Ulalume
Eugene Onegin
Painting by Ilya Repin, 1899
Tchaikovsky’s great opera (1879), with a libretto largely lifted from Pushkin’s epic poem, is a snow-filled but overheated saga of frustrated amour. TVC has never seen a live performance and has no plans to visit Russia in order to do so. The 1988 Decca DVD, directed by Peter Weigl with Sir Georg Solti conducting the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, reveals one of the enduring problems with opera as film as opposed to the Opera House. It sounds good and it looks good but, alas, not at the same time. The film treatment, while a little static, soars above the…
Continue Reading →Valentine’s Day
St. Valentine (from 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'
(2015 – ASO) After champagne and real Turkish delight, and the annual re-run of Picnic at Hanging Rock, it was time to head through Adelaide’s February furnace to the Festival Theatre, where Arvo Volmer conducted the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s version of a concert, curiously and incongruously entitled “Passionate Tchaikovsky”. We had the Russian composer’s Violin Concerto, with Ilya Gringolts sublime on lead violin, wearing a frock coat straight from Fiddler on the Roof. Written in 1878 to console its creator for the unfortunate and instantly-regretted decision to marry the loopy and self-centred Antonina Milyukova, the piece was not played till…
Continue Reading →No Man’s Land
(Harold Pinter) Adelaide University Theatre Guild, 2014 Clive James described this piece as akin to “a chess game being played out long after a draw should have been declared, since there are only two knights and two pawns left on the board.” Whilst this could not describe a real game, you get his point. It’s another psychodrama but with enough keen sense of modern discourse to give us (pardon us for this) pause… Pinter’s stronger characters can never resist the chance to crush their weak or shifty (usually self-delusional) adversaries. Here, two men with literary pretensions, watched and ‘waitered’ by…
Continue Reading →Munch more than a Scream
Oslo boy Edvard Munch (12/12/1863 to 23/1/1944) got a retrospective a year and a bit ago to mark his 150th birthday (and the Munch Museum’s 50th). The visual strut of an angst-ridden tripod of tortured genius (with Ibsen and Strindberg), his paintings prefigured Freudian dream analysis (e.g. “Despair”, “Anguish”, “Night in Saint-Cloud”, “The Sick Child”, “Separation” and “The Weeping Nude”, which last was completed about the time of his nervous breakdown).
Continue Reading →The Clearing House
Are we over the publishing tactic of “tease, obfuscate, hit-and-run”? Reports (and comma errors) are rife over the discovery of a Harper Lee spin-off, Go Set a Watchman, with Scout Finch now grown up and sittin’ at the back of the bus. The latest in a long line of similar finds, from The Original of Laura (nb: notes on index cards, not a novel) and similar teases over Kafka and J. D. Salinger, this has the added frisson of publication in the author’s lifetime. TVC can’t wait for future unearthed treasures: Luke Rhinehart’s Snake Eyes; J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter Goes to…
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