I went to Paris for a working day-trip earlier this week and saw this extraordinary exhibition. Many, many thanks to the ever-fabulous Mikhail Rudy for showing me round it himself. The article is in today's Independent (Radar's Observations section)...
Chagall's Commedia dell'arte, 1958, from the Frankfurt Alte Oper. (c)ADAGP-Paris2015
Paris has faced dark times in recent weeks, but an antidote to the tense atmosphere following the 13 November attacks has materialised in a perhaps unexpected quarter. Marc Chagall: Le triomphe de la Musique (The Triumph of Music) is the first exhibition that the Philharmonie, the city’s new, state-of-the-art concert hall, has initiated and produced. To walk into it is to be enveloped in a high-spirited celebration of colour, sound, dance and what its musical director, the Russian pianist Mikhail Rudy, terms "art total" ("complete art work").
Almost more an installation than a conventional exhibition, it brings together for the first time Chagall’s designs for theatre, ballet and opera, including The Firebird, Daphnis et Chloe, The Magic Flute, a little-known ballet by Leonid Massine called Aleko, and, from the 1920s, the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre. There’s a special focus, too, on the ceiling panels that the artist painted for the French capital's Opéra Garnier, his magnificent canvas “Commedia dell'arte” from Frankfurt's Alte Oper, and designs for the two giant panels that hang in the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, from one of which the exhibition title is taken.
Fragile sketches for some of the projects are enjoying rare public display; and a film created by Rudy with the Google Cultural Institute views the Opéra Garnier ceiling in high definition close-up, revealing details effectively invisible in the theatre: the minutiae of brushstrokes within floral bouquets, characterful expressions on the faces of stylised figures and the fading in and out of clear, brilliant colours – all accompanied by extracts from the 14 pieces of music that Chagall names as the images' inspiration. Eventually one seems almost to be hearing the painting itself.
Rudy, now 61, was a young musician of 23 seeking political asylum from the USSR in France when he first met Chagall. He was asked to perform in a concert marking the artist’s 90th birthday, and thereafter saw Chagall frequently during the last seven years of his life. "He always had a twinkle in his eye," he says. “And he used to say that the best things in life were the Bible, Mozart and love.”
Recently, Rudy devised an animation of the Opéra Garnier ceiling panels, The Sound of Colours, which is screened together with live piano music to match the images – a project that Rudy says came about after the artist's grand-daughter, Meret Meyer, saw a similar work he had created of Kandinsky images synchronised with Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and asked if he would do something similar for her grandfather's works. "I would never have dare touch them otherwise," says Rudy. In collaboration with the Philharmonie, this proved the starting point for Rudy to begin making his long-held dream of the exhibition a reality at last.
This show, and its companion exhibition Marc Chagall: Les Sources de la Musique (currently in Roubaix) will go to Montreal in 2017; next year part will be displayed at the Chagall Museum in Nice.
For Paris the timing may be coincidence, but could scarcely have been better. It's more than a feast for eyes and ears: the artist’s sense of joy proves a marvel for the rejuvenation of the spirit.
I was already planning to run this trailer for Mikhail Rudy's new animation and live music project The Sound of Colours before the Paris tragedy happened. He recently performed it at the Philharmonie in Paris, where a gigantic exhibition of Chagall's theatre work is in progress until the end of January.
The animation is of the Chagall murals in Paris's Opéra Garnier and while the music involved - mainly piano transcriptions of orchestral music - extends from Gluck's 'Dance of the Blessed Spirits' to the 'Liebestod' from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, the trailer shows us Ravel's La valse.
Ravel wrote La valse in 1919-1920 in the aftermath of World War I. It feels - whether or not he intended it to be read this way - as if he's portraying the old world of the 19th century, led by the emblematic Viennese waltz, whirling itself into a vortex, the apocalypse of World Wars I and II (he died in 1937, so did not live to see the latter; but I wonder sometimes whether in due course history will come to see the two as indivisible).
