Superb film of August Wilson's Ma Rainey – and not just because of Chadwick Boseman

After yesterday’s early evening football, there was still time for a film and, in this case, it was a re-watch of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

I’ve seen August Wilson’s play three times – I reviewed the National Theatre’s 1989 production, then went to see it with The Other Half when it played briefly at the Hackney Empire (where the roof leaked onto us). Then we went to see it again in the National’s top-notch 2016 revival.

The release of George C Woolfe’s 2020 film – produced by Denzel Washington as part of his long-term project to bring all of Wilson’s plays to the screen – was overshadowed by news of the death of star Chadwick Boseman at just 43 from cancer, while the film was in post-production.

His performance as the tragic, traumatised trumpeter Levee in Ma’s four-piece band – at once full of contempt for the white men who only tolerate the black musicians because they bring money in, but also overly deferential to them because he wants his own band – is brilliant. Little wonder that he received a hat-load of posthumous awards and nominations.

In a way, though, Boseman’s tragically early passing dwarfed the rest of the cast. The Other Half and I streamed it early after it landed on Netflix, having linked up the TV to one of our phones because we were at the start of two months without the internet after a major blow-out. That was how much we wanted to see it – and see it early.

Yet seeing it again now, I can not only re-engage with the brilliance of Boseman, but also better appreciate Viola Davis’s powerhouse performance as Ma.

I’m also now familiar with Colman Domingo, who played Cutler so well, and can enjoy more fully Glynn Turman’s turn as Toledo.

The film landed barely six months after the murder of George Floyd, illustrating just how topical the themes of Wilson’s – and Woolfe’s film – remain.

An essential watch.

 

For the record – all hail vinyl

Today was going to involve a trip to the cinema to see Singin’ in the Rain on a big screen, but a chill I picked up when my lower legs and feet got soaked while working outside on Thursday put paid to going anywhere.

So instead, the day has offered another chance to indulge in a newfound household love of music – when it’s on vinyl rather than CD or digital.

Like the predicted demise of cinema as a result of TV, the death of records as a result of CDs and then the digital revolution has been greatly overdone.

Indeed, vinyl has been making a comeback for some years – particularly with DJs on the club scene: after all, how does scrubbing work when the music is on a CD or is digital?

There’s been a deck in wherever I’ve called my home – it’s been the one removable piece of one of those stacked hi-fi units. But it hasn’t been compatible with anything else we had for at least two decades. Some years ago, The Other Half bought a Bose amp and speakers that would link with our digital music, but it never worked with the aforementioned deck.

And yet …

Last month, the OH decided he was buying a new deck. The old one could be used in our study to digitise vinyl.

He went to Richer Sounds (a very ethically sound company, by the way) and came away with a very nice deck. But it didn’t quite work with the Bose kit. I suggested that, since he has a ‘big’ birthday coming up in January, I could get him a new amp and speakers as a pressie.

He didn’t want to wait that long – so I got it early. From Richer Sounds – which company I really do recommend. Ethically excellent and therefore, with superb, knowledgable staff. We’ll be back before the end of the year, because it looks increasingly likely that he’ll get a good CD player to add to the system, as a birthday present for me. I fully intend to take up the chance to test drive what they have with some of my favourite classical recording.

When we get that, we’ll use it to check just how much better vinyl is than CDs – or perhaps not. But for the moment, the evidence of our ears – and our souls – is overwhelming.

We’ve listened to easy, classical, rock, jazz, pop, folk-rock … and guess what? It’s all better. The sound is deeper, warmer and less … how to put it? Flat. You can easily imagine yourself in a concert space or a cathedral or in a recording studio – in other words, somewhere with space. For the first time, I see the shortcomings of CDs and digital.

Because for the first time, I’m listening to vinyl on really good kit, even if far from the top of any available range.

Growing up, my parents had one of those huge radiograms – the size of a big sofa, but probably lacking in the actual sound department. 

Back in the 1970s, the first really grown-up album I listened to was Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, when babysitting and reading my employers’ copy of Emmanuelle as a much-needed sex education. Yet I’ve only ever owned it as a cassette and then a CD. A new, 180gm vinyl copy arrived yesterday: it’s like hearing it for the very first time.

Herbert Von Karajan

Last weekend, with a desperate, almost physical craving for something lushly late Romantic, I got hold of a new copy of Also Sprach Zarathustra and the Dance of the Seven Veils by Richard Strauss. Recorded in 1959 and 1960 respectively, by the Vienna Philharmonic and Herbert Von Karajan, these are iconic recordings.

