Alastair Macaulay: Two Proms and middle-class angst

From our critic in residence:

I.

The playwright Mike Bartlett write plays for today in idioms that hanker for the plays of yesterday. His most prestigious play to date has been “King Charles III”, written when the late Queen Elizabeth was alive and Charles was still in waiting; it was written in verse, a fantasy of the near future but masquerading self-consciously as a history play. (And the verse was terrible.)

Now, with “Juniper Blood”, he tackles the realms of “The Good Life” and “Clarkson’s Farm” – but with the tactics of Ibsen and Shaw. The play is set in rural Oxfordshire, where a townie, Lip (Sam Troughton) has moved with his wife, Ruth (Hattie Morahan), to the farmland of his ancestors. But traditional country life and rewilding become so much Lip’s agenda that he tells Ruth he’s opposed to modern medicine for the child they’ve conceived together. Ruth, appalled, begins at once to speak of leaving him. Lip is the kind of unremitting idealist that Shaw defined as part of Ibsenism; but the talky way in which the five characters speak is less like Ibsen than like Shaw himself.

“Juniper Blood” is that old-fashioned thing, a three-act play, with long, long speeches and two intervals. I love many plays with long speeches too, but several of those written by Bartlett are creaky in the way many resent in Shaw.

Because Lip and Ruth love each other, the complexities of their relationship give the play what limited suspense it has. During the course of the play, which spans a few years, Ruth’s daughter Milly (Nadia Parkes) turns up twice with a not-very boyfriend, Femi (Terique Jarrett); they also get visited by their farming neighbour, Tony (Jonathan Slinger). Tony has an endearingly funny long speech in which (Slinger’s pacing is marvellous) he takes time to propose to Ruth a sexual relationship; but, like the various relationships Milly and Femi have with each other and others, this feels extraneous, something that Bartlett toys with because he is a Playwright writing Scenes.

Femi addresses one mega-long speech to Lip’s back: it covers ways of combining socialism with capitalism in the twentyfirst century. Why on earth is he going on like this? You may be sure Lip pays no attention; I suspect few of us do either, because we can’t feel much emotional reality in this virtual stranger turning up to lecture his host about large issues out of the blue.

Bartlett is a good enough playwright to make change our minds about each side of an argument, but he isn’t good enough to make us care greatly for any individual onstage. The bond between Ruth and Lip, central to the plot, should be tragic, since they soon establish irreconcilable differences – is he to save the world by pursuing his country life or will she persuade him to allow modern science into his vision? – but they’re both more theory than real.

Sam Troughton, playing Lip, has been one of Britain’s most oddly memorable actors for over twenty years. He’s no dreamboat type, but he exudes a memorable integrity. Bartlett gives him the tricky assignment of singing several folk songs: he sings them tunefully and in character. His silences and his body language become as effective as his voice; he stays in your head long after the play. He and Hattie Morahan (a touching presence as Ruth, though weak in lower areas of her voice) make an thoroughly odd couple – which is the whole point. You see why they upset each other; and when you see that they are powerfully attracted to each other despite everything. James Macdonald, directing, has done all he can to make the play less contrived than it is. But Bartlett’s writing stays irredeemably clunky.

II.

At 11am on Saturday 23, the Albert Hall was filled by prommers eager to hear András Schiff play Bach’s “The Art of Fugue”, which he has called the greatest work by the greatest composer. I’m not sure that Schiff is the greatest Bach player today – I have heard more luminously elegant Bach playing by Angela Hewitt in recent years – but certainly this was a great event. “It’s pure mathematics,” I heard admirers say afterwards. They’re not wrong, but it affected me more immediately like asttonomy in constant motion: the music of the spheres.

III.

That was quite a weekend at the Proms. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra from Amsterdam gave two concerts under its Finnish designate maestro Klaus Mäkelä. Mäkelä – chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic, music director of the Orchestre de Paris, director designate of the Chicago Philharmonic – is twenty-nine, with a meteoric career already causing extensive comment; he becomes the chief Concertgebouw conductor in 1927.

In the first concert (Saturday 23 evening), Mäkelä kept making different impressions, in two works that are part of the Concertgebouw tradition. He opened with Luciano Berio’s “Rendering”, a problematic postmodern piece (postmodern in its use of unfinished music from Schubert’s unfinished D minor symphony D 936A), which he made interesting but unsatisfactory. With Mahler’s Fifth Symphony – the Concertgebouw’s Mahler history goes back to Mahler’s own visits as conductor (he called Amsterdam his “spiritual second home”) – he was elegant, beautifully lucid, at first not always propulsive in rhythm. But in the third movement he elicited more attack and more colour from these players. His account of the fourth, the famous Adagietto, was the quietest I’ve ever heard, wonderfully sustained. (This was my fourth live performance of Mahler Fifth in thirteen months.) The fifth movement is often played with an element of vulgarity: Mäkelä completely avoided that. It was hard to tell whether Mäkelä was giving us a new approach to Mahler, or whether he is a marvellous maestro who isn’t – yet – quite a Mahlerian. But the Concertgebouw sound under him shows an absorbing range of texture: with mellownesses and softnesses amid the brightnesses and power. Everything has focus and purity.

At the second performance, on the afternoon of Sunday 24, the accord between Mäkelä and Concertgebouw was brilliant in three wonderfully different works. The elegance of playing under Mäkelä never precludes force, power, or fantasy. Mozart’s Paris symphony (no 31 in D major) was all suspense. With Janine Jansen as solo violin, Prokofiev’s first violin concerto in D major, a work I have often heard over almost fifty years, became a more poetic adventure of the soul than I have ever known it, now winged and now driven. Indeed (I was not alone in reacting this way) it became the greatest and most inspiring of all Prokofiev’s compositions. Bartók’s “Concerto for Orchestra” is a darker work, entirely of this world, but with elements of play; Mäkelä made it a work of many moods, while always making it a vehicle for the orchestra. Even amid the other great events of this Proms season, amid the other memorable visiting orchestras from Budapest and Copenhagen, this Concertgebouw weekend was a peak.

The post Alastair Macaulay: Two Proms and middle-class angst appeared first on Slippedisc.