Philip Glass & Laurie Anderson - American Style
It's a packed house at the Theatre Royal for this, the highest profile event at NNF 2017. The audience is hugely mixed, with posh olds as well as young hipsters thronging the bar ahead of the show. The couple in matching black berets particularly floated my boat.
Renowned, controversial composer Glass is on grand piano, with cellist Rubin Kodheli in the middle and musician and wordsmith Laurie Anderson on the right playing keyboard and violin. Tonight is both a love song for the USA and an elegy for hope in its current situation.
A large screen behind them shows Anderson's artwork and video, ranging from blackboard scribblings about empires to images of a unicorn during a piece about extinction. I was sort of expecting something a little more vibrant and controversial, but the images were mainly slow, melancholic and dark, albeit pretty.
Musically it's more melodic and charming and less challenging than I was expecting. Glass and Anderson both speak confidently and naturally to the audience about the pieces, including a piece based around a Ginsberg poem which is one of the best parts of the hour and 40 minute performance. Anderson even tells a joke in the middle and speaks about stand up and improv, and how the USA is currently improvising due to the political situation. She also reads a story from an armchair about the time she wrote a letter to Senator Kennedy as a child and tells a story from a play by Aristophanes about a wall, linking it in nicely to Trump's proposed wall. Etude #10 is a piece that has no words but the trio play together beautifully and flowingly like a three way conversation bathed in green lights.
For the most part the music sounds pretty samey - sad, delicate, meandering and beautiful, not as angry as I thought it might be, and this is definitely not a call to arms type of evening. It's more of a musing on their country, what is was, was it is, and what it could become. Towards the end Laurie reads the line "I'm not sentimental, but you know what I mean..I love the country".
Tonight was an interesting show that didn't necessarily demonstrate the very best of the individual performers but it did do what it said on the tin - namely make us consider the state of the States. Also, I guess that the way things are going over the pond at present is serving creative people in that it gives them the opportunity to rise up and make art that is full of real emotion. An entertaining, intellectual and classy evening, but not the groundbreaker I was hoping for.
