entitled ‘The Exotic’, this began with a rare performance of Pierre Boulez’s hard-core avant-garde masterpiece Le Marteau Sans Maitre (‘The Hammer Without A Master’). Written in the 1950s for an ensemble of instruments including soprano voice, flute, guitar, viola, xylophone, vibraphone and percussion – which evokes the sounds if not the forms of Japanese and Balinese music – the work is a setting of three surrealist poems by Boulez’s contemporary Rene Char. 
 
Le Marteau retains the composer’s signature post-War style of ‘total serialism’ but introduces an additional element of what he rather mischievously termed ‘local indiscipline’. Along with its exotic instrumentation, this sense of structural freedom allows space for the composer’s intuitive genius (as well as the interpretative artistry of the performers) and potentially provides some relief from the work’s otherwise almost mechanical sense of determinism (not to mention the formidable demands it places on the audience and musicians alike).
 
As a composer, conductor and intellectual Boulez has always been something of a personal hero of mine, and there was a great sense of occasion about the event, but to be brutally honest (like the man himself) I found the performance surprisingly anticlimactic and strangely unaffecting. It’s hard to be sure, but I think this was due to the overly cautious and reverential spirit in which it was conducted by American contemporary music specialist and former Boulez student Jeffrey Means, and accordingly performed by the undeniably accomplished ensemble of musicians (which included the likes of guitarist Slava Grigoryan alongside a distinguished array of fellow instrumentalists). 
 
The glowing exception was soprano/mezzo Judith Dodsworth, whose voice has enormous range and expressiveness, and who brought out the work’s playfulness and sensuality, both of which are essential aspects of Boulez’s (typically French) musical personality (and of Char’s poetry). In other words: she brought an element of jazz to what otherwise sounded at times like the organised cacophony of a totally serialist marching band. 
 
After interval, I felt a similar sense of clockwork-like automatism detracted from Vähälä and Jumppanen’s otherwise flawless performance of Debussy’s Violin Sonata. As with the earlier Beethoven sonata, their playing seemed a little too tightly wound and controlled for the work to unfurl and display its glorious colours, or to evoke some of its more soulful and jazzy resonances. 
 
A more satisfyingly Debussyian conclusion to the concert – and the entire day – was ironically provided by contemporary German composer Hans Tutschku’s work for electronically processed piano Shadow of Bells.Played by Andrea Lam with the same sensitivity that informed her performance of the Amy Beach Piano Quintet, this spacious work created a sonic landscape that reminded me of wandering through a Japanese garden filled with the sound of distant temple bells, in which I heard echoes of Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie.
 
As such it provided an appropriately poetic and exotic finale. I drove away into the darkness of the Adelaide hills on my way back to the city filled with an abiding sense of awe and mystery, and with an unfinished platter of cheese sitting on the passenger seat beside me.
 
*
 
Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. 
 
Professor von Flügelhorn is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  
 

 

Jurrungu Ngan-ga 

Marrugeku

Adelaide Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

Jurrungu Ngan-ga is the latest work by Broome/Sydney-based intercultural dance theatre company Marrugeku. 

Jointly led by choreographer-dancer Dalissa Pigram and director-dramaturg Rachel Swaine, the company creates work through a deep and long-term process of consultation and collaboration with Indigenous communities, before touring to urban and remote Australia as well as internationally. More recently they’ve expanded their remit to connect with First Nations peoples around the world as well as other minority communities back home. 

 

Jurrungu Ngan-ga makes a compelling link between the treatment of Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers in terms of their incarceration, brutalisation and death while in detention. In doing so it paints a convincing picture of White Anglo-Celtic settler Australia as shaped by an inherently carceral form of colonisation that can be traced back to its convict origins and is still going on today.

 

The title means ‘straight talk’ – a Yarawu concept that refers to direct and honest communication between family members. In the context of the show this takes the form of a frank and fearless conversation between Indigenous, refugee and settler populations, trans and CIS gendered subjects, prisoners and guards, performers and audience. 

 

The work is informed by a similar process of ‘straight talk’ between creatives, performers and cultural dramaturgs. The latter include Yarawu elder and senator Patrick Dodson; Kurdish Iranian journalist, writer and former asylum seeker Behrouz Boochani (who was detained on Manus Island for five years); and Iranian-Australian philosopher and activist Omid Tofighian, who co-translated Boochani’s book No Friend But The Moutains (which was based on text messages from Manus Island sent via a smuggled mobile phone). This book is one of two departure-points for Jurrungu Ngan-ga; the other is Australia’s Shame, the Four Corners documentary about the torture of Indigenous youth at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in the Northern Territory that was broadcast on the ABC in 2016.

 

Rather than directly staging or quoting from these sources, however, most of the scenarios in Jurrungu Ngan-ga have been developed through improvisation (the cast are listed as co-devisors). Nevertheless these clearly allude to scenes and images of Manus in the book or Don Dale in the documentary, framed by a nightmarishly surreal composite ‘prison of the mind’.

 

Visual artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s simple but devastatingly effective set features a towering cage-like fence or wall of perforated metal that also serves as a projection surface, with a doorway that opens and slams shut, and a surveillance camera mounted high up in the centre of the fence that the performers frequently interact with, turning their backs to the audience while large scale projections of their images stare or talk back at us. Downstage of the fence – and as it were inside the cage – huge brightly lit chandeliers are lowered and raised above the otherwise bare stage: obscene signifiers of wealth and power juxtaposed with the poverty and deprivation signified by the rest of the set. Andrew Treloar’s costumes are a ragtag mishmash of ‘found’ items like trackie pants, footy shorts, sweatshirts and tank tops, with a few creative adornments like baseball caps and chiffon slips.

