Myth Conception

Opera it ain’t. But it contains marvels of staging; tech doesn’t get any higher. It is Gaddafi: A Living Myth, given a short run by English National Opera in the London Coliseum (last performances this Friday and Saturday). If you are interested in multi-media of a quite extraordinary expertise and are prepared to submit to undistinguished music that is a mixture of rock and swoopy strings apeing near-Eastern style plus a documentary about Gaddafi which will inform you a lot and bore you a little, then get to the Coli while there’s time. So, if it isn’t opera, why is English National Opera putting it on (at vast expense, will we ever know how much?)? For the sake of novelty, getting backsides on seats including perhaps some ethnic groups who may not care for Puccini or Mozart?

The new offering is of episodes from the life of the Libyan dictator, tyrant, liberator, supporter of terrorism; yet a man that has done his country good, who has earned the commendation of Nelson Mandela and the bombs of America. There is little singing, the story being told (mostly shouted) in couplets, sometimes rhyming, banal often. Shan Khan is credited with the libretto, Steve Chandra Savale with conception and some lyrics. Fatima sings occasionally and there are snappy choruses for soldiers and armed women who do gymnastics. Asian Dub and Diaspora (seven players with electrical instruments) provided the accompaniment as well as a small orchestra in the pit.

Scene one: a group of peasants in the foreground with a backcloth depicting a landscape of a desert. Suddenly the backcloth, by some device of film or whatever, sprouts an attacking army with soldiers, guns, tanks; the apparently one-dimensional backcloth erupts, spouting blood convincingly….. quite frightening. Later on a car breaks through the backcloth; later still the famous green tent, a big one, is erected in a matter of seconds.

Ronald Regan, King Idris, Gadaffi family members, the military are in the cast, headed by TV star Ramon Tikaram as a lookalike Colonel G. in a suitably charismatic portrayal. Mr Blair makes an appearance – and a surprisingly punctual exit! – towards the end. Meanwhile we have, for over two hours, seen much of the myth: the deposition of King Idris, the seizing and maintenance of power lasting nearly thirty years, the determination to spread the Green Book/Koran worldwide, American wrath, war, terrorism, P.C. Fletcher, comic opera uniforms, a spell in the desert and the famous green tent; Gaddafi was a canny choice, considering the many facets of this living myth.

But there is no heart to this portrait, maybe there is no heart to Gaddafi and that is what is lacking here. Even the high tech brilliant staging by David Freeman cannot compensate for the hollowness of the enterprise. The audience roared its approval at the close but I think many of us (especially opera goers) were bored. It is sad that one of London’s two opera houses has put on a show in which music is an also-ran. As with many a film or documentary, you might notice the music only if it were not there. Gaddafi is presumably a one-off: will Covent Garden see it as a challenge to produce something in the same genre? Another living myth perhaps – Castro?

Private Passions (Radio 3) Telegraph review

On radio: good company is what makes great radio

Presenters who make you listen, rather than just hear, are the key to successful programmes, says Gillian Reynolds, the Telegraph's radio critic

John Amis, talking to Michael Berkeley on Private Passions (Radio 3, Sunday) said he nearly died last year and, knowing it, thought to himself: "Well, that's OK. I've met a lot of people, I've heard a lot of wonderful music, I've had some nice sex, I've enjoyed my food. Why not? Goodbye. But I didn't."
So there he was, back on the radio, remembering being taught about life by Michael Tippett and about music by Benjamin Britten, recalling working all those years on My Music, and how well the team got on though they met only in the studio and didn't socialise outside it, declaring passion was what he looked for in music. To all of which this listener, awed, dazzled and glad, could only respond (quite faintly, seeing it was so hot outside): "Hurrah."
This was one of those conversations that showed why, in this country, we love radio. It's because the company is so good. In nations where what comes out of the little box is mostly music, the chances to get to know interesting people via the airwaves are correspondingly fewer. British radio listening remains very high, with nine out of 10 of us listening an average of 23.8 hours each week, because we like what is on it. An essential ingredient of this successful mix is the people.
These days, if you want to listen to music, there are internet services that can construct you a personal playlist made up of tracks you've told it you like, plus new ones the computer will add, selected to fit your predilections.
Such a service won't give you the company of a John Amis, a Michael Berkeley, a Terry Wogan, a Russell Davies, an Andy Kershaw, a Johnnie Walker. If people like them make you listen rather than just hear, they are worth both pay and praise.

