HHH
I HAVE a question for members of the audience who attended the RSNO's performance on Saturday night of Smetana's six-work cycle of symphonic poems, collectively known as Ma Vlast (My Country). Here's the question: do you think the presentation worked?
The reason I ask is I'm not entirely sure it did. I have no problem whatsoever with the performance by Peter Oundjian and the orchestra: that was warm, expansive, vivid and violent according to the mood of the music; light as a feather, endlessly evocative, wonderfully elegant and foot-stampingly bucolic – peasant-like, even – as appropriate. And the work is such a rarity in the concert hall in its complete form: I don't think I've heard it live since Charles Mackerras and the Czech Phil did it at the Edinburgh Festival years ago.
And I have no problem with the "symphonic photo-choreography" of James Westwater and Nicholas Bardonnay – a three-screen slide show of pretty much all things Czech, from historical, geographical and political elements, along with natural-feature landscapes and riverscapes, to parties and football, with fruitmarkets, dancing and folk music in the streets, and the darker things of life interwoven.
But did the two strands fit together? Were they complementary? Did they form anything other than two different art forms presented simultaneously? Did one expand, explore, affect or inform the other? Did they amount to more than the sum of their parts? Or was it a slide show with musical accompaniment; or, indeed, an epic orchestral presentation with decorative slides overlaid? I simply don't know. But I confess I'm not particularly comfortable with the concept.
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