Rafael Bonachela and Jacopo Godani with the Sydney Dance Company, by Andrew Miller

Ezio Bosso and Rafael Bonachela collaborate.

Shared Frequencies
The Sydney Dance Company
Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay: 5 April 2011
in Sydney until 16 April

Raw Models
Choreography - Jacopo Godani
Assistant to the choreographer - Amy Hollingsworth
Music - 48 Nord (Ulrich Mueller and Siegfried Roessert)
Costumes and lighting - Jacopo Godani
Costume realization - Claire-Louise Rasmussen

Landforms
Choreography - Rafael Bonachela with the dancers of the Sydney Dance Company
Assistant to the choreographer - Amy Hollingsworth
Music - 'Music for Weather Elements' composed by Ezio Bosso
Lighting - Mark Dyson
Costume design - Rafael Bonachela
Costume realization - Fiona Holley
Music performed by
Ezio Bosso - piano
Veronique Serret - violin
Geoffery Gartner - cello
Katie Noonan - voice

Contemporary art has been around long enough now to be no longer necessarily contemporary with the present day and likewise Avant-Garde seems sometimes more a style than an attitude or movement. Contemporary dance, as free and expressive as it generally is, sometimes feels held back by its stock of conventional movements and gestures. These movements are becoming less and less abstract even if they can be expressive and exhilarating and every good choreographer has their own touch with them. Of course classical ballet has its own stock of traditional steps, but these are meant to blend together smoothly; in a way the ultimate aim of the choreographer and dancer is to meld these individual steps together into the transitionary movements to become a single fluid movement and an expression of a whole more than the sum of its steps. The audience forgets to see or analyze the steps as separate.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




From the Stalls: Handel's "Orlando" at the Scottish Opera, Edinburgh Festival Theatre, by Caroline Bottger

Tim Mead as Orlando and Sally Silver as Angelica in Handel's Orlando at the Scottish Opera. Photo Richard Campbell.

Orlando
Music and libretto by Georg Friedrich Handel
Scottish Opera Company
Edinburgh Festival Theatre
Thursday 5th March

Conductor: Paul Goodwin
Stage Director: Harry Fehr
Set and Costume Designer: Yannis Thavoris
Lighting Designer: Anna Watson

Orlando - Tim Mead
Angelica - Sally Silver
Medoro - Andrew Radley
Dorinda - Claire Booth
Zoroastro - Andreas Wolf

The terrain of the Scottish Opera company is very broad and rich, and as a result, it yields some strange, glorious fruit. Georg Friedrich Haendel’s baroque opera Orlando, replete with the classic themes of love, madness and redemption, hit the stages of Glasgow and Edinburgh this February and of course, all the audience could do was sit in their seats in awe. Scottish Opera gave this 1733 baroque masterpiece a complete face lift to lighten the drab northern winter, and has garnered nothing but four-star reviews for its efforts.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




London Sinfonietta: Xenakis – Architect of Sound, London Sinfonietta and André de Ridder at the Southbank Centre's Ether Fesitval

Iannisxenakis
Iannis Xenakis

London Sinfonietta: Xenakis – Architect of Sound

Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre
April 2nd, 2011

Iannis Xenakis - Eonta
Kottos
Phlegra
La légende d'Eer

London Sinfonietta
André de Ridder, conductor
Rolf Hind, piano
Tim Gill, cello
Sound Intermedia, sound projection

The Southbank's annual Ether Festival, exploring innovative and multi-disciplinary approaches to contemporary music, includes this year a Xenakis weekend (perhaps timed to mark the tenth anniversary of the composer's death), of which this concert is a part; following the Barbican's "Total Immersion" day dedicated to him two years ago, there seems to be a bit of a vogue for Xenakis in London at the moment. I'm no aficionado, but have always been intrigued by his unique background as an architect and mathematician who applied the same structural principles to composition, and grateful that the resulting music doesn't sound remotely as sterile as one might imagine — in fact far less so, to my mind, than what one might call the pseudo-mathematical approach of total serialism.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




Photography and Place at the Art Gallery of NSW, by Alan Miller

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia, 1945-2002), Perisher Valley no 7 NSW, 1984.