Meanwhile, on Sunday's Private Passions, that friendly neighbouring harbour for freights of music and memories, John Amis was on top form. We don't know him, but radio creates such potent illusions we imagine we do.
As soon as he starts talking, however, we realise all over again that we don't, but, because we love what we pick up from him, whether about his marriage, or Frank Muir's quip about Donizetti's demise, or Denis Norden's genius for timing, or why he thinks Tippett was like Beethoven but Britten more of a "know-it-all" like Mozart, you really couldn't ask for better company.

Radio 3 Private Passions website

John Amis

Sweet singing in the choir (From The Tablet's Christmas edition 2005)

My friend from Johannesburg loves what Thomas Hardy called ‘the ancient stave’, choral music of the medieval and renaissance era. When she’s in London, we go on what she irreverently calls our ‘church crawls’ to stock up with Palestrina, Byrd, Lassus, Victoria, whatever is in season.

‘Intoxicating’ was the word for Sweelinck’s little offertory motet, Gaude et laetare, composed almost three hundred years ago. Sung at Solemn Mass for the third Sunday of Advent at Westminster Cathedral, it swept the senses like a powerful fountain, drenching the listener with bursts of joyful sound. The choir here - Martin Baker has been Master for five years – has the edge on its London counterparts. The acoustic is favourable because of the curved overhead canopy and the music seems more vivid, more ‘in your face’. The choir also sang movements from Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G minor written in honour of the Cathedral’s first music director, Richard Runciman Terry.

Martin Baker’ predecessor James O’Donnell is now at the Abbey where last month I attended the Remembrance Sunday service. Among the highlights was John Ireland’s touching anthem Greater love hath no man, actually composed in 1912, two years before the beginning of World War I. The other highpoint was The Last Post. My cousin Kingsley, whose favourite piece of music this was, asked me several times who wrote this tattoo/fanfare but I was unable to tell him. Does anybody know? Or did it just happen? It has a strange beauty beyond its funereal resonance.

The adjective ‘stunning’ applies both to the visual delights of St Paul’s Cathedral and to its echo (least obtrusive under the dome). Stately tempi are best here although the gorgeously shifting harmonies of Herbert Howell's Canticles and his ecumenical lollypop, Like as the Hart, sounded well on my visit. (When St. Paul's was being built, the organist complained to Wren that he had allowed insufficient space for the organ; Wren exploded; ‘'You and your damned chest of whistles’.)

The sound is different at the London Oratory, where female sopranos take the place of boy trebles. This small professional choir, directed by Patrick Russill has a high reputation, in particular for Gregorian chant. Recently I went to Vespers when the choir beautifully sang Lassus and Orlando Gibbons as well as plainchant. I returned for Gillian Weir’s recital to inaugurate the restored Walker organ. Weir is to the organ what Heifetz was to the violin, and Casals to the cello - a phenomenon. Each item was based not only on Gregorian chant, but we heard also the appropriate chant sung by male members of the choir. Three movements Messiaen’s magically adventurous cycle La Nativité du Seigneur were heard and works by Jeanne Demessieux, Tournemire, Duruflé, and from a different century, Nicolas de Crigny.

Appropriately, since my friend is Jewish, our last visit was to the Reform Synagogue in Upper Berkeley Street. Here there was no counterpoint, no polyphony, but only music of melody and harmony, an intriguing mixture of English, German, Russian and Middle Eastern influences. The organist was the distinguished Christopher Bowers, but the professional choir was, shall we say, not at its best that Saturday (December 10). It was an intimate and friendly service; a spiritual occasion, which felt like family prayers. I couldn’t help being tickled by the fact that one of the readings concerned a king whose diamond developed a scratch, which was dealt with by an expert jeweller.

amispic

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