 

Sound is also crucial to the evocation of place and atmosphere, and includes mechanical noises, walkies-talkies, barking dogs and tropical birds. There are also pounding dance tracks by composers Sam Serruys, Paul Charlier and Rhyan Clapham (aka DOBBY), and a haunting song by Kurdish Iranian singer Farhad Bandesh.

 

The heart and soul of the show however is provided by the powerhouse ensemble of First Nations, Filipino, Palestinian and Anglo-Celtic Australian performers, each of whom brings their own unique physicality and personality to the show. Memorable sequences include a Don Dale/Dylan Voller-like scene featuring Wiradjuri performer Chandler Connell manically pacing inside an invisible cell (defined by Damien Cooper’s harshly effective lighting), punctuated by outbursts of furious dancing or yelling at the security camera; Australian-Filipino dancer Macon Escobal Riley dragging himself along the floor while being menaced and finally stripped naked by a pack of human hyenas; and Australian-Filipinx trans performer Bhenji Ra telling the story of the suicide of one of her Vogue ‘mothers’, and then beginning a Voguing routine while leading a group chant of the names of Indigenous people and refugees who’ve been violently killed or died from neglect while in detention. This leads directly into a climactic ‘krump army’ sequence, in which all the performers take turns to climb on a table and do their own wild solos – including White Aussie kangaroo-hopping security guards – while swapping clothes, cheering each other on, and embodying the spirit of resistance and freedom that defies all systems of domination and subjugation. 

 

Marrugeku has developed a form of dance theatre which is radically different from most ‘contemporary dance’ in Australia. Its intercultural focus, raw physicality and generation of material through improvisation are all directly inspired by the ‘Flemish Wave’ of dance theatre – in particular the work of Alain Platel and les ballets C de la B (performance dramaturg Hildegard de Vuyst is a long-term collaborator with both companies). 

The use of a strongly gestural language based on the stories and bodies of the dancers is also clearly influenced by the Tanzteater of Pina Bausch. Just as the latter’s work dealt with historical trauma and denial in post-war Germany as well as enduring gender-based hierarchies of power, Jurrungu Ngan-ga contends with the ongoing trauma and denial of colonisation and racism as well as intersecting forms of oppression like heteronormativity and transphobia. 

In doing so they’ve conjured up a form of ‘horrific surrealism’ (a phrase coined by Tofighian) that reminds me of Kafka as well as Expressionist painting or the cinema of David Lynch. More vitally, they’ve enlisted the subversive forces of resistance and creativity that belong to some of the most oppressed communities in our society and transformed them into something powerful and beautiful.

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he wasthe lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen), in which capacity as the band’s front-man he developed a unique form of contemporary dance combining elements inspired by Isadora Duncan with the traditional Austrian Schuhplattler. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He’s currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He’s also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

 

Verdi’s Messa da Requiem

Ballett Zürich
Eleanor Lyons, Caitlin Hulcup, Paul O’Neill, Pelham Andrews
Adelaide Festival Chorus
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra

 
Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

Verdi composed his Messa da Requiem in honour of his older contemporary the Italian writer and humanist Manzoni, whom he admired not only as an artist but as a social and political liberal committed to the Risorgimento. As for Manzoni’s religious views, while not as anti-clerical as Verdi, his avowed Catholicism was similarly liberal, stressing that while Catholic doctrine might comprise the sum of all truths, it doesn’t do so exclusively. 

 

The work was first performed in a church (San Marco in Milan), and then almost immediately afterwards in an opera house (La Scala). Both were conducted by Verdi himself, and featuring four soloists who’d all previously been cast in the premiere of his most recent opera Aida. 

Ongoing quibbles about whether or not Verdi was sufficiently religious, or whether his Requiem is more inherently ‘dramatic’ or ‘spiritual’, surely miss the point. Like his operas, the work expresses the Shakespearean breadth of his vision, from the blazing heights of love to the sombre depths of tragedy. 

 

In 1943–4 it was performed sixteen times by the inmates of Theresienstadt concentration camp, using a single copy of the score and accompanied by a piano. Eichmann joked: ‘Those crazy Jews are singing their own requiem.’ 

More recently in 2021 it was performed at the Met to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. In the words of the Dies Irae: ‘The day of wrath will dissolve the world in ashes.’ 

 

Speaking as someone who’s neither an Italian nor a Catholic, I can still find comfort and joy – as well as hearing pain and anguish – in Verdi’s Requiem. Like all great masterpieces, its meaning depends on the context, and its truth is revealed by history. 

However, the meaning and truth of a work of art – like the meaning and truth of a religious text – aren’t entirely contingent or open to interpretation. They also lie within the work or text itself, for those who have the eyes and ears to read or hear what it has to say.

 

Unfortunately, Christian Spuck’s production and choreography for Ballett Zürich not only turns a blind eye to the libretto but also appears to be deaf to what Verdi wrote. In fact music and dance are at such cross-purposes that after a while I found myself alternately closing my eyes to listen, or trying to block my ears and watch.

 

The dancers were certainly impressive, and the soloists gave their all and were mostly in glorious voice, though tenor Paul O’Neill showed signs of strain on the night I attended. The chorus did outstanding work (especially given the choreography they were called upon to execute while singing); and the orchestra played with distinction under the thoughtful baton of Johannes Fritzsch. However, apart from some thrilling outbursts from the percussion in the Dies Irae, the performance sounded lacklustre and the pace dragged. Possibly the conductor was directed to follow what was happening stage – which is the opposite of what music should do in relation to dance, and completely robbed the score of its autonomous character. 