We had listened to a recording I'd had since the 1980s of the Berlin Philharmonic, with Von Karajan conducting, playing Ravel’s Bolero and Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d’un faune. A revelation.

The Strauss was no different.

Hearing all these on vinyl, was extraordinary. I know them well – or so I thought – yet there I was, clocking things I’d never heard before.

It’s true: vinyl produces greater warmth, greater detail – and a greater sense of space: it’s not ‘flat’. You are suddenly in the concert hall or the cathedral (if listening to organ music or a requiem) or even the studio.

Earlier today, I put on my 7” of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (copy from the 1970s: eight-track and all that stuff). A work that I am almost unbelievably familiar with. And yes – it’s warmer and there is more detail – there’s a shimmer of bells at one point that I have never noticed before.

Then I followed it with an LP of James Galway playing Mozart’s flute concertos and, by god, if you don’t benefit from added detail with Wolfie, then where do you benefit from detail?

I have orders on the way for some minimalist American music (Glass, Adams and Reich) and for the new two-disc Jonas Kaufmann set of songs of Vienna, Wien. Apart from actually experiencing music live, I haven’t been as excited by it for years.

And what do we learn from all this? Certainly that, while tech and innovation can give us new things that are good, they are not inevitably better than what went before. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater – and other such clichés.

Oh – and investing in seriously good hardware will produce seriously good results.

A rhapsody about the ultimate queen

Queen were a revolutionary band. This is not really a matter for dispute. And if you don’t believe it, I suggest you listen to A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.

However, the launch of Bohemian Rhapsody, the new film that’s essentially a biopic of the band’s iconic lead singer, Freddie Mercury, has quickly been accused of not itself being revolutionary enough.

There’s a badly flawed logic here: the band were revolutionary, yes … but why should any film about that band *have* to be a revolutionary piece of cinema itself? Seriously – why?

Why not just let the revolutionary band’s revolutionary music tell the story?

And this, in essence, is primarily what happens. The late stages of the film recreate pretty much Queen’s entire Live Aid set, which finally got the phones buzzing for that charity fundraiser and on screen, is one of the most adrenalin-pumping things you will witness in a cinema this year.

What you don’t get is dwarves wandering around Freddie’s parties with silver trays on their heads, heaped with cocaine.

What you do get is hints of this, plus fetish clubs and much more.

But hey, this is not a hagiography – and thank goodness for that.

What we have is a really entertaining film that also manages to show some of the problems that Freddie Mercury faced in his life: he was the archetypal flawed genius … arrogant certainly, yet also incredibly vulnerable and desperate for love and genuine friendship; and in his own way, very loyal.

Like Abba, Queen transcend generations – and generalisations. Their music will be around after I’m gone, for instance. Of that I have no doubt.

For me, this is a superbly entertaining movie – and very, very moving in places.

Initially, I didn’t want to see it.

I fell in love with Queen in around 1974-75, when I heard Bohemian Rhapsody for the first time, at the Christmas disco of my then girls’ school. I stopped still, on my own, in the middle of the floor, as my mind was blown.

I seem to lack much in the way of memories for huge swathes of my life up to about 40, yet I can remember that moment as if it were yesterday.

I can remember too, going to pubs in Lancaster with my then boyfriend and feeding the jukebox to play Friends Will Be Friends – and being absolutely convinced that that was hardcore rock ‘n’ roll ... though to be fair to myself, if you know that my core musical love is classical, then it really was hardcore.

Later still, I remember when Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister, feeding another juke box, in another place, to blare out Another One Bites the Dust.

I’ve never stopped being a Queen fan. I never got to a concert, although I’ve been at a party with Brian May and Roger Taylor (very sedate), but I’ve long regretted never seeing Freddie in the flesh.

When he died, I retired to my Bloomsbury bedsit with two bottles of Bulgarian cabernet sauvignon (it was cheap but decent), put my headphones on and listened to him for hours while getting steadily pissed. It is the only time, thus far, that I have mourned a celebrity in such a way.

The concert sequences here, seen on a big screen, gave me a buzz I hadn’t expected.

And while the the cast as a whole is very good (and the costumes and hairdressing are fabulous), it has to be said that Rami Malek, as Freddie, turns in a performance that would not be out of place in next year’s Oscar nominations.

