STAYING ALIVE

What I’ve missed most over the past eighteen months has been live performance. Quite how much I realised the Sunday before last at Glyndebourne. The first test was whether my one-time sylph like form now enlarged by lunching and lounging about at home would fit into my dinner jacket and trousers. “Only just” was the answer as my trousers were tourniquet tight. We were to see Luisa Miller a Verdi opera little known and seldom performed created a few years before Rigoletto and La Traviata. It was the first night. The soprano was an Armenian who was making her Glyndebourne debut. She was described as Armenia’s best singer.

Our breath was held, our mood skittish – this was a new experience…going out, eating, drinking, watching and listening. Throughout the auditorium  there were corpulent afficionados conversing in voices like Brian Sewell. 

Conversation quietened to a hum, the conductor arrived in the orchestra pit flamboyantly; he waved his baton and the curtain went up. It was like being transported back to the mid-1960s, to a Rita Tushingham film called “The Knack …and how to get it” which had a house painted inside entirely in white. It’s stark and strange. I confess I was not blown away – I heard whispered comments “it’s all about triangles”…”virginity”… “they ran out of money”. 

After dinner, which incidentally was brilliant and colourful, in the second act something extraordinary happened that can only happen in live performance. It was like falling in love or being hit by a bolt of lightning. The star-crossed lovers and the turmoil around them became the only thing on my mind. It was much more than a suspension of disbelief. It was a heightened sense of being, like flying in a balloon or the feel of Mediterranean sun on your face as you get off the plane on holiday. I was transported.

The singing was magnificent, the feelings tragic, hopeless and gut wrenching. Mane Galoyan, the debutante, extraordinary, moving and joyous. Joyous? How odd to see a tragedy, a car crash of a relationship and feel happy. That again is what live performance can do. 

The many reviews unanimously lauding the opera, the performance of everyone and describing Mane as a “revelation” were the best I’ve seen for anything ever.

I was lucky. It was like winning the lottery. Unknown opera. Unknown lead singer. Tightly trousered I basked in the glow of a triumph and felt I somehow owned a bit of it.

What I love about live performances is the frisson that the risk of doing it brings. My wife when asked to sing that solo first verse of “Once in Royal David’s City” said solemnly “If I muck it up I’ll ruin everyone’s Christmas”. She didn’t. Christmas survived. But the point was a poignant one.

As I ease back into being sociable again I realise how tiresomely functional life became in the lockdown. There was no smell to anything, no surprises, no spontaneity, no discovery, like Mane the Armenian soprano’s, that one could fly.

Last week I met an old friend and we started to talk about companies or business or political leaders we admired and trusted.

We struggled for a few minutes and then we began to discover we were, in fact, impressed by a lot of companies, mostly quite small, many run by women.

It’s only when you can see body language as opposed to being on a Zoom call that magic can happen. Human beings are meant to mingle and share. They are meant to perform. 

Live performance can transform you. Without it life is dead dull.

'ART, WHEREFORE ART THOU?'

I’d like to claim these words came from the second merchant called Biennale in Shakespeare’s lesser known “Merchant of Venice 2” but I can’t and it doesn’t.

But neither it would seem, does art play much of a leading role in La Biennale di Venezia – the 56th International Art Exhibition. The critics have been cruel about it. Respectively the Guardian, Telegraph and Times:

“More of a glum trudge than an exhilarating adventure”

“Hectoring and joyless”

“Why Venice should be allowed to drift slowly towards a dignified death”

Not ringing praise then and to be fair the Biennale’s title “All the World’s Futures” deadens one’s expectations with its sententious pomposity.  Why is it artists speak in a language (which I call Sewellese) that is excluding, abstract and just weird?

The Czech and Slovak Republic Pavilion slogan…inspiring thought!

Either that or they distress themselves by the foulness of capitalism (and they do this in Venice the very origin of a rapacious love of money), of inequality, cruelty, war and so on. Life seems bad to the artists of today. Ironically all this sits alongside some of the most joyously uplifting works of previous centuries in the galleries in the heart of Venice like the Academia, Ca Pesaro, Ca D’Oro and the Correr.