 

Verdi’s music is nothing if not passionate and fiery – or alternatively pitch-dark. Spuck’s production on the contrary is all shades of grey and faded colours – from the set design, with its ash-covered floor and blackboard-like walls (which at one point the dancers use chalk to scribble on), to the drabness and pallor of the dancers’ costumes (apart from one flimsy black dress, and the staid black shirts and trousers worn by the soloists and chorus). 

 

As for the choreography: apart from occasional outbursts of sprinting or darting around, the movement was mostly languid and heavily indebted to classical ballet but without any of the latter’s sense of weightlessness or flight (instead there’s a lot of prolonged lifting, carrying and dragging). Meanwhile the poor soloists wandered slowly and portentously around the stage as if in a Wagner opera, looking for something to do and hoping forlornly to be included in the action, while their voices ascended vainly into the lighting grid. The chorus came off best: often crouching and moving intently en masse while singing with hushed intensity, like a shuffling horde of zombies, or perhaps a corps de ballet of the damned trapped in a choreographic hell. 

 

Possibly all of this was meant to make us feel ‘sad’. If so, ‘sad’ is the one thing Verdi’s music isn’t – tragic, defiant, raging, pleading, despairing, terrifying, liberating, soaring, beautiful, ethereal, but never ‘sad’. It’s a Requiem, but it’s not a dirge. 

 

The inmates at Theresienstadt were surely singing it as an act of resistance and freedom; as an expression of their love of life; as an accusation levelled at the Nazis and the watching but indifferent world; and as a desperate cry for help addressed to the Red Cross delegation who came to inspect the camp and came away apparently convinced by the Nazi propaganda machine that there was nothing sinister going on. Whatever the case, they certainly didn’t sing it because they were feeling ‘sad’.  

 

The bottom line is that Verdi’s Requiem isn’t written to be danced to. That doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be danced to; but such an idea would call for something more energetic and transgressive than Spuck’s enervated and regressive choreography and staging. In other words: it would call for something more like Verdi’s Requiem. 

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he wasthe lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen), in which capacity as the band’s front-man he developed a unique form of contemporary folk dance combining elements inspired by Isadora Duncan with the traditional Austrian Schuhplattler. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He’s currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He’s also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

 

 

Ngapa William Cooper 

Nigel Westlake, Lior, Lou Bennett
Andrea Lam, Rebecca Lagos, Kees Boersma
Australian String Quartet
Adelaide Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

I was deeply moved by the performance of Ngapa William Cooper (‘Uncle William Cooper’) at Adelaide Town Hall last Tuesday, following its debut at Ukaria Cultural Centre the previous Friday. The ornate neo-classical splendour of the venue, with its magnificent marble pillars and towering organ-pipes, made me feel like I was back in the Vienna Musikverein, and somehow seemed an appropriate setting for a work which is redolent with a sense of history and occasion while also being rich in musical and cultural complexity. 

 

The song cycle is a follow-up to Compassion, ­a 2013 collaboration between Anglo-Australian composer Nigel Westlake and Israeli-Australian singer-songwriter Lior, which was based on ancient Hebrew and Arabic texts. Their new work is co-written and co-performed with Yorta Yorta Dja Dja Wurrung songwriter-composer Lou Bennett (who is also Cooper’s direct descendant) with additional lyric content by Sarah Gorey, and like its precursor is a stylistic crossover with contemporary classical and popular elements. It’s also similarly cross-cultural in inspiration and has the same underlying theme of compassion at its heart. 

 

The work celebrates Yorta Yorta activist William Cooper, who as Secretary of the Australian Aborigines’ League led the only march of protest in the world at that time against the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938. Cooper and his fellow protesters marched from his home in Footscray to the inner city of Melbourne and attempted to deliver a petition of condemnation to the German consulate (which needless to say refused to admit them or receive their petition). 

 

Cooper had previously called for Aboriginal representation in Federal Parliament in his petition to King George V – a petition which (in an act of rich historical irony) Prime Minister Joe Lyons likewise failed to pass on to Buckingham Palace. Perhaps unsurprisingly Cooper saw the parallels between the plight of his people and the Jews in Europe, asserting that: ‘We are a very small minority, and we are a poor people, but in extending our sympathy to the Jewish people we assure them of our support in every way.’ 

 

The work began with a stirring traditional ‘Call to Ancestors’ by Lior and Bennett, who stood facing each other and sang in Hebrew and Yorta Yorta. Six sections followed, telling the story of Cooper’s protest and concluding with a reflection on his legacy, with the voices of both singers interweaving, accompanied by Andrea Lam on piano, Rebecca Lagos on percussion and Kees Boersma on double bass. 

 

Westlake’s music is highly accessible, using a base language of post-Impressionism peppered with elements of jazz and rock, and is full of tonal colour and syncopated rhythms. In terms of harmonic progression and melodic material I found it a bit static and repetitive at times – reminding me of an older generation of Australian composers like Sculthorpe or Ross Edwards – but it was richly evocative, especially in descriptive passages like the one that accompanied the protest march itself.

 

Lior sang in English from Cooper’s perspective, his voice finely spun and delicate as a reed instrument, while Bennett’s rich, bluesy contralto responded with words and phrases in Yorta Yorta that were intuitively connected with the content of each section, evoking themes of endearment, loss, family, protest, mourning and commemoration. Bennett also joined Lagos on percussion in one movement by shaking eucalyptus leaves, which evoked a sense of place and ritual, and reminded me of the sound of wings in flight. 

