The Boulez concert was on another level. The audience at Albert Hall surrounds the stage, so I was actually facing Boulez. I could see his calm, serious, undemonstrative expression while I heard music of scintillating clarity, aching tenderness, and overwhelming intensity. He hadn’t the slightest trouble getting the orchestra (which he’s conducted for decades) and the combined BBC and London Symphony Choruses to blow the lid off the hall in Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass (the text of which is in Old Church Slavonic). This was only the third time Boulez has ever conducted it. (Phoenix Arts editor Jeffrey Gantz reviewed one of the other two, in Paris in 2003.) Simon Preston, in Boston last year to accompany the BSO in Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony, played Albert Hall’s monumental organ, and New Zealand tenor Simon O’Neill’s idiomatic Slavonic and hefty projection stood out among the four vocal soloists.
The program began with a visceral, uplifting Sinfonietta, with 14 trumpets. In a free pre-concert dialogue with the director of the Proms, Boulez talked about the difference between the American minimalists’ repetitions and Janáček’s, with their more complex rhythms, harmonies, and sonorities. Boulez turned the insinuating, unsettling Capriccio for Piano and Winds (with the impressive Jean-Efflam Bavouzet), by turns intimate and circusy, fleet and galumphing, delicate and assertive, into a mesmerizing dream world.
London’s rich theater season had me bypassing Mamma Mia! for the National Theatre. In Melly Still’s breathtaking staging, Thomas Middleton’s verbally and emotionally corrosive The Revenger’s Tragedy became an all-too-timely exploration of the destruction and self-destruction wreaked by the compulsion to get even. (One of the characters is named Supervacuo.) Superb actors like Rory Kinnear (Roy’s son) and The History Boys’ Jamie Parker spoke Jacobean blank verse like real-life Jacobeans. On the revolving stage created by Still and Ty Green, the major “rooms” were separated by sinister narrow corridors, from or into which you couldn’t predict where an actor might emerge or disappear. Sexy contemporary costumes and the mix of early music (countertenor Jake Arditti) and rock (DJs differentGear) provided vivid visual and sound images for a brutal, decadent, trivial world not unlike our own.
I also caught Afterlife, a new play by Michael Frayn (Copenhagen) about the legendary theatrical producer Max Reinhardt. It offered a beautifully modulated performance by Roger Allam in the central role. But the play was both self-consciously symbolic (Reinhardt as Everyman and the Nazis as the Devil) and perhaps not pretentious enough for its own good. A failure, but on a very high level.
London, of course, is also one of the world’s greatest centers for art, especially European paintings (four Vermeers!), and most of the museums are free. I spent many of my daylight hours at the National Gallery, which has two of the Vermeers, Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne and Diana and Actæon, Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, one of Uccello’s three massive Battle of San Romano paintings, and masterpieces by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca, Rembrandt, and Velázquez. The smaller Wallace Collection has Hals’s Laughing Cavalier, a Rembrandt portrait of his son Titus, Rubens’s Rainbow Landscape, Velázquez’s Lady with the Fan, and an array of elegant, poignant Watteaus. On the far side of Hampstead Heath, Kenwood House is a beautiful estate with hilly lawns and woods and a pond with an artificial bridge, a magnificent library designed by Robert Adam, yet another Vermeer, and Rembrandt’s greatest self-portrait. One of my favorite places in London is Sir John Soane’s Museum, the great 19th-century architect’s quirky, personal collection of art (including Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress) and artifacts, in a house he himself designed, filled with skylights, hundreds of mirrors, and a crypt.
