BOOKS & ARTS
Stones to live in exile from the Inland Rev-
enue in the south of France. Why, you might
ask, were the six founding members of the
Common Market so keen to have us join?
A very different approach to our nation-
al history could be heard in Roderick Wil-
liams’s quiet, reflective series for Radio 4,
A Singer’s Guide to Britain (produced by
Chris Taylor). Williams, a professional bar-
itone, wanted to find out how songs could
be used to tell our island story, taking us on
a journey through traditional songs of the
sea, Robert Burns, Welsh-language ballads,
Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp. Per-
haps by accident or design his guests on the
first programme were mostly women, Eddie
Reader, Georgia Ruth and Fay Hield, giv-
ing his programme a very different sound
from the high-octane brashness we heard on
Radio 2. It was as if the two programmes by
chance illustrated just how divided we have
become in how we want to be seen — bold,
provocative, divided, Britannia as a brassy,
belting hussy; or cool, calm, reflective, Bri-
tannia as a bell-like songstress singing her
way to harmony.
Billy Bragg recalled how, at primary
school 50 years ago, he was taught songs
like ‘Hearts of Oak’ and ‘Men of Harlech’,
long lost from the curriculum. Yet songs
can create a sense of belonging, to a place
but much more to a shared past and shared
future. Eddie Reader, who has reinterpreted
Burns’s ‘My love is like a red, red rose’, talks
about songs as a chain, reaching back 200 or
more years and picking up power along the
way, ‘like a telephone line into the past and
all the way back to where we are now’. Such
songs, echoes Williams, are an aural embodi-
ment of ourselves, our spirit, history brought
to life, not merely reaching back to the past
but stretching forward into the future; a
force for cohesion.
Alan Johnson, one of Littlejohn’s guests,
revealed that he had been woken up polit-
ically when he was 14 by reading George
Orwell. Open Country on Saturday morn-
ing (Radio 4) took us to Jura where 70
years ago Orwell (known on the island as
Mr Blair) finished writing his dystopian fic-
tion Nineteen Eighty-Four. Perhaps he was
influenced by the gloomy grey slate screes
of the infamous Paps of Jura, shrouded
in mist. Barnhill, where he stayed, was an
isolated house at the far end of the island
and very remote with no running water, no
electricity, only the open fire as protection
against the howling winds blowing in across
the sea, ‘extremely ungetatable’, wrote
Orwell. Helen Mark talked to a woman
whose uncle used to own the shop and she
recalls how she was asked to ‘make up mes-
sages for Blair of Barnhill’.
Are we bold, brassy, belting
Britannia or cool, calm,
reflective Britannia?Music
Golden threads
Richard Bratby
Das Rheingold
Arcola Theatre, until 10 AugustLos Angeles Philharmonic/
Dudamel/Wang
Usher Hall, EdinburghWhen it comes to the opening of Wagner’s
Das Rheingold, Mark Twain probably put it
as well as anyone: ‘Out of darkness and dis-
tance and mystery soft rich notes rose upon
the stillness, and from his grave the dead
magician began to weave his spells about his
disciples and steep their souls in his enchant-
ments.’ As at Bayreuth, so in Dalston. At
the start of Julia Burbach’s production for
Grimeborn, a man stumbles into a back
alley and, rummaging through discarded
boxes, finds a pair of headphones. And there
it is: that deep, eternal E flat. Don’t some
people say they can hear an all-pervading
global hum? Wagner’s world is turning, and
for good or for evil the old sorcerer is weav-
ing his spell again.
Staging any part of the Ring cycle in the
handkerchief-sized Arcola Theatre might
sound like a stretch, but Wagner handles
the hard bit, and even in Jonathan Dove’s
reduced 18-piece orchestration (conducted
with quiet command by Peter Selwyn), he
can move universes with the shift of a har-
mony. Burbach and her designer Bettina
John take care of the rest. The idea of Alber-
ich as a man on the run from reality, pulled
into a fantastic and brutal alternative world,
is beguiling. Burbach uses Dove’s numer-
ous cuts and omissions to shape a counter-
intuitive vision of Wagner’s world, in which
Alberich’s (Seth Carico) mental-health
issues (it’s never clear whether his Nibelung
slaves are anything more than a set of toy
action figures) are a matter for more gen-
uine sympathy than the gods’ household
squabbles. A family of espresso-sipping gen-
trifiers, Burbach’s deities are led by a Wotan
(Paul Carey Jones), whose bronzed nobility
of tone is undercut by his lust for the Ring,
and whose treatment of Alberich, in league
with Philip Sheffield’s rasping, red-trou-
sered Loge, is shockingly brutal.
Anyway, this all happens just inches away
from you, with absolutely no vocal or dra-
matic compromise. Wagnerian voices of the
power and eloquence of Gareth BrynmorJohn (Donner) and Andrew Tipple (a des-
perately touching Fasolt) give this domes-
tic drama an overwhelming ferocity. Only
Longborough offers Wagner that invades
your personal space quite this thrillingly, and
even there you wouldn’t quite manage to see
Marianne Vidal’s glamourpuss Fricka quiet-
ly hyperventilating, or the play of fear and
shame on Freia’s (Kiandra Howarth) face as
her menfolk load her into another cardboard
box. As in all the best Rheingolds, Carico’s
Alberich is a vocal match for Wotan, and it’s
hard to damn any character as wholly malign
when the pain in their eyes is so visible.
It’s as bracing a take on Rheingold as
you’ll see; a provocative and intelligent
attempt to engage with the piece as an inde-
pendent drama, and magnificently sung.
Dove eliminates altogether the character
of Mime, Alberich’s brutalised victim. This,
and only this, makes a sympathetic Alber-
ich credible, and the drama ends with him
wretched and alone, having been worked
over by a bunch of particularly hateful yup-
pies. Fair enough, if the story is to go no
further. But Wagner is planning on going
further. This isn’t Brecht: music and words
are dense with intimations of future com-
plexity, good as well as evil, before the inevi-
table end. Still, why bother with Wagner atall, unless his floodtide of emotion carries
the mind into unexpected and troubling
places? I suspect the Master would have
acknowledged (though not endorsed) both
the seriousness and the effrontery of this
counterfactual Rheingold.
Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Ange-
les Philharmonic descended on Edinburgh
with a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth
Symphony that was so gorgeously played,
and so breathlessly, ardently lyrical that
a British listener, with their eyes closed and
the standard set of prejudices (and prejudic-
es about Dudamel are as entrenched as they
come), would have sworn they were listen-
ing to one of the so-called ‘Big Five’ orches-
tras from the other side of the USA. As for
John Adams’s new piano concerto Must
the Devil have All the Good Tunes? — well,
over three linked movements Adams does
his usual thing: a deftly orchestrated urban
nocturne, peppered with references to mid-
century pop culture.
Yuja Wang rode Adams’s chugging solo
part with diamond-toothed swagger, before
getting down to real business with three
encores. Tea for Two melted in the mouth.
Strauss’s Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka swirled
glittering starbursts of tone at the edge
both of sonority and of physical possibil-
ity. Tchaikovsky’s Danse des petits cygnes
tiptoed through the air and dissolved with
a throwaway shrug. This must be how audi-Classical music is the only branch
of showbiz where ‘crowd-pleasing’
is a pejorative termThe ferry only comes three times a week;
there’s only one road through the island.
Islanders have to be self-reliant. If some-
thing breaks they have to find their own way
of mending it. Not a bad philosophy to live
by in these times.