 

Before interval, two works were performed by the redoubtable Australian String Quartet. Bryce Dessner’s Aheym(Homeward) was a thrilling opening, written very much in a post-minimalist idiom; this was followed by arch-minimalist Philip Glass’s nostalgic and lyrical String Quartet No.3 ‘Mishima’, which was originally written as a film score for the Paul Schrader movie about the Japanese author (and quasi-fascist) who committed seppuku after a failed military coup (possibly a somewhat off-key choice in this regard, given the content of the main item that followed). Both works were given incisive renditions by the quartet, with superbly blended sound, exquisite tonal range and (in the Dessner) pounding rhythmic attack.

 

All in all, then, a musically satisfying evening – and in the case of the song cycle, a timely and fitting tribute to a towering figure in the ongoing struggle for racial justice in this country and across history. 

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He’s currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He’s also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

A Little Life

Directed by Ivo van Hove
Based on the novel by Hanya Yanagihara
Adelaide Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

Belgian stage director Ivo van Hove works across Europe, the UK and the US with companies like the Young Vic and the Comédie Francaise as well as commercial productions on Broadway. However the International Theater Amsterdam (formerly the Toneelgroep) – where he’s been Artistic Director since 2001 – is his primary artistic home and creative laboratory. 

 

Above all, his work with ITA demonstrates the value of his long-term collaboration with other creatives – in particular set and lighting designer Jan Versweyveld, video artist Mark Thewessen, sound designer Eric Sleichim and dramaturg Bart Van den Eyde – as well as a permanent ensemble of actors. Of course I speak as a humble Austrian emigré, but there seem to be few such theatre companies here in Australia, and our main stages seem to be the poorer for it.

 

Van Hove’s productions with ITA are often adaptations of novels or screenplays – as well as existing plays or cycles like Shakespeare’s Roman Plays or History Plays – that re-interpret the original works from the ground up in terms of their form and meaning. They typically use spectacular yet minimalist staging (there’s often little or no furniture except when absolutely necessary), with unconventional audience configurations and live-feed or pre-recorded video as crucial elements of the set design, as well as a low-key, understated acting style. To facilitate this, the cast use body-mics, wear contemporary clothes no matter where or when the play is set, and are often in bare feet or stripped naked as part of the action. 

 

Theatrical abstraction, realism and a heightened sense of ritual sit side by side in van Hove’s aesthetic. The emotional tone and style of his productions alternates between ice-cold and white-hot; and their execution (in every sense of the word) is always rigorously disciplined and highly controlled no matter how violent or cruel their assault on the audience’s senses. As such there’s something profoundly Classical about them that harks back to the Ancient Greeks and other non-Western traditions like Japanese Noh drama. 

 

A Little Life is based on Japanese-American author Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel about a group of male friends in New York City. The narrative slowly tightens its focus on the central figure, Jude, and gradually reveals itself to be about childhood sexual abuse and trauma, ongoing physical and emotional abuse, chronic pain and disability, self-harm and suicide (the list of trigger-warnings outside the theatre was probably the most comprehensive I’ve ever seen).

 

As an orphan delivered into the ‘care’ of a monastery, Jude is initially tortured by the monks, before being kidnapped by Brother Luke, who kidnaps him with the false promise of being his friend and protector and then forces him into years of sexual slavery. After being rescued by the police he's made a ward of the state and subjected to further abuse by counsellors; escaping this, he becomes a hitchhiker prostituting himself to truck drivers; finally he's picked up by Doctor Traylor, who gives him antibiotics to cure him of venereal disease and then locks him in a basement and abuses him sadistically, before driving over him with his car and leaving him with permanent injuries to his legs and spine. 

 

Despite being nurtured by his case worker Ana (who is dying of cancer), his college friends (especially Willem, who eventually becomes his lover and carer), his law professor Harold (who adopts him as a son), and his doctor Andy (who treats his ongoing ailments and self-inflicted injuries), Jude remains trapped in a cycle of self-harm and the underlying conviction that he's unworthy of being loved. This is exacerbated when he falls prey to another abusive relationship with Caleb, a fashion executive who repeatedly beats and rapes him before eventually throwing him down the fire escape of his apartment and leaving him for dead. After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Jude accepts Willem’s offer of a relationship but is unable to enjoy sex; after an emotional struggle, Willem accepts this on condition that Jude tell the truth about his past. The two of them settle down to a brief period of happiness together; but more tragedy lies around the corner, and Jude’s travails are far from over.

 

Despite being shortlisted for numerous prizes, the novel divided critics and readers, and was decried by some as ‘trauma literature’ or ‘torture porn’; more than one friend of mine hated the book and/or found themselves unable to finish it. I personally felt its detailed account of abuse and self-harm – and their effect on Jude as well as everyone in the novel who loves or endeavours to help him – was in no way gratuitous or exploitative, but on the contrary revealed something profound about the ongoing ramifications of trauma for everyone affected by it either directly or indirectly.

 

Van Hove and his creative team have adapted Yanagihara’s 800-page chronicle into a four-hour work of ‘slow theatre’ (with one interval) which is similar to the effect of reading the novel in terms of duration and rhythm – as well as the form of attention required from the audience. The adaptation also includes long stretches of exposition which are more or less lifted from the novel and put into the mouths of the characters, so that the action is less dialogue-driven than narrative-driven – in other words, more like a novel than a conventional play. However, in contrast with the deliberately measured tone of the novel, van Hove’s production is much more confronting and brutal.