If you don’t like Queen, then it’s really simple: don’t go. But don’t pretend that this isn’t glorious entertainment and a wonderful reminder of just what a genius Freddie – and the rest of the band – were and are.

Cello joy as Soltani's debut hits the shelves

Home

Kian Soltani and Aaron Pilsan

Deutsche Grammophon

You know what it’s like: you wait ages for a brilliant cello album to come your way and then suddenly there’s a queue.

The 2012 BBC Young Musician winner, Laura van der Heijden, released her first album in the last days of 2017 (I’ll be looking at this another time), while the recording debut of the 2016 champion, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, arrived at the start of this month.

And now we have Home, the debut of Kian Soltani, the winner of the 2013 International Paulo Cello Competition.

The idea behind Home is to weave together Kian’s roots. Born and brought up in Austria, of Iranian parents, the programme reflects this.

We open with Arpeggione, one of the most famous pieces by Schubert, a composer for whom the cellist has a particular fondness, and a work demanding virtuosity.

After the three movements of that, Schubert’s Nacht und Träume concludes the Classical section of this album, before we head into the Romantic era and Schumann – another Austrian composer with whom Soltani feels a particular affinity.

Schumman originally wrote Zart und mit Ausdruck, Lebhaft, leicht and Rasch und mit Feuer as a three-movement work, Fantasy Pieces for Clarinet and Piano – while also stipulating that cello or violin could replace the former.

More Schumann follows, before we move into a new work.

Seven Persian Folk Songs comprises seven pieces, ranging from the poetic to the ferocious. Written by Iranian composer Reza Vali for Soltani and dedicated it to him, it provides a fascinating contrast to the first parts of the album.

Some critics reject Persian symphonic music – also known as Persian polyphonic music and generally written by Persian/Iranian composers for Western ensembles and orchestras – because of the differences between Persian and Western scales.

However, composers have found ways to solve the questions these differences ask and Vali’s ability to do this is part of why the resulting work is so fascinating in its melding of different musical cultures, which leaves us with both familiarity and yet something different and challenging.

The album concludes with Iranian Fire Dance, a composition by the cellist himself.

In effect, the Persian/Iranian works add a philosophical complexity to the album as a whole, since in combining the traditional with the new, they add a wider sense of ‘home’ that’s more in keeping with the philosophical complexity of the German concept  of‘Heimat’ than any straightforward understanding of the word.

It adds a musical note too to current debates around migration, integration and cultural fusion.

Kian is a protegée of Anne-Sophie Mutter and Daniel Barenboim – he has been a member of the former’s Virtuosi as well as a member of the latter’s West-Eastern-Divan-Orchestra and is also a member of the newly-founded Boulez-Ensemble.

The Schubert here is exquisite, with a lightness that almost defies belief. The Schumann takes us into more melancholy, contemplative terrain, while the Vali ensures we don’t lapse into easy listening mode.

Throughout, Soltani’s playing is simply superb, with tremendous range of tone and emotion. And enjoying equal billing is pianist Aaron Pilsan, whose playing is every bit a match for his compatriot.

Quite simply, this is a wonderful release that reinforces the variety and beauty of the cello – and also  adds to a growing sense of how blessed we are in seeing such a number of superb young musicians rising up in front of us.

A shimmeringly good start to the Debussy centenary

A Christmas present to make you feel grown up

In this centenary of the death of the great French composer Debussy, one thing is assured: there will be no shortage of recordings of his works.

If Debussy has never quite been my favourite composer, he’s been hovering not far away from the top of my personal pantheon since around 1980. I had embarked on A’ level music studies at Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School and one of the first works that we were introduced to was Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.

It was a Deutsche Grammophon recording, with Herbert von Karajan wielding the baton and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra providing the gorgeously lush sound that stunned this then teenage listener.

It was the start of love affairs with all four component parts of that musical equation.

My mother, whose own classical music appreciation largely went little further than Handel’s Messiah (played every year as we put the Christmas decorations up) and Gilbert and Sullivan, was delighted in my interest and happy to buy me albums at Christmas and birthday.

The mantra was established instantly: DG, Von K, the Berlin. Most arrived on cassette, since I had one of those handheld ones that I later took to college. Such tech has gone the way of all flesh, but my vinyl recordings still survive – including one of those joint Debussy-Ravel programmes that seem to have been the light-classical norm for years.

In a general sense, I always loved DG covers – and still do: so much cleaner and brighter and more modern than those that, for instance, had a reproduction of a painting of an eighteenth-century street because it was a recording of something or other by Mozart. And while of course I would not wish to suggest that I am swayed by covers alone, I do still think that DG produces the classiest covers around, even when they’re predominantly artist portraits. 

