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MUSIC
Interpol and Bloc Party
Hordern Pavilion, November 18
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★
There is a lot of sense in this trans-Atlantic, alternating-headliner double bill of two bands that are creatively founded on the interplay of a dominant lead singer and a sonics-sculpting guitarist, but fundamentally driven by historically less stable and less publicly prominent rhythm sections.
New Yorkers Interpol are roughly the same late ’90s vintage as London’s Bloc Party, but each band has its roots in different shades of the post-punk era in the UK. That was a scene where rhythm and intensity made for a new kind of dance music – harder, darker, more tense. It focused on controlled release rather than abandon and on semi-lit rather than brightly flashing dance floors. More head than hedonism, you might say.
Black suits and sunnies were de rigueur for Interpol.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Those similarities extended to the way each band began its set: slowly, establishing rather than immediately scene-setting, with an older song in some debt to the Cure emerging. Bloc Party built into So Here We Are like a gradually warming introduction to our later discussion; Interpol moodily foreshadowed a more terse exchange with Untitled.
Bloc Party extended that feeling with an almost elegant mid-tempo take on Sex Magik before Russell Lissack’s guitar began spinning vivid sparks off Hunting for Witches, drummer Louise Bartle, the star of the night, and bass player Harry Deacon practically charging towards us. Then, 90 minutes later, for Interpol the smash and clang of Daniel Kessler’s guitar in C’mere immediately reset the sharper, chillier tone, met by the martial stomp of drummer Sam Fogarino, bass player Brad Truax and keyboardist Brandon Curtis.
From here on the Americans made slight variations to tempo and marginal changes in mood, our movement chased by shadows in Into the Night and X-rayed in the negative dance of The Rover, swamped by cascading torrents in All the Rage Back Home, and bent with waves of dark matter in Roland. (Does this make sense in physics? Well, it does in this room.) Things swung more dramatically for the English quartet who could turn the tap on Interpol-like mood with the synth-enhanced Different Drugs, segue from a vigorous Song For Clay (Disappear Here) into the mass eruption of dancing and singing that was a more brutal Banquet, build again in This Modern Love and make it payoff in the flowering Like Eating Glass.
The real difference between the bands – the separation of this conjoined night – might show with those singers: the once-uptight Kele Okereke in light and brighter clothes, working the crowd in professional showman mode; the more taciturn Paul Banks, like the rest of his band in black suit, topped off by sunglasses and addressing the crowd only as necessary.
But they reflect a deeper truth: Bloc Party made the room feel like a club where all energy is directed to the centre and exposure is not just inevitable but welcomed; Interpol transformed it into a low-ceiling hangar, all pockets of recess and regrets. Same, same but so different.
Bloc Party and Interpol play the Hordern Pavilion, November 19
The Lost Boys
Little Eggs Collective
Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre
November 16
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★½
Suddenly, everything is immersive. From Viral Ventures’ The Great Gatsby to the Australian Brandenburg’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Inferno, and now Little Eggs Collective’s The Lost Boys, producers are ripping out seats and pulling down walls. Is it about novelty, about the search for a more intense – Instagrammable? – experience. Or is it art?
The Lost Boys is, initially, all about novelty. Performers could be anywhere: bopping on a cramped dance floor, up a ladder or among the audience. You don’t quite know what’s happening. And that sense of confusion is, perhaps, at the heart of this piece, inspired by J. M. Barrie’s elegiac ode to childhood. Because who knows what is happening when you grow up? As a wide-eyed Anusha Thomas points out, it’s only when you turn two that you realise you’re not going to be one forever.
Performers could be anywhere in The Lost Boys.Credit: Grant Leslie Photography
The action bounces, abruptly, from childhood games to vivid nightmares, to sharp pangs of sudden insight. These are conveyed partly through words (directed by Craig Baldwin and Eliza Scott) and costumes (Esther Zhong) and ragged scenery (Ryan McDonald, who also directs the audience’s attention with an intricate lighting plot), but mostly by the physicality of playing, fighting, dancing.
The show opens with a rave, company members bopping on a cramped dance floor as they connect and disconnect with the music, the rhythm, the tribe. Adriane Daff charms us with terrible jokes and Samuel Beazley gets a spontaneous round of applause for a dance evocation of some charismatic kind of villain – Hook? Finally, Emma Harrison unites the company – and the audience – in the complicity of song.
At the centre of the work the indefatigable Julia Robertson and Romain Hassanin face off from either side of the stage, dressed in their Lost Boys animal onesies. The two wrestle for what seems like forever, grappling again and again and again, until a sudden awkward moment – an unwanted sexual frisson? – makes them leap apart.
The Lost Boys feels like an experiment taking place in real time. It’s a devised show, but at times the action is so visceral that it stops being a performance and becomes real-life drama, with the audience as witness. That said, the final twist is both pure theatre and a masterstroke which, in an instant, reframes the entire premise and sends you out questioning. And that, surely, is what art aspires to.
Wildschut & Brauss
Musica Viva
City Recital Hall
November 18
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
The violin sonatas of Cesar Franck (1886) and Claude Debussy (1917) are separated by a mere 31 years during which the world had changed utterly. Both are highly expressive in their own way, yet while Franck is romantically opulent, Debussy is concise, almost to the point of terseness.
Despite that, there is a continuity between them, Debussy using Franck’s cyclic form (evolving themes between movements), and it is not hard to think that Debussy is making a veiled homage to Franck with his opening idea.
Two great works of the French tradition formed the pillars of the recital by violinist Noa Wildschut and pianist Elisabeth Brauss with performances of refined sensitivity, reverence and understanding. In Debussy’s Sonata, which ended the first half, there is little space for setting the scene – every utterance needs to be gesturally perfect on first hearing.
Wildschut shaped each thought with neither inhibition nor exaggeration, following their inner logic with intuitive grasp. Everything received attentive care, but nothing was over-earnest or padded, while Brauss played with sensitive quietness and hushed precision. They gave the central movement a sense of fancy and subtlety, catching the music’s elusive changes with quiet freedom.
Wildschut’s violin cadenza towards the end cascaded with the lightness of water tumbling down a rock. To close the second half, they started Franck’s Sonata with breathless softness and throughout the performance such passages had that special tension and concentration that makes listeners subconsciously hold their breath.
There were moments where Brauss almost underplayed the piano part, but the third movement, the expressive heart of the work, opened from hushed textures to climactic moments of powerful intensity in which Wildschut still managed to preserve sweetness of tone and line. The surging finale repeated this, only yielding to a moment of over-enthusiasm in the closing bars.
There had been similar virtues in Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in A minor Opus 105 which opened the concert. The second movement was whimsically playful and changeable and the last given with light crispness.
Messiaen’s Theme and Variations moved from an austerely still theme to a vividly ecstatic final variation of ritualistic solemnity. Forces of Nature by Melbourne composer May Lyon, in its premier performance, juxtaposed a first section of spare single notes and shimmers in the high register, evocative of melting ice sheets, with a second half which was the mirror opposite in the low register, portraying volcanic eruptions. These two young players, still in their 20s, bring precocious musical understanding and great promise for all our musical future.
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