 

The audience is seated on either side of a traverse stage, with video screens at either end showing non-stop slow-motion footage of New York City streets. This is occasionally tinted by a pink filter or pixelated to become visual static during the later scenes of abuse or self-harm, which all occur centre-stage.

 

A live string quartet sits below the stage on one side of the traverse and plays various pieces during transitions between scenes – most notably a repeated version of the slow introduction to Mozart’s ‘Dissonance Quartet’. Music and sound are also conveyed through speakers placed around the theatre; and the actor-characters also play records on a stereo which is positioned on the opposite side of the traverse and forms part of the furniture in the apartment shared by Jude and his friend (and later lover) Willem. 

 

The dialogue is in Dutch, and the actors all use body-mics, but surtitles in English are projected on either side of an inverted structure that hangs suspended over the stage and contains the lighting grid. This structure also plays a spectacular role in a typically van Hovean coup de théâtre at the climax of the play. 

The effect of the surtitles is a bit like watching a foreign-language film, and one soon ceases to notice that the actors aren’t speaking in English. In any case, although the action is predominantly set in New York, with flashbacks taking place around the rural heartland of the United States, one feels that it could be taking place almost anywhere – or more precisely, right here – that is to say, wherever the play is being performed.

 

Like Yanagihara’s novel, Van Hove’s production gradually turns up the heat, until what initially appears to be a generic story about a group of post-college friends becomes a slow-burning spectacle of carnage. In fact the cast spend much of their time either preparing and cooking food on a functioning stove-top at one end of the stage (which they eat in front of the audience during interval) or cleaning up stage blood that’s been visibly released from plastic bags taped to Jude’s body and dripped or leaked onto the floor during the scenes of self-harm and abuse (though his shirt remains soaked and stained with it for the duration of the show).

 

As such the production progresses stylistically from Stanislavskian naturalism to Brechtian alienation effects to a kind of Artaudian theatre of cruelty – where ‘cruelty’ is to be understood not merely in terms of physical violence or sadism (though these certainly feature in the story) but as a form of representation that transcends language, abolishes distance and exposes the audience to something dark and destructive at the heart of human nature. 

 

All of this is inhabited with a paradoxical sense of lightness and ease by the uniformly excellent ensemble cast – some of whom have been working with van Hove (and each other) for decades. Dutch-Palestinian actor Ramsay Nasr gives a carefully measured and distilled performance as Jude; Hans Kesting is monstrously convincing in his serial incarnation of Jude’s abusers, his transformative physicality and transfixing gaze mesmerising and terrorising Jude and the audience from one character to the next; and Marieke Heebink calmly haunts the stage as Jude’s dead social worker Ana – who in this adaptation is the only female character in the story, and who in van Hove’s staging accompanies Jude like a guardian angel during some of the most extreme scenes of abuse and self-harm. 

 

In fact both the adaptation and staging tighten the narrative in terms of the underlying masculine dynamics that drive the story and relationships. For example, whereas in the novel Jude is adopted as an adult by his former law professor Harold and his wife Julia, who both become loving parents to him, in this version the character of Julia is omitted, making Harold’s interest in Jude potentially more ambiguous. The same is true of Jude’s doctor Andy, whose seemingly endless capacity to administer medical assistance while preserving confidentiality about Jude’s acts of self-harm almost comes to seem like a form of enabling. 

 

The increasingly ritualised staging suggests that beyond the representation of abuse as something to be understood physically, psychologically, socially and institutionally (all of which Yanagihara extensively documents in her novel), for van Hove there seems to be a theological (or perhaps a-theological) dimension to Jude’s suffering (it’s no coincidence that his namesake is the patron saint of the hopeless and despairing), as he’s repeatedly and systematically reduced to a state of abjection that resembles the sufferings of Job or the Passion of Christ – an analogy which is surely alluded to by the copious amounts of blood onstage. In this regard the play becomes a parable about cosmic injustice and the torment of the innocent, with the audience as complicit witnesses in lieu of an implicitly absent, indifferent or cruel God – a tradition that harks back to the ancient tragedies of Euripides and Seneca and is recapitulated in the perverse visions of Pasolini and De Sade.

 

This perspective in no way absolves us from our own ethical or political responsibility for what unfolds on van Hove's merciless stage. Compared with the solitary act of reading the novel, watching the play induces a sense of collective guilt and moral injury on behalf all who suffer injustice and oppression – victims of physical or sexual abuse; people with disabilities; sexual, racial and cultural minorities; First Nations peoples and asylum seekers. Beyond the consolations of love or piety, van Hove’s theatre of cruelty exposes us to what might be called our shared inhumanity, which no amount of sacrificial blood can wash away. Acknowledgements and reparations are all very well, but the cycle of abuse and trauma, rinse and repeat, also needs to stop.

 

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Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He’s currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He’s also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations),Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

 

 

 

 

Björk, Cornucopia

Perth Festival 

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

Dear Björk 

 

I’ve been your devoted fan ever since I watched The Sugarcubes music videos back in the 80s when I was living in a student share-house. My bedroom had the TV aerial socket, so it became the shared living room, and I’d stay up watching MTV after my fellow householders had all gone to bed. 

 

When you went solo I continued to follow your career through the 90s and into the new millennium. With your incredible voice, musical inventiveness and fearlessly independent artistry I felt like you were a worthy successor to your (and my) feminist singer-songwriter icons Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush. Your first four albums – Debut, Post, Homogenic and Vespertine – were each more wondrous than the last, as were the videos that accompanied the singles. As for your performance and soundtrack for Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark: I can still remember sitting in the cinema in devastated silence long after the film had ended.  