Before the centenary got underway, DG had released Seong-Jin Cho’s new collection of piano works, Debussy, comprising Images I and II, Children’s Corner and Suite bergamesque.

In January, this was followed by Daniel Barenboim’s heavily-touted Claude Debussy, with a programme of Estampes, Clair de lune (from Suite bergamesque), Le plus que lente, Elégie and Préludes, Book 1.

Since the composer is standardly described as an Impressionist, it’s easy to think of his work in terms of paintings rather than the literature that was his inspiration. It was a poem by Mallarmé that gave birth to Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, for instance.

But it can be difficult not to see pictures in the mind’s eye when listening to his work. To be honest, I don’t think that counts very high on a list of problems.

On a different note, I have made the mistake, for some time, of treating music as background – something to play on headphones when working so as to aid concentration – and forgotten the value of setting aside time to really listen.

This weekend, I decided to actually sit down and pay attention to these two new discs.

Now Cho is new to me, whereas Barenboim is an established household god who I have had the very great joy and privilege of seeing play live.

The programmes are different – except for Clair de lune. Both are wonderfully meditative: a proper listen is seriously de-stressing stuff.

I have no preference over that one shared piece. But there is something in Cho’s playing that is so subtle, yet utterly devastating.

The thing I kept thinking of when listening was, ironically, not in his programme – Le Cathédrale engloutie (The Submerged Cathedral), which is is the tenth piece in Préludes, Book 1. Yet it is what I thought of, time and again, while listening to Cho.

Barenboim is wonderful, with the contrasts that you would expect, but there is an ethereal, shimmering quality to Cho’s interpretation that takes the breath away – that’s if you’ve not already found tears streaming down your cheeks.

I was constantly half-thinking of light on rippling water – and yes, of submerged buildings.

In this year of Debussy, these two have already set the bar very high. Get/stream both, if you can. But if you have to choose, go for Cho and then invest the time away from anything else, simply letting yourself be drawn in to the utterly beautiful music and this quite extraordinary performance.

And one can only hope that this is indicative of the quality that we’ll be treated to over the coming months.

A Meistersinger with plenty to feast on

Ending of Act II

One of the things that makes good art great is its endurance and its openness to reinterpretation down the years: that whatever the apparent subject, it is never just about that.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is such a beast. Weighing in at four and a half hours of music –divided here by two intervals of 35 minutes apiece, allowing audience members the time to unpack the Tupperware and enjoy a leisurely picnic – it might be Wagner’s one mature comedy, but that should not be read as suggesting it lacks intellectual meat.

Indeed, one of the pleasures in watching is in noting the themes – and also how the production works with (or against) them.

The downside with such works is that they can also be open to people attempting to foist interpretations on them.

In the case of Meistersinger, there has been a determined effort by some to suggest that Beckmesser is an anti-Semitic character (who has to be defeated by an Aryan).

Nobody has ever been able to concretely prove that any character in one of Wagner’s operas is Jewish. Wagner’s anti-Semitism is a well-known fact, but that doesn’t mean that his dramas are filled with anti-Jewish tropes. 

Here, the name of Sixtus Beckmesser is thoroughly German and what he quite clearly is is Wagner’s Malvolio, right down to the thin-soled shoes he has badgered Hans Sachs to finish being his yellow stockings, cross gartered.

Why does he have to suffer defeat and humiliation? Because he’s a jealous snob; a petty guard of the petty rules that govern the Meistersingers’ guild – the sorts of rules and attitudes toward art that Wagner himself railed and reacted against.

Further, he has the temerity to imagine that he would be a suitable match for the much younger Eva, who has been promised to the winning Meistersinger at the city’s midsummer festival. The widower Sachs has the decency, self-awareness and basic humanity to know he’s too old for her, even though the idea is not unattractive.

But Wagner is not quite so simplistic: while Sachs comes to see the limits of the rules, he doesn’t represent artistic anarchy, but wants to find an equilibrium between tradition and moving forward.

The idea of wahn – one of those German words that contains a whole philosophical concept; in this case, meaning far more than simple ‘madness’ as it is literally translated – permeates Sachs’s (and Wagner’s) fears, yet it can be a positive force in creativity. The conflict between strict rules/convention and artistic evolution reflects similar tensions in the wider world between the status quo and change. We all face this and most of us probably take comfort in what of the former suits us and believe only in limited change. Thus understanding Sachs’s fears and dilemma is not difficult.