Mikhail Rudy is giving the UK premiere of Metamorphosis, the Quay Brothers' film visualisation of Kafka's famous story with live piano music by Janacek, as part of the Institut Français's long-weekend festival It's All About Piano. The concert/film is on 27 March at Kings Place (the other half will be Rudy's now-famous live music & film mix of animated Kandinsky and Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition). The festival itself promises to be a dazzling array of all things piano - artists appearing also include Peter Donohoe, François-Frédéric Guy, Daria van den Bercken, there's a masterclass with Angela Hewitt, a session on the inner workings of the instrument with Steinway master technician Ulrich Gerhartz, jazz, films, The Carnival of the Animals and, basically, you name it. Piano fans should be turning out in droves.
I took the opportunity to go and visit Stephen and Timothy Quay, the American-born identical twins who have taken the art of animation to places one might never have imagined it could go. My piece about them is somewhere in the Independent today, but here is the longer director's cut, with plenty of bonus material.
Here's a taster...
The Quay Brothers’ studio looks unassuming enough
from outside on its south London side-street. Go in, though, and it feels like
an evocation of an imaginary eastern Europe. One half is the workspace where
the twins film their animations. The rest resembles the second-hand bookshops you
might stumble across in old Krakow or Budapest, with a table for coffee and browsing
amid laden, dimly lit shelves. A wooden-cased clock abruptly grinds, then
chimes and keeps chiming. I could almost swear it strikes 13. Timothy Quay quips: “It only goes off when it hears
the word ‘Kafka’.”
The American-born identical twins Stephen
and Timothy Quay, 67, have long been associated with cutting-edge multi-media
projects, often mingling animations with music in a sphere beyond the
capabilities of words. Now their interpretation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis – the
story of an ordinary young man who finds himself transformed into an insect – is
due for its UK premiere on 27 March at Kings Place, in the Institut Français’s festival
It’s All About Piano. The Quays’ images meld with music by Leoš Janáček, Kafka’s
older contemporary and Czech compatriot, performed live with the film by the Russian
pianist Mikhail Rudy.
The Quays eschew contemporary computer
animation in favour of, among other things, handcrafted puppets. These adorn virtually
every surface in the studio, spooky little presences that might resemble
witches, demons and more. The brothers often make the puppets themselves: “The
heads might be carved out of balsa wood, with real eyes,” says Stephen, then clarifies,
“Real glass eyes. We put olive oil on
them so that when the lights are on them they gleam.”
Rudy’s own multi-media projects include a
theatrical adaptation of The Pianist (the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman) and
animations of Kandinsky and Chagall to which he plays live. He originally commissioned
Metamorphosis from the Quays for Paris’s Cité de la Musique. “We had six months
to do it, but 30 minutes of music would normally take us about a year,” says
Stephen. “We decided therefore on a mixture of live action and puppets, which
was something new for us.” From Rudy’s recording of Janáček’s piano music they
selected pieces to build the narrative. “In that sense we choreographed to what
he laid out for us,” says Timothy.
Shot in sepia and black and white, the film
is on the creepy side of sensitive – or the creepy-crawly side, since the Quays
have been relatively literal about the insect. “Kafka specified that the book
illustrator shouldn’t show the insect,” says Stephen, “but that’s literature. I
don’t think you could get away with that in film.
"We decided we'd make a kind of cockroach, because for us that would be the worst thing to be turned into. We grew up with them around in Philadelphia and it was upsetting when you saw one rambling over your utensils in a drawer or darting round the room or, even worse, just a huge one walking down the centre of a street. It's an extraordinarily adaptable insect - a creature like a rat - and we even read that in those days in New York if you opened up the back of the TV they'd be in there, eating the wires..."
Oof. Back to Kafka. “We’ve always adored Kafka’s work,” Stephen says. “At first with Metamorphosis we flinched, because everybody knows it. At
the same time, it was no problem to come to the story, and we knew Prague both
physically and in our imaginations, especially through the black and white
photos by Karel Plicka.”
Here they are at MOMA in New York, discussing their major retrospective exhibition there three years ago:
The Quays’ films are steeped in Eastern European
influence, where rich traditions can be found of both puppetry and animation;
they pay tribute to figures such as the Czech animator Jan Švankmejer orWalerian
Borowczyk
from Poland. One of
their great-grandmothers was from Upper Silesia: “The twins tendency comes from
her family,” they note. “In a sense you feel those ghosts to have manifested in
us.”