Photography and place: Australian landscape photography 1970s until now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, until 29 May

The Australian landscape seems to require photography. The question of who, how, where, how often and why thankfully remains open, at least among the eighteen photographers included in Photography and Place at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Australia, so conflicted about cities, is one of the most urbanized societies on earth, a situation which makes the looming question of the landscape all the more urgent. Wilderness will aways dominate the continent, never allowing settlements to be interspersed as they are in the United States or Europe. The land provokes sentimentality, poetry and bitterness. In the heart of the cities which cling to the coastal fringe, it can seem another universe until a dust storm, fire, flood or the daily violence of the sunlight reminds us of nature’s nonnegotiable and indifferent presence.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




Photography and Place at the Art Gallery of NSW by Alan Miller

Ingeborg-tyssen_600

The Australian landscape seems to require photography. The question of who, how, where, how often and why thankfully remains open, at least among the eighteen photographers included in Photography and Place at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Australia, so conflicted about cities, is one of the most urbanized societies on earth, a situation which makes the looming question of the landscape all the more urgent. Wilderness will aways dominate the continent, never allowing settlements to be interspersed as they are in the United States or Europe. The land provokes sentimentality, poetry and bitterness. In the heart of the cities which cling to the coastal fringe, it can seem another universe until a dust storm, fire, flood or the daily violence of the sunlight reminds us of nature’s nonnegotiable and indifferent presence.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts.

Alan MIller

A Singer’s Notes by Keith Kibler 31: Black Ink

Bad things have been raging in the world. Still, today I see my old cat rolling in the sun. I begin now to think about the powerlessness of beauty in a different way. Hear Shakespeare how he says it in Sonnet 65:

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower? ......

...unless this miracle have might:
That as black ink my love may still shine bright.

20110125-0009
Cat Colony, Largo Argentina, Rome. Photo © 2011 Michael Miller.

Black ink... We must, because we can, read. We must read words like light, dark, black. The cat has trust. When she first locates the sun with her eyes, she must wait for it to warm her with a kind of trust. When this happens, she starts to roll, a slow religious roll that has an evenness. 

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




Sergio Tiempo at Queen Elizabeth Hall: Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, and Ravel, by Gabriel Kellett

Sergio-tiempo_1_sait
Pianist Sergio Tiempo

Sergio Tiempo at Queen Elizabeth Hall

Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre
March 15th , 2011

Franz Liszt - Three Pieces from Les Années de pèlerinage

Sonetto 47 del Petrarca
Sonetto 104 del Petrarca
Sonetto 123 del Petrarca

Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Sonata in C sharp minor, Op.27 No.2 (Quasi una fantasia – Moonlight)

Fryderyk Chopin - Études

Etude in C, Op.10 no.1
Etude in C sharp minor, Op.25 no.7
Etude in G sharp minor, Op.25 no.6
Etude in C minor, Op.10 no.12
Etude in C minor, Op.25 no.12

Maurice Ravel - Gaspard de la nuit

Franz Liszt - Two Pieces

Consolation No.3 in D flat
Mephisto Waltz no.1


Sergio Tiempo, piano


As usual for me, this was a concert I chose for the repertoire rather than the performer – three of my favourite composers and one (Liszt) I want to investigate further. It's always been pretty much just about the music(, man...), a philosophy I'd like to outgrow. There's not many 'artistes' in classical music that I feel either enthused or knowledgeable enough about to call myself a fan of yet, but one exception is Martha Argerich, who has consistently championed Sergio Tiempo and regularly performs with him. Based on this knowledge and what I'd gathered about him from reading snippets here and there, I went into his debut Southbank performance, part of their International Piano Series, with hopes that he had some of the mercuriality and fire that I love in Argerich.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




