Of the Aka Pygmies, of the elephant orchestra in Bangkok, and of the giant xylophones of Uganda, each of which consists of 22 logs laid across two larger logs and beaten by six men in strict time. Hitting a log with a smaller piece of wood must be one of the earliest forms of music-making, but it’s also one of the most enduring. Children and animals can do it, but it can also lead to music of the most intellectually demanding kind
Watching Ttukunak, I am put in mind of many things. The girls enter barefoot in white shifts, and with a stick in each hand begin to belabour the planks – delicately at first, but with great rapidity, so that a complex rhythmical edifice emerges: since the planks are of unequal length, we get melody as well. The girls move round, sometimes interlacing their arms or looking into each other’s eyes and grinning; it’s by turns a duet and a duel, but what their sticks do is pure ballet. Then they move to the slates, from which they draw warmer, sweeter sounds; finally they move over to metal, which sounds by turns like cow-bells, church bells, and a gamelan.There’s something Japanese about their delicate precision, but also a bucolic gutsiness: no one has ever seen anything like it, and everyone responds rapturously.After which Radio Tarifa prove an anticlimax.
These rag-tag roots pioneers have made a brilliant success of Arabised flamenco, as their CD Fiebre makes clear. Their first incarnation was as a studio ensemble, but over the years they’ve gradually roughened up their act, and given it high-octane energy for the stage. Now they whip up a storm which doesn’t abate till they depart, and the audience clap and sing along.Nice to see folk instruments given their moment in the limelight, and pleasant to be reminded how neatly Arabic and medieval European sounds can meld, but for music you’re better off with the record.. Alexander Zemlinsky was Schoenberg’s teacher, friend and brother-in-law, but musically he was closer to Mahler and Richard Strauss Yet he was no mere late-romantic imitator. He found his own voice, and nowhere with more clarity and assurance than in his opera The Dwarf, with which Opera North kicks off its innovative season of eight short operas. For her 18th birthday, the Infanta is presented with a dwarf by the Sultan of Turkey. She and her heartless companions regard him as a mere toy, but he knows nothing of his ugliness, and falls in love with the princess.
When he finally uncovers the truth about himself, he dies of a broken heart. The Infanta is unmoved.Out of this disturbing story of cruelty and innocence, Zemlinsky fashioned a moving masterpiece, with a particularly rewarding central role. But how is the opera to be staged? The sight of the privileged mocking physical deformity would be hard to take, however true to history it might be. The director David Pountney makes no attempt to recreate that spectacle Paul Nilon comes on in white tie and tails He might be a waiter, or a singer. The key is that he has forgotten, or never known, how insignificant he is in relation to a princess The discovery of this destroys him.
Nilon gets well inside the part, and sings it with conviction, even if his acting is sometimes clumsy. Graeme Broadbent is a suitably camp court chamberlain, and Majella Cullagh brings warmth to Ghita, the one sympathetic figure in the royal entourage. Stefanie Krahnenfeld well conveys the Infanta’s petulance and frivolity, but Pountney’s staging shows a rather uncertain touch, the exaggerations of the court and its costumes taking too much attention away from the tragedy being acted out at its core.The Spanish theme was sustained with Manuel de Falla’s La Vida Breve, given an intensely powerful and brilliantly detailed production by Christopher Alden. Its story is simple enough, and not so far from that of The Dwarf. Salud lives through her love of Paco, but he is two-timing her, and is about to marry the rich girl, Carmela. Salud confronts them at their wedding and falls dead before them Like the Dwarf’s, her death seems to have no physical cause.