They grew up and initially studied in
Philadelphia, but after winning scholarships for postgraduate work at the Royal
College of Art in London, they found themselves “on the doorstep of Europe,”
and never looked back. “We got out of America – it couldn’t propose anything
for us,” says Stephen. “A friend said that if we could wash dishes in
Philadelphia, we could wash them in Amsterdam – and that was sufficient.”
In one celebrated collaboration (in 2000) the
BBC teamed them up with the giant of experimental electronic music, Karlheinz
Stockhausen, in a 20-minute piece for the Sound on Film series. “It felt like
being placed on the train tracks with something the size of Karlheinz rolling
down towards you,” the brothers recall. “But he was immensely tactful and very
open; he made no restrictions. At one point he asked us to add a touch of blue.
We didn’t.”
They recall that on first viewing their creation, Stockhausen was disturbed by the image of a woman seen only from the back, which they had chosen to represented a psychiatric patient from Heidelberg, whose letters to her husband had been so intensely written and written across that they became a "field of graphite". Stockhausen, they say, thought instead that the image represented his mother, who had been murdered by the Nazis. "He thought we were telepathic," the Quays remember. "We hadn't known anything about it."
Their next big project is with the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen
on his new work Theatre of the World, which will be premiered in Los Angeles in
May. Creating animation is a slow, detailed
business; the brothers are habitually in the studio before 5am. “We’re
exhausted by the end of the day,” they acknowledge, “but that’s what it takes.”
At first working together was a practical solution: “At art school, each guy
has a piece of paper and a pencil,” remarks Stephen, “but when someone gives
you money to make a film, they don’t fund two films, only one. Still, who
better to collaborate than two guys who can put their heads together, and their
hearts too?”
For the Quays’ audience, the results may be
startling, sometimes hair-raising, but always richly rewarding.
Puppet or dancer? Entertainer or symbol? If the latter, symbol of what? The premiere of the multi-media Petrushka in Wimbledon the other night, which I previewed here, was an evening to remember.
For pianist Mikhail Rudy it's the culmination of years of dreaming and planning. It began when he took Stravinsky's own Three Dances from Petrushka (piano arrangements made for Rubinstein, who never played them, apparently - too difficult, the story goes...) and set about transcribing the rest of the complete ballet score himself, with lurking visions of what could one day be done with it in terms of visual interpretation. Micha writes of a childhood impression of a puppet show:
"I could tell that behind the curtain there was an unsettling human
form, which made my heart thump. I called him The Great Puppeteer.
Invested with an extraordinary power, he was able to breathe life into
his creations, to make them dance and laugh, or fall in love, but, at
his least whim, he could melt them down at will into a spoon, like a
character from Peer Gynt, or cut off their heads as if they were poor
Petrushka. I was hypnotized by his limitless power, and I identified
with his creatures. Were my emotions real or imaginary? I'm still
looking for the answer."
"In the little theatre where the drama of Petrushka and the
Ballerina is played out, one piece of wood – the piano – brings to life
other pieces of wood, at the behest of a magician in a black suit.
Perhaps one should play Petrushka in a top hat, surrounded by white
rabbits and ladies sawn in half whose reflections keep on multiplying in
mirrors… The piano giving the illusion of an orchestra, which in turn
gives the illusion of marionettes, who in turn make us believe in human
feelings."
Now, realised as a multi-media film by IWMF director Anthony Wilkinson, with dancers from Rambert and Matthew Bourne's New Adventures and absolutely mesmerising puppetry from the Little Angel Theatre, the Petrushka project presents Micha with an almighty challenge: playing this plethora of colourful fairground activity, inner anguish, mechanistic irony and mystical symbolism is quite tough enough without having to coordinate one's every movement with a movie. The result? It works its magic from first snowflake-drenched moment to last.
The puppeteer sees his own impish, teasing, rebellious creation achieve acrobatic wonders, undergo very human suffering, and ultimately elude him altogether. The poor puppet's head is unscrewed, his sawdust emptied on the ground, his carcas left in a cardboard box - only to reappear beyond grasp, argumentative as ever, a spirit in his own right that can never be destroyed.