Twentieth Century Rocks at LSO St Luke’s: Guildhall Ubu Ensemble play Adams, Boulez, Varèse, and Zappa, by Gabriel Kellett

Zappa
Frank Zappa

Twentieth Century Rocks at LSO St Luke's
LSO St Luke's, Old Street
Jerwood Hall, March 24th, 2011

John Adams  - Chamber Symphony

Pierre Boulez  - Dérive

Edgard Varèse - Octandre

Frank Zappa -

The Dog Breath Variations/Uncle Meat
The Girl in the Magnesium Dress
The Perfect Stranger
Questi cazzi di piccione
Harry, You're a Beast/Orange County Lumber Truck
G-spot Tornado

Guildhall Ubu Ensemble
Simon Wills, Ben Gernon conductors


It was the title of the concert that first caught my eye, a pun and a gratuitous film reference joined in unholy wedlock, with no objections raised from my pew. Then I noticed the performers. The Guildhall Ubu Ensemble are apparently no mere youth orchestra composed of Guildhall students, but “the musicians of tomorrow playing the music of our time.” I would condemn the arrogance and dubious accuracy of that statement, were I not too busy praising the superb choice of name and happily envisaging a future where all musicians pretend to be influenced by seminal proto-Surrealist literature.

Also, the music looked pretty good. So it was off to my first time at St Luke's, the permanent home of the LSO's “Discovery” music education programme. It's a converted 18th century church that, once inside, has the atmosphere and appearance of the assembly hall of some well-heeled school — not, in this case, a criticism, as it seems somehow appropriate for the lightly subversive slant of this concert. The programming throws up some interesting relations between the chosen composers, especially in the mischievous pairing of Adams and Boulez, who have been quite disparaging about each other's work. I'm a big fan of Adams' unabashed eclecticism and exuberance, and my impression of this performance of his Chamber Symphony was that the Ubus — as I will now refer to them — are too, the string players in particular full of emphatic gestures that showed their immersion in the music. Jointly inspired by cartoon scores and Schoenberg's piece of the same name, but with the latter influence generally paramount, it's more violent and menacing than most Adams, though humorous as well. Other than a passage in the last movement for double bass and synthesiser that was not quite tight, it was an assured opening to the concert.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




The Better Part of Valour: A Movie for Tea Party Folk, by Alan Miller

In hard times, a leader emerges.

The following treatment, provisionally entitled "The Better Part of Valour", was leaked to me by a source at a major Hollywood studio. In the wake of recent controversy over "The Kennedys" it is an interesting political document. Is Hollywood responding to a change in the American psyche, or pandering to a fake demographic which lives only in the headlines in the New York Times? Will movies for Tea Party folk become the norm? The document I received was stained with pork rind grease in the lower right hand corner, leading me to believe that someone authentically conservative must be involved with the project.

"THE BETTER PART OF VALOUR"

MADISON BROOKS is a junior White House pool reporter with the Washington Post. Her zeal for the scoop often sees her at odds with her liberal "lamestream media" bosses. As we meet her she is having her usual Tuesday lunch with her best friend RONRON BATISTA, a gay, Latino republican who writes for the Post Sunday magazine. He is working on a story about a new social trend: young people in "red" parts of the country are turning into liberals, at least culturally. They listen to left-wing music, watch left-wing movies, wear left-wing clothes, etc. He is sardonic, even more conservative than Madison.

Read the full story on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




The Better Part of Valour: A Movie for Tea Party Folk by Alan Miller

Hog_farm_hogs

The following treatment, provisionally entitled "The Better Part of Valour", was leaked to me by a source at a major Hollywood studio. In the wake of recent controversy over "

The Kennedys" it is an interesting political document. Is Hollywood responding to a change in the American psyche, or pandering to a fake demographic which lives only in the headlines in the New York Times? Will movies for Tea Party folk become the norm? The document I received was stained with pork rind grease in the lower right hand corner, leading me to believe that someone authentically conservative must be involved with the project.
Read the whole story on The Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts.
Alan Miller