MAN OVERBOARD

A much admired friend was on the ABC’s New Inventors during the week. He is a man of huge intellect with an enquiring mind which does not take no for an answer. He is generous, funny, and has devoted his life to the welfare of others, in and out of the workplace.

He has invented a man overboard (MOB) rescue device, which he demonstrated with his usual understatement. One of its significant advances is in keeping the victim horizontal during rescue, helping to prevent aspiration into the lungs, and maintaining blood pressure and flow in the hypothermic.
It rightly won the night 2:1, the third vote being given by a woman panellist to a biodegradable multi-hole flower arranger. Remind me to throw her one next time she falls overboard.

For those inclined, you can vote here.

SKY III

BOOK OF LONGING

The day wouldn’t write
What the night penciled in







After six years gestation, The Leonard Cohen – Philip Glass poetry / music collaboration Book of Longing (2007) has been crisscrossing the globe for 12 months, and slipped through Sydney on the weekend, a beautiful Sydney weekend, on the way to the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

We went to the 6pm Sunday show. Why aren’t more things scheduled here on Sunday evenings, perhaps with the exception of the hottest of Sydney’s mid-summer nights, when nothing should be on, including clothes, before sunset? Glass gave a preconcert talk which we missed, blissfully unaware it was on, and blissfully finishing off a harbourside lunch with a creamy sago of the texture of meringue without the sweetness, lightly dressed with a passionfruit syrup. It should have been called endorphin pudding.

Unlike K, who listens to Leonard Cohen as an almost meditative experience, hearing the voice more than the words, I’m not a great Lenny fan. Too much Cohen and I start to feel like I need to kill someone, that’s Lenny or me. Mr Cohen didn’t appear, but sent his voice, his poems, his drawings and his psyche for what was to be a very personal exploration of one man and his search.

My introduction to Philip Glass, who readily acknowledges the influences of Ravi Shankar, Nadia Boulanger, and Steve Reich, was the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, one of those ‘if you remember it you didn’t see it’ affairs. I saw it three times in rapid succession, and more memorably, with his ensemble backing the film live during a Sydney festival some years ago. It epitomised Brian Eno’s description of minimalism : “a drift away from narrative and towards landscape, from performed event to sonic space”. Glass's enormous body of work is many things, and good accompanist is one of them. Probably it was film scores which most brought him into the mainstream (Thin Blue Line, Kundun), and it was a pretty mainstream crowd who came to this show. The hall was full except for the very upper rows of the closest side boxes where there would have been restricted view of the screen.

The Concert Hall stage was blocked in black, comfortably accommodating the eight musicians, and four soloists. Philip Glass was on keyboard. Leonard Cohen drawings hang at the rear around a central screen for further imaging. The effect was quite intimate for such a large hall, helped probably by us sitting mid stalls. It began like entering a private studio or study but by the end it felt like you were exiting a mind, this whole dark space ultimately became inside you-know-who’s cranium.

Cohen’s (“Anyone who says I’m not a Jew is not a Jew”) work is startlingly frank. He exposes himself and his struggle between attachment and release with a repetitive intensity, returning constantly to lust, music, death, sex, no death, rebirth, sex, round and round, Boogie Street to mountain and back. It was all very agitating, as well it ought be. It is after all a Book of Longing. Once when asked if he might turn his attention (from longing) to fulfilment, Cohen’s reply was “What has fulfilment got to offer?

Glass, no stranger to agitation himself, was ultimately the calming influence. His soothing rhythms and soft Buddhist precussions, with fine interludes on violin (a tilt perhaps at Cohen’s comments that the approach by Glass was like being asked by Bach if he could use your lyrics) and cello, amounted to a kind of therapy, reassuring but never hindering or intruding on the word. It was a well drilled performance, choreographed to fine detail, the mezzo of Tara Hugo the most willing of the vocalists to emote beyond the routine, although on reflection, that is counter to how Cohen deadpans his lyrics.