Micha is aligned at once with the puppeteer/magician, wearing the turquoise and gold cloak of the character throughout his performance (but no top hat, rabbits or sawn-in-two females...). The pianist is the puppeteer; the piano is the puppet. And it escapes. The spirit of art and of creativity is something we think is ours and that we can control. But maybe, instead, it is this spirit that comes to control us. It's more than we think it is: independent, elusive, immutable.
Despite a lifetime of familiarity with Petrushka's music, story, choreography and concept, this dazzling mingling of artforms in a quiet Wimbledon sidestreet was the first time the work truly made sense to me at its deeper level. Bravo Micha, bravo Anthony and bravi bravissimi Little Angels.
Last winter I took a very snowy trip to Paris to see the world premiere of pianist Mikhail Rudy's astonishing venture into musical animation. Having unearthed Kandinsky's original designs for a 1928 theatrical staging of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition - they were quietly awaiting attention deep within Paris's Pompidou Centre - Micha conceived a way to update this ever-musical artist's work for a modern context. Joining forces with an expert animation company, he set about breathing life into Kandinsky.
The result? Micha plays - necessarily in perfect coordination with the film - while Kandinsky dances. The animations don't overload the music with extraneous effect. Different images assemble, deconstruct, kaleidoscope; they're often playful, sometimes ironic, always cool and light in touch. Now Micha is on a world tour with the project: given the blessing of the Pompidou, which is putting out a DVD, he has just taken it to the US and Russia for the first time. And this week you can catch the UK premiere in the Turner Sims Hall in Southampton on Thursday night (17 Nov) and at the Wimbledon Festival on Saturday (19 Nov).
It's a new slant on Mussorgsky. But intriguingly enough, it is far from being the first time a pianist has done his own thing with this music.
Since Horowitz, who coined the term 'pianostrate', many performers have taken as read carte blanche to make their own additions to Mussorgsky's already dazzling score. Partly this is down to the popularity of Ravel's orchestration, which appeared to make people think there was more to the piece than its original composer had put into it himself. So pianists are divided, roughly, into those who stick to the text and those who...don't.
When I wrote a 'Building a Library' piece for BBC Music Magazine a few months ago looking at different interpretations of Pictures, it became clear that Sviatoslav Richter's legendary live recording from Sofia has its revered status for a good reason: sticking faithfully to the text, Richter put in all the colour, magnificence and orchestral effects the piece could hope for through his playing alone. Of the 'pianostrated' ones, Horowitz was incomparable, though Leif Ove Andsnes's Pictures Reframed proved fascinating in its own way. Mikhail Pletnev's, while evoking astonishing, multifaceted, eleventh-dimension sounds that you wouldn't imagine a piano could produce, was cold as ice. Vladimir Ovchinnikov's recording was a sure sign that this excellent former Leeds winner remains seriously underestimated today, and among historical recordings Lazar Berman's remains a personal favourite of mine. I listened to loads of good ones, a few less good, and a monstrous heap of CDs that were well-played, faithful renditions of the score without a hint of interest or originality about them.
Anyhow, that is by-the-by. If you're within batting distance of Wimbledon or Southampton, don't miss Micha's audio-visual treat this week.
The Metamorphosis is the book of the moment. I've been in Paris for a couple of days to do an interview and while there I also met up for tea and tarte aux framboises on the Place des Vosges with Mikhail Rudy (he of The Pianist and the animated Kandinsky Pictures at an Exhibition). His next collaborative project, due for premiere in Paris in March 2012, is based on...yes, The Metamorphosis, and will involve film projections by the Quay Brothers to a selection of Janacek piano music. Meanwhile he's bringing Pictures to the UK in November - performances in Southampton (17 Nov) and at the Wimbledon Festival (19 Nov). Well worth the train ride, imho.
Meanwhile, my interviewee - an intergalactic opera star - talked to me for two hours, then sent me home with a red nose. That is a first. I hasten to add that it's made of foam. It is now perching on my desk lamp, smiling at me (in a manner of speaking), while I think of his unforgettable performance as Werther earlier this year.
