Category Archive: MUSIC
Dante’s 750th
(Elder Hall, Adelaide University, 30/9/15) The Dante Society of SA gave a most agreeable concert to mark the 750th birthday of the Great Florentine, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Professor Diana Glenn gave two readings from The Divine Comedy – first from Paradiso, Canto XXIII, where Beatrice and Dante gaze up at the infinite sunbeams of redeemed souls, and Dante swoons (as he was wont to do). Then Mekhla Kumar (above) performed Liszt’s Sposalizio, inspired by Raphael’s The Marriage of the Virgin. Konstantin Shamray (below) played Liszt’s Dante Sonata with its slightly cartoonish swerve between the hell and heaven, with its different (hellish and celestial) keys…
Continue Reading →Twilight of the Gods
(Dir. Julian Doyle) (2013) Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the successor to Schopenhauer and a great writer and weirdo, said he “would never have survived my youth without Wagnerian music.” “And Wagner did become Nietzsche’s awakener, who, by subsequently failing to live up to the youth’s ideals, dealt him wounds which, though they never healed, yet played a salutary role in his development into one of history’s most formidable philosophic writers and thinkers. Like King Ludwig, he at first placed Wagner upon so high a pedestal that the concussion of the idol’s fall shattered not only it but the shocked worshipper, too….
Continue Reading →Peter Allen – Not the Boy Next Door
A match made in Heaven
The final stages of this TV two-parter are a salutary reminder of that dreadful scourge of the homosexual world in the 1980s – the music of Peter Allen. Oh yes and that AIDS was, in those days, suddenly rampant and absolutely untreatable. This is a paint-by-numbers production. But that doesn’t mean it is bad – just mediocre, glitzy, watchable and non-threatening. Like Allen himself. The audience is told what to think at every stage, from the obligatory hard-scrabble childhood (cleaning Dad’s brains off a wall), to fame, fortune and an opportunistic marriage to American music royalty. Sigrid Thornton looks surprisingly like Judy Garland but is stretched by a script which…
Continue Reading →Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel
"Let's see what he makes of this brief..."
(by John Louis Di Gaetani) (1978) When P brought this obscure little tome at the Paradise Bookshop, L asked, not unreasonably, “What has Wagner to do with the modern British novel?” Oh ye of little faith and so many brains! Well, let’s see…. In this book, Dr Di Gaetani mounts the case that the operatic works of Wagner, and in particular the poetry and prose in his librettos, had a vital galvanising effect on five major British novelists maturing (if not all necessarily in their prime) during the Edwardian Age: Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. P read this…
Continue Reading →Verdi’s Requiem
Debut at L Scala, 25 May 1874, drawn by O. Tofani
SA State Opera Chorus, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, 26 August 2015 A very nice performance. Having a foretaste of the Requiem at the introductory session held by the Dante Society, The Varnished Culture settled back in the well worn and frayed Festival Theatre, with its ghastly art adorning the foyers (no longer ‘modern’ but eternally bad) for the full rendition of Verdi’s famous Requiem Mass. Coinciding with the staging in Adelaide of Faust, Timothy Sexton conducted the ASO, and, having rehearsed the State Opera Chorus, simultaneously conducted all 64 of them (plus kettle drum player) by alternately waving at the pit and the stage. The…
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