 

I have to admit that you lost me for a while when you released Medúlla, followed by Volta and Biophilia. I also had trouble getting on board the Nissan Maru with you and Matthew Barney for Drawing Restraint #9. I loved the soundtrack, but I was repelled by Barney’s self-absorbed aesthetic and fetishistic appropriation of Japanese culture, not to mention the uneasy sense of complicity and exploitation I felt while watching the two of you enact your nuptial rituals onboard a Japanese industrial whaling ship However ironic or critical your intentions, it seemed like an act of artistic hubris and political naivety, especially for someone like yourself with a professed commitment to the environment and biodiversity. More generally, I found myself troubled by an element of self-importance that seemed to have crept into your work, and a loss of the sense of humour and playfulness I’d always loved about you before.

 

However, you won me back with your post-Barney breakup album Vulnicura, which felt like a return to Vespertine’s sense of intimacy and personal revelation, and its follow-up album Utopia’s transcendent embrace of love and nature in all their forms. More recently Fossora seemed like an airy expansion of that vision, while also including some of your most personal tracks yet; I especially loved your elegy for your activist mother, ‘Ancestress’. 

 

So it was with great expectations that I attended your much heralded and critically hailed visual and musical extravaganza Cornucopia. I found myself sitting about halfway back – that is to say, in the back row of the ground-level seating, just in front of the rear, tiered sections – in the huge five-thousand seat pavilion at Langley Park which was apparently designed and constructed according to your specifications. 

 

As a result I felt less immersed in the experience than I imagine would have been the case had I been sitting closer to the stage. I could barely see you in the distance over the heads of the rows of audience sitting in front of me; to be brutally honest a regular stadium would have provided better sightlines. In any case you were totally dwarfed and often completely obscured by the digital art projected onto the curtain of ropes in front of the stage as well as the screens on either side and behind you. As for the video content itself, this was impressive for a while, but eventually became a bit like watching an endless series of screen savers interspersed with clips from your music videos, and hardly included any live coverage of you or your fellow musicians.

 

I’m sure the designer costumes and masks worn by you all were marvellous, but I couldn’t really see them either; and while the choreographed antics of the female flute septet in their fairy wings provided some visual and comic relief, there was otherwise little to engage me in terms of what I could see onstage. As for the blinding lights that were blasted into the audience at regular intervals, these had two young fans sitting beside me cowering and covering their eyes.

 

This visual onslaught was reinforced by the rolling waves of incoherent and indiscriminate sound delivered by the (again apparently specially designed) surround-sound system, which added an extra layer of reverb to the already dense of mix of live and prerecorded sources. A friend later remarked that all of this made her feel a bit seasick. The effect was exacerbated by the occasionally out-of-synch video clips. In fact as I increasingly withdrew internally from the experience I found myself wondering if I’d be better off watching and listening to your music videos in a well-designed surround-sound cinema.

 

As for the music itself: I was more than happy with the selection of songs, predominantly drawn from Utopia and supplemented by some additions from Fossora, as well as some interesting new arrangements of some of my favourite hits from your back catalogue like ‘Isabel’, ‘Hidden Place’ and ‘Pagan Poetry’. I also enjoyed the instrumentation and musicianship – especially from the septet of flautists, the harpist, the drummer/percussionist (mostly using an electronic drumkit, but with some occasionally intriguing additions), and the 18-voice choir (also dressed in white and wearing golden masks and headgear) who opened and closed the concert, as well as augmenting what was for me a stand-out central performance of ‘Body Memory’ from Utopia (the video art for this was also amazing, with what looked like hordes of dancers appearing at the base of the screens and then slowly floating upwards like souls towards the gates of Heaven).

 

However, the strange sense of your ‘live absence’ (as opposed to the virtual presence of your digital avatars onscreen) was reinforced by your frequent disappearances into a specially designed reverb chamber cocoon, as well as the fact that neither you nor the musicians interacted with us throughout the show, apart from the four-word ‘Thank you for tonight’ you left us with in parting. You didn’t even bother to return for the encore, which was valiantly performed by the choir without you, in what must be the most abrupt ending to any live gig I’ve ever attended.

 

As for the video of Greta Thunberg delivering a variation on her now-all-too-familiar speech about climate change which was projected across the rope curtains just before that encore: the whoops and cheers from the audience in response made me feel like I was at an eco-revivalist tent rally of the culture-knowledge class faithful blindly signalling their collective virtue and worshipping their celebrity saint – all the while blithely ignoring the apparent contradiction between your fantasy of saving the planet by becoming one with nature and the massive use of sound, lighting and audio-visual technology involved in your Cornucopia travelling show. I wanted less of all that, and more of what makes you special: your astounding voice, your glorious music (without all those layers of reverb) and your pagan poetry.

I remain as ever

Your devoted but brutally honest fan

Wolfgang.