And just when you think he’s trapped in his vortex forever, there comes the

Epilogue – Merely A Prayer
…
Now I’m here at the end of the song
the end of the prayer
The ashes have fallen away at last
exactly as they’re supposed to do
The chains have slowly
followed the anchors
to the bottom of the sea
It’s merely a song
merely a prayer
Thank you, Teachers
Thanks you, Everyone

MAKROPULOS AT LAST

"For me, this role challenges any preconceptions of an operatic diva. She is a true original." - Cheryl Barker.


The first blog reviews are coming in for Opera Australia's Vec Makropulos, Janacek (1926) - The Makropulos Case / Affair / Secret. I spend way too much time bouncing up hit rates on favoured bloggers, waiting to hear, and this one's been slow, but that's sometimes a good sign.

Sarah Noble, usually quick off the mark, slowed lately perhaps by the power of the performances and her committment elsewhere, has made preliminary notes.

Kevin Jackson, twice already, says: "I felt that THE MAKROPULOS SECRET as near a perfect night in the theatre as one can have at the Opera."

"..very likely the best opera I have yet encountered -" begins Esoteric Rabbit.

That's what I like to hear. I get off on the expectation. Going to the beach with Dad, the long long drive up and down Mona Vale Road, over Tumbledown Dick Hill, past the wonderfully exotic Bahai temple, where I secretly wanted to go in but only on the way home, till after what seemed like half a day later we would hit the burning sand to silly squeals of 'last one in's a monkey's uncle'. I love expectation.

We have 10 days to wait, with Philip Glass - Leonard Cohen's 'Book of Longing' (SOH Sunday), and a return to Billy Budd for the last night (once is not enough) in between.

Meantime, there are little things of no less importance. I'm waiting to see what 300 years does to thoughts about little things.

The Anja Silja 1995 Glyndebourne DVD arrived yesterday, and that's for tonight.

"THAT ONE"

is THE one.

LITTLE THINGS

It was the morning after the southerly blew through. Things hadn’t been good and the world was heading to hell in a handbasket. Walking in the cold early morning was a reminder of the winter we were leaving behind, with day length now rapidly increasing and the sun sitting higher in the sky every day. I miss Winter already.

Scattered on the forest floor were dots of white Eucalypt and Angophora flowers, shredded off the highest branches by the nights winds, lying there like Hansel and Gretel clues to nowhere special, except a change of mood.

Better already.

This little person, male or female I wasn’t about to check, was waiting for us when we got home, snuggled into the ground. All the dogs could do was bark and stay clear.




What a cutie, a spiny ant eater with cream brown spines all puffed out, caught off guard and quickly buried in for safety. The Echidna is an egg-laying mammal, the female suckling its young (they're called puggles - file that in your scrabble cortex) through milk pores. As egg layers, and with a low body temperature of 31 - 32 celsius, they are probably the ancient link between reptiles and mammals. That's between snakes and us!

Almost side by side was this native iris (Patersonia sericea var. sericea) in flower, this day his big day.



And the sky hadn’t fallen in, as blue as ever over the Hakea salicifolia in full spring bloom.

BILLY BUDD performance

Teddy Tahu Rhodes as Billy Budd, picture Steven Siewert, SMH

Wednesday was the opening night of Billy Budd. We are not really opening-night-people, but there we were, with M, a work friend, and L, one of my sisters. M is a voracious reader, very familiar with Melville, and a lover of all music good and meaningful. It was her first go at Billy Budd. L has been living in the Kimberleys for more than 30 years, where life’s focus is a long way from 20th Century opera, but not from ambiguity and the search for meaning. Now widowed, she has returned to Sydney and is sponging up whatever is on offer. It was also her first go at Billy. There was little bit of who’s whoing going on, but the Opera House seemed quiet and relaxed, nothing in the Concert Hall, few tourists, and what was good, and this applies to all these not–for-everyone sort of shows, most people are there because they really want to be.