The Swiss Salon on the Zattere proclaims:  “The World’s in a Hell of a Mess” (is it? Well look harder), New Zealand examines “Psychological Blocks of Perception” and throughout the city there are fragments of letters of complaint by victims of torture in Iraq. Any second I expect to see Ed Miliband walk round the corners and say “see what I mean?” Phrases like “Present Nearness” from Grenada (no me neither) leap out of posters. It’s like being trapped in Pseuds Corner.

The actual Giardini event is vast. Things to like – yes in a messy world let’s look on the brighter side at last.

The giant live, helmeted, masked fighter pilot’s head with breathing kit at the entrance to the Russian stand is dramatic.

The intricate vast spiders’ webs of keys hanging from the ceiling and their videos of tiny children from around the world talking about where babies come from (“I came out very fast….. vroom…”)  in the Japanese stand was memorable.

The US stand of which I’d heard good things was just dull.

If you like Spam, cigarettes and female orifices you’d love the UK stand….some said it was “funny”.

But Fiona Hal’s work and ideas on the Australian stand was three star Michelin art. In six or seven sections it was witty, beautiful and thought provoking. She’d engaged some Aborigine women to work as a team creating soft toy endangered animals out of military battle fatigues and military waste….it was extraordinary. One wall was covered in a display of driftwood from a river in New Zealand – strange and beautiful.

The Australian girls on the stand were serious and very articulate.

Australia and Fiona thank you. I believe in art and the Biennale again.

STOP THE OBFUSCATION

Sir Peter Bazalgette put the boot into the art world last week when he said:-
“Sometimes if you walk into an exhibition and you read the notes you would feel as though you are reading a foreign language”

And I guess most of us agreed. Not a lot to disagree with is there? It’s like teenage drinking, drug taking and pregnancy - a disgrace that has to be cracked down on.  But here’s the funny thing - because it has been. In the instance of teenage drinking, drug taking and pregnancy all have declined rapidly with drinking by 16 – 25 year olds reducing more sharply than amongst any other sector of the community. Teenage pregnancies are now the lowest since the 1960s.  And in the galleries I visit the quality of curating and simple English has reached new levels of clarity. Peter will say no doubt: “the word I used , you will notice, is ‘sometimes’. I was not saying it was prevalent”

Well if not prevalent or a serious problem why raise it and I have to say in the video of you explaining the Daily Telegraph article which trailed this alleged communication crisis, you did look rather anguished about this so-called issue.

In his book “Breakfast at Sotheby’s: the A-Z of the Art World” Philip Hook fingers some of those troublesome “foreign-sounding” words: “Accessible, challenging, decorative, difficult, important, interesting, monumental”

Crikey – they are hard ones aren’t they?

But this is yesterday’s fight. Overall the world of arts and culture has never been more astutely aware of the need for audiences and simplicity. Post-Apple, cleanliness and brevity of communication is the thing. The V&A gets this, the Ashmolean gets it….hell they all get it. Wherever you go the way in which art is talked about, the odd Brian Sewell apart, in words of one syllable.

On Sunday’s “Broadcasting House” on Radio 4 Paddy O’Connell interviewed people in the street about the side by side “Van Gogh “Sunflowers” at the National. It was a lightweight but refreshing piece demonstrating that the Chairman of the Arts Council’s concern lest anything impede art being for everyone is really pretty groundless.

So don’t be blue, Peter. The arts world is in better shape than you fear and the language with which it’s described is a) English and b) generally clear and simply informative.  My concern is the opposite of yours. Do you ever worry we aren’t being careful enough to get to the root of things and embrace complexity when it is there?  Brian Sewell is a fine example of someone unafraid to say either something is really difficult or, in entertainingly extravagant language, that a given work is ghastly.

The good thing about Sir Peter’s outburst, and perhaps this was his motive all along, is he hit the headlines and this blog.

Written by Richard Hall and first published on http://www.businessofculture.com/