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen), in which capacity as the band’s front-man he developed a unique form of contemporary folk dance combining elements inspired by Isadora Duncan with the traditional Austrian Schuhplattler. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations),Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

 

Kronos Quartet

Perth Concert Hall
Perth Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

The Kronos Quartet are the rock stars of contemporary classical music. Original members David Harrington (first violin), John Sherber (second violin) and Hank Dutt (viola) have been playing together since 1973, and at least for this old Gen X former prog-rocker they still haven’t lost their cool. They belong to the same generation as comparably influential and wide-ranging figures in avant-garde popular music like David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno or David Byrne. Unlike those artists, Kronos are primarily interpreters of the music of others; but just as Bowie or Gabriel continually reinvented themselves and their sound, so Kronos have progressively embraced a breadth of repertoire which is surely unparalleled among classical ensembles, extending from medieval and Renaissance music to the various strands of 20^th century modernism and postmodernism (largely skipping over the Classical and Romantic repertoire) as well as arrangements of world music and tracks by Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin. In so doing they’ve expanded the possibilities of what a string quartet can play or even sound like; the only comparable classical music ensemble I can think of would be the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

 

Like other great classical ensembles (and rock bands) of their generation, Kronos have resisted the temptation to cultivate an excessively blended or polished sound; instead they’ve retained and even refined their own sharply individuated voices. As became apparent during the concert, Harrington can still coax the wildest sounds from his violin; Sherber is an incisive, almost astringent counterpart as a second fiddle; and despite his deadpan demeanour, Dutt is surely the funkiest viola player on the planet. This ethos of diversity in unity extends to their new cellist Paul Wiancko, who played with enormous delicacy and finesse, and who briefly became the star of the evening in the second half of the concert when the quartet played George Crumb’s Black Angels, which in its third and final movement features haunting extended solo cello passages eerily backed by the other three players playing water-tuned crystal glasses.

 

Like the ACO, Kronos have also enjoyed long-term relationships with established and emerging composers and played a key role in commissioning new works. Most recently they’ve embarked on a project called 50 for the Future, commissioning and recording fifty new works in a huge variety of genres and making these – together with sheet music and supporting material – freely available online, with the intention of inspiring and enabling future musicians to carry the torch of tradition and innovation into the 21^st Century. A selection from this body of work formed the bulk of the first (and for me most successful) section of their Five Decades Tour recital at Perth Concert Hall. Indeed I almost wished they’d devoted the entire concert to this new repertoire, perhaps supplemented by a few choice items from their back catalogue – but more of that later.

 

The opening selection of works from 50 for the Future showed off the quartet’s and the new repertoire’s variety of sounds and styles. West African singer-songwriter Angélique Kidjo’s YanYanKliYan Senamido #2 was a gently swaying piece based on traditional Beninese vocal music, with Kronos nimbly accommodating its complex syncopations and cross-rhythms. Next came Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini’s Maduswara, a moody and atmospheric work that featured weirdly sliding microtones, insect-like patterns of ostinato, an occasional burst of percussion or shouting, and a background field recording of burbling frogs and the sounds of a gathering storm. 

 

This was followed by Serbian émigré composer Aleksandra Vrebalov’s My Desert, My Rose, an emotionally and physically gripping piece with scooping melodic fragments of lamentation and increasingly insistent rhythms that reminded me of Balkan or Romani folk music and took things to another level of intensity. After this, electronic musician Jlin’s Little Black Book gave things a darker and more contemporary urban edge, at times almost sounding like a nerve-wracked film score by Bernard Hermann.

 

An excerpt from Canadian composer John Oswald’s Spectre (which was written for Kronos in 1990) was a little more conceptual, beginning with the quartet ‘tuning up’ and then launching one by one into a series of long held notes and tremolos, to which overdubs were added until they became a 1000-piece-string-orchestral version of themselves, the whole piece building to a shattering tsunami of sound. 

 

The quartet were then joined by twelve musicians from the University of Western Australia, the Western Australia Academy of Performing Art and the Western Australian Youth Orchestra in a generously conceived performance of Philip Glass’s Quartet Satz, another work commissioned for the 50 for the Future project. Glass has written for and been championed by Kronos since their inception; this particular work had a lightness and lyricism that made it an ideal pedagogical exercise, as well as being a homage to the composer’s longstanding relationship with the quartet (and more distantly to Schubert’s unfinished and similarly titled masterpiece).

 

The last item in the first half of the program was a new work by local Noongar composer, musician and scholar Maatakitj (Dr Clint Bracknell) commissioned for Kronos by Perth Festival and entitled Bindari (thunderstorm). The quartet were joined onstage by Maatakitj, alongside fellow Indigenous performer Rubeun Yorkshire leading five other young First Nations dancers. Personally I found all these elements made for a slightly awkward and uncomfortable fit; but it was warmly embraced by the audience and the quartet, who vigorously lent their instruments to sounds and rhythms that would traditionally be made by voices and clapsticks.

 

After interval came a dramatic change in tone, substance and scale with a highly charged, sombrely lit and elaborately staged performance of Black Angels, which began with the quartet’s four instruments hanging from wires like corpses waiting to be brought back to life. Crumb’s macabre anti-war masterpiece for amplified string quartet also involves a battery of percussion and other sound objects – including gongs, maracas and an array of water-tuned crystal glasses (which were initially concealed beneath black cloths on tables upstage). The work was written in 1970 in response to the Vietnam War but also evokes other atrocities – not least with its outbursts of shouted or whispered counting in various languages, its sinister musical references to Schubert’s Death and the Maiden and the Dies Irae, and its terrifying high-pitched vibrato swoops and screeches on the upper strings, as well as other unconventional bowing techniques and tapping effects on the strings and fingerboards. 

 

It’s an extreme work – one that apparently inspired Harrington to form the quartet when he first heard it on the radio – and has become something of a Kronos signature piece since they first performed and later recorded it; so it felt like a harsh but appropriate way to close the program. To my taste, it’s almost impossible to listen to anything afterwards; to paraphrase Adorno’s dictum about writing poetry after Auschwitz, to play an encore after Black Angels is almost more barbaric than the work itself. 