My recollection of this Billy Budd was that the set projected out towards the pit, poking out into the proscenium arch, so I was surprised to see the curtain down. More memory doubts. By the end of the night I realised what had happened – this production is a perfect fit for this theatre, the right size, the right colours, the right everything to the point that it seems that the whole theatre is the set, the stage just one end of it, and we are all there, all of us on the black ocean. I had so approximated the drama in my mind that my recall was of such an enhanced perception that the set and the spaces about it had indeed become one.

It was a very satisfying, emotional and ultimately exhausting night. M cried at the end. I experienced a wave of emotion somewhere early in the first act, that place where you realise you are slipping into something of such worth and certainty of excellence that you give yourself up to it completely.

Brian Thomson’s set is genius, an abstract hydraulic of society’s many levels, relentless shifts and uncertainties, class, imbalance, power and oppression, authority and control. Carl Friedrich Oberle’s costumes perfectly rooted the action at sea in the late 18th C, a dirty underclass, officers pumped up, their ridiculous hats to make little men and little minds big and imposing, like frill-necked lizards confronted with threat. The lighting by Nigel Levings made magic, and Neil Armfield, present in the audience, had his stamp all over it – everything with a purpose, and every priorty in place.

My only question mark was over the most critical scene of all, the trial scene. This was on a high deck, half-way up the stage height, and a good way back. It seemed too remote a placement for such an intense and personal moment, when Vere confronts his own demons, and for whatever reasons, hides behind the rules of the law of man, as all our leaders do today, yesterday, last week, last year, unable to deal with the truth, the outer and his inner truth, and weakly stays mute as Billy is judged. Strangely, this was the only time I felt I was watching something instead of being somewhere. Billy's final plea "I'd have died for you, save me!" was lost in the emptiness of it all. Perhaps that’s right after all.

Philip Langridge was in full control of the stage, and his voice, except for a few cracks at the upper limits. There was a spontaneous couple of coughs at one moment. I wondered if he had a cold, or lingering pilgrim flu, like the rest of the city. His return to a safer pitch for the epilogue brought an outporing of resolution, his acceptance of his own circumstance, and reconciliation with his position, a reconciliation based on Billy’s forgiveness, a lesson for us still struggling to forgive him (Vere) for our perception of his moral weakness, we less loving than Billy.

The Epilogue and his lonely silent stage exit had the house frozen and M crying.

Teddy Tahu Rhodes was wonderful, full of wonder. I was sceptical. He looked good, lean, very muscular, even slightly feminised with long blond hair, repeatedly brushing it away, but at the same time, no less masculine. There was something almost androgynous there, that sex was no matter, something you sometimes see in people completely at ease with their own sexuality, and that of others, such that matters of sex are beyond judgement. And his teeth shone white in the blackness. His voice was beautifully modulated, without the burnished brassiness you often hear when he is playing butch-man, and the sweetness of his final farewell "Through the port comes the moon-shine astray!" was the sweetest baritone singing on stage I have ever heard.

Claggart was well served by John Wegner, his bass oiling across the decks, his demeanour almost too vile, perhaps less external evil would have emphasised the internal darkness more.

Conal Coad was so evocative as the old tender hearted seaman, god he’s a good performer, and especially worth mentioning, they were all very good, was the Novice of Andrew Goodwin, and his beautifully enunciated downstage struggle against his fate "It's unjust, it's unfair!"

Mr Hickox and the orchestra, odd brass blurt notwithstanding, made great sense of this, never better than the great 34 chord interlude, the silent interview, the offstage scene between Vere and Billy, the messanger of death facing his own weakness and Billy’s acceptance.

And the mighty choruses were mighty choruses.

ABC have an video interview with Teddy Tahu Rhodes (04:32) , about this role and working with Neil Armfield, including some production footage.