However, when he pays homage to tradition in the final act, it is often considered a difficult piece of nationalistic fervour. 

But historical context means a lot. When it was penned in the 1860s, Germany was on the cusp of becoming a reality, offering its peoples an increased security in the face of competing and established nationalisms from east and west in particular. It is easy now to forget that nationalism was not considered inherently negative in the 19th century: specifically, we don’t consider Italy’s move toward nationhood at the same time as anywhere near so problematic. German nationalism of the same period, though, has come to be viewed through the prism of what happened decades later and is thus treated as unique.

And it’s hardly as if we in the UK don’t like more than a spot of wildly bombastic pomp and circumstance – and not just at the Last Night of the Proms.

Hans Sachs and Sixtus Beckermesser

It’s also worth remembering that while Wagner himself might have been a nationalist in ways we think of today, he was also anti-militaristic and anti-imperialistic: today’s definition of nationalism usually includes militarism and, at a time when the UK government is planning ‘empire 2’, some on these islands at least hanker for imperialism.

On a cultural level, German-language opera existed, but German composers such as Handel and Gluck had preferred Italian, just as the court of Frederick the Great spoke French – a point referenced in Sach’s hymn to German art. That’s the context for artists striving for a German voice in art.

Royal Opera House director of opera Kasper Holten leaves the job with this new production. And it has left some to grumble – not least about how he’s changed the ending. But then, isn’t breaking the rules what this is all about?

Here, after Walther is accepted into the meistersingers’ guild and, in turn, accepts that, rather than fall into his arms, Eva storms off – presumably angered by his apparent rejection of rebelling against the rules and/or his acquiescence with the nationalism most usually perceived.

It does no damage to the whole, however you look at it.

Mia Stensgaard’s set has come in for criticism too – particularly in the second act, where something more pastoral might be welcome. This is certainly a point.

We start with something like a vaguely Deco series of boxes; angles everywhere, with staircases that go nowhere and a door like the aperture of a camera. It could remind one of Escher’s nightmarishly impossible architecture and indeed, at the climax of the second act, it becomes a nightmare. In a clever move, it only really resolves to full symmetrical neatness in the final act.

In between, during probably the slowest revolve in theatrical history, we see the back of the main set, rigged out as though it were backstage. But as Sachs plots to turn the madness to sanity, it also sees him ‘outside’ the world of which he has been such a part; a clique; an elite with its endless rules that help to preserve that elite.

Resolving the issues is what allows him to return inside, but only as he also helps to at least partially break the strangulating hold on artistic freedom. This is like Wagner’s personal manifesto – as is Sachs’s belief in democratising art by calling for the meistersinger to be chosen by popular vote and even his own determination to match words and music completely, which Sachs mentions in the libretto.

Dress is modern and includes nods to modern elites such as masons – the production poster adds business/City types as another elite.

It’s been noted that Walther is dressed scruffily, with a rock ‘n’ roll t-shirt – unfitting for a noble. But actually, it fits perfectly: the artisans in the guild are the ones for whom such things as appearance are central to their cultivation of their own sense of being an elite. An aristocrat has no need of such symbols because he’s already a member of a ‘real’ elite – though there is irony to his being the one trying to break into a very different sort of establishment.

Sachs, Eva and Walther

If Meistersinger, lacking the sturm und drang impact of Wagner’s great Romantic works, never quite hits the emotionally devastating notes of, say, the last minutes of Tristan und Isolde, it is perhaps his most consistently beautiful and melodic score.

The orchestra was in fine form under Antonio Pappano, if a tad too loud during some of the conversational moments.

Bryn Terfel might not be quite the baritone he was a few years ago, but his is an easy charisma and he brings a straightforward honesty to Sachs that is perfect for the role.

Johannes Martin Kränzle as Beckmesser deals with the comic elements delightfully, while Gwyn Hughes Jones as Walther and Rachel Willis-Sørensen as Eva, and Allan Clayton and Hanna Hipp and Sachs’s apprentice David and Eva’s maid Magdalene, all give fine performances.

The ending, with two choruses cramming the stage, is a theatrical barnstormer. The music resolves as it does at the end of the overture – and a glorious resolution it is too.

Meistersinger is a comedy in the same way that the likes of Twelfth Night is: there are laughs and chuckles, but there is much more to take away when the final chord has sounded.