 

So it felt like a false step to me when the work was followed by not one but two encores. The first was a ‘remixed’ version of the Tune-Yards track ‘Colonisation’, for which the quartet were rejoined by Maatakitj on vocals and clapsticks, alongside dancer Yorkshire in body paint, all of which again felt a bit clumsy and inept to me – though again, the audience were enthusiastic. The final encore was an arrangement of Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ as sung by Janis Joplin, which in contrast seemed like a tasteless display of self-indulgence – especially coming after Black Angels – notwithstanding the incredible sounds Harrington wrung from his violin, which indeed sounded uncannily like Joplin. If anything, I felt, the only appropriate piece to play after Black Angels would have been something more minimalist and healing, like Kronos’s equally iconic version of Arvo Pärt’s Fratres – perhaps preceded by their searing arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner or Purple Haze. 

 

In sum, then: phenomenal playing by one of the great ensembles of our time, in a pot-pourri of a program which didn’t quite cohere for me despite some effective moments and thrilling highlights. 

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished). On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

 

The Cage Project

Cédric Tiberghien and Matthias Schack-Arnott
Perth Concert Hall
Perth Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

The third and final week of Iain Grandage’s penultimate Perth Festival leans heavily into two of his strengths as an artist and curator: namely, First Nations performance (including the Australian Dance Theatre’s new work Tracker and BIGhART’s work-in-progress showing of Punkaliyarra) and contemporary music (with The Cage Project, Kronos Quartet and Linda May Han Oh’s Ephemeral Echoes all being performed on successive nights at Perth Concert Hall). One senses that having programmed some large-scale crowd-pleasers in the opening week (as well as the series of concerts by Björk that close the festival this weekend and continue next week), Grandage has reserved some of the works that are closest to his heart for this phase of the festival, when most of the big-ticket items have already landed (and mostly sold out).

 

The Cage Project is a collaboration between French pianist Cédric Tiberghien and Melbourne-based percussionist and sound artist Matthias Schack-Arnott, whose companion piece Everywhen was performed at PICA last week. Both are solo performance works for a bespoke form of percussion orchestra which is also a composite visual art object. The works can thus be seen (and heard) as inventing a new genre of musical and visual assemblage, which adds the fourth (and performative) dimension of time to the usual three dimensions of sculpture. As such, Schack-Arnott follows in the footsteps of Cage himself, who was also deeply interested in visual and performance art, and who accepted his former teacher Schönberg’s description of him as an inventor rather than a composer (though like Schönberg he was surely both).

 

In the case of The Cage Project, the musical and material substratum for Schack-Arnott’s visual-sonic assemblage is Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano. The original work was composed between 1946 and 1948, and Cage’s invention involved inserting found objects like screws, bolts and pieces of rubber or plastic onto or between the piano strings, so that some notes still sound like a piano while others sound more like plucked strings, bells, chimes, or gongs, or even lose their original frequency and sound like unidentifiable and untuned objects being tapped, rattled or struck. 

 

As for the music itself: at this stage in his career, Cage had not yet fully embraced his later aleatory aesthetic (although there’s still a crucial element of chance involved in the choice and positioning of the objects inserted into the piano, notwithstanding Cage’s detailed instructions). Each of the twenty pieces – sixteen ‘sonatas’ and four ‘interludes’ – is highly structured (the interludes are a little freer), with the musical proportions of each piece (both internally and in relation to the whole work) having a complex mathematical pattern based on randomly chosen numbers and fractions.

 

All this might sound rather cerebral, but the effect is engagingly playful, richly emotional and deeply meditative. Cage was inspired by the Indian philosophy of eight emotional rasa ‘flavours’ in art, ranging from the more ‘negative’ or ‘black’ emotions to the more ‘positive’ or ‘white’ ones, and leading to a ninth navarasa or state of tranquility. In terms of Western music, one hears echoes of Debussy and Ravel, Bartók and Stravinksy, Schönberg and Webern, as well as modern jazz – all played on what sounds like a Balinese gamelan orchestra with a conventionally tuned (if somewhat note-restricted) Western piano as part of the mix – and the more one surrenders to the experience, the more one is transported on a musical and spiritual journey. 

 

In this case, the experience was heightened by Schack-Arnott’s appropriately inventive addition to Cage’s original instrumentation. As with Everywhen, this took the form of a visual and sonic object that hung suspended above the performer and the piano, rotating slowly and randomly in response to currents of air generated by fans, and looking a bit like a huge chandelier or Alexander Calder mobile – or perhaps a revolving space station from Kubrick’s 2001. The structure consisted of horizontal metal bars connected by wires, with various sound-objects attached like bronze plates, metal tubes, wooden planks and granite tiles; these were individually struck by mysterious robotic devices that were invisibly connected to and activated by the prepared piano keys (don’t ask me how). The entire apparatus was touch-sensitive in relation to Tiberghien’s playing and resonated without amplification in the characteristically warm yet detailed acoustics of the Perth Concert Hall. An additional layer of visual dynamics was provided by the lighting, which slowly shifted from overheads to floor lights and back again as the performance progressed, variously illuminating the revolving structure, the performer and piano, and the walls and ceiling – as well as resonating with the Festival theme of Djinda (stars) – until the final sonata saw Tiberghien’s face framed by a single light and surrounded by darkness. 

 

Every aspect of The Cage Project reflected a deep sense of collaboration and mutual trust between Tiberghien and Schack-Arnott, as well as their shared love and understanding of Cage’s original work. The sense of dialogue between artists and across artforms as well as across time and space reminded me of Rilke’s poem ‘Lovesong’ about souls ‘swaying in time’ and ‘vibrating in sympathy’. We need such works in troubled times, and I applaud both the artists and Grandage for having faith in them.

 

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Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he wasthe lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.