A Wishlist of Upcoming Programmes from the JPO

After an enjoyable Summer Season 2019 at the Johannesburg Philharmonic, which ended this week, and which included some great works that it’s always a pleasure to hear, I’ve put together my wishlist of works that I’d like to hear from the JPO in future seasons. (The Winter Season 2019 programme hasn’t been announced yet, so I’m holding thumbs with one hand while typing this post with the other.) Of course, the orchestra faces many practical constraints, such as having to attract regular audiences who may want to stick to a traditional canon of classics, or the lack of funding required for commissions and rights, or funding to rehearse and perform a work with 100 extra players and rare or exotic instruments. My wishes are likely to remain unfulfilled, but I’d like to hear from other concertgoers if they have similar desires regarding particular works they’d like to hear live.

Bartók: Concerto for orchestra. I’ve been tracking the JPO’s programmes since their relaunch of regular seasons in 2017, and only one-tenth of the programmed works have been composed in the last 100 years. This work premiered 75 years ago, and it remains Bartók’s most popular piece.

Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring. This work is from more than 100 years ago (but only just), though what modern classical composition has been more influential? And what could be further from the so-far solely mellifluous 20th-century works already presented, like those of Gershwin, Ravel, and Bernstein?

Highlights of the JPO’s Summer Season 2019

The Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra’s Summer Season 2019 ended last night and, having especially enjoyed a few particular moments during the season, I’ve highlighted them here to preserve the happy memory of them. I attended the Thursday night concert of each week, and I list my highlights below in chronological order, from reading the season’s programme in January through the four weeks of concerts.

1. The inclusion of two works on this season’s programme written in the last 100 years (the Korngold violin concerto, and Ravel’s G major piano concerto).

2. An all-Mozart week, featuring the last and greatest of his symphonies.

Barry Jenkins’s Sharp and Tender “If Beale Street Could Talk”

I regret not having the time right now for more than these brief notes on Barry Jenkins’s new work, his adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk, which is a wondrous movie and a stirring, almost painful experience to watch. Jenkins’s last movie was Moonlight, which will never be forgotten by anyone who’s seen it. After seeing that movie and going back to the theatre a number of times for repeat viewings, I wrote that I was immensely encouraged as I anticipated Jenkins’s coming masterpieces; now, I can tell you that If Beale Street Could Talk seems like the fulfillment of an impossible promise. Jenkins’s style is now instantly recognisable, in the slow, glowing, sensual tactility of his images, and in the deeply resounding, sharp yet opaque emotional resonances they evoke.

I have another regret, which is that I didn’t get to read Baldwin’s novel before seeing the movie. As soon as I heard about its release last year, I went through every library and book shop in the area looking for it, but came up short. Now, besides Jenkins’s cinematic conception and execution, I have much to praise about how the story is set up and the characters placed to lay out particular ideas, and I don’t know where to give credit. I’ve read Baldwin’s essays with great admiration; what we call fervour in other authors is more like fire in Baldwin, and I still remember how right it felt when I read Harold Bloom calling him a direct descendant of the prophetic lineage of Jeremiah. Bloom also memorably wrote, “Unlike Emerson, Baldwin lacks the luxury of detachment, since he speaks … for a sexual minority within a racial minority, indeed for an aesthetic minority among black homosexuals. Ultimately, Baldwin’s dilemma … is that he’s a minority of one, a solitary voice breaking forth against himself from within himself.” By that description, and knowing what Jenkins wrought in Moonlight, it’s difficult to imagine an author whose material would be more apt for Jenkins, who also works to invert the difficulties of outwardness, and bring forth his, his story, and his characters’ full immense inwardness, in all of its vulnerability and splendour.

The Year in Movies – 2018

2018 was not an excellent year for this blog. Though I still saw many movies, and many brilliant movies, personal matters kept me from writing and posting reviews (which always takes longer than watching the movie itself). I underwent a handful of wondrous experiences, which I shared here, and a few more that I regret I was not able to share. I feel that I developed and learned more about the work of making movies and of discussing them, as well as about myself and how I view and appreciate them. I hope the chances will come for me to go further in detail in the coming year. A particular development for me personally was an increase in the number of television series I watched. I’ve hardly written anything about television at all, and before 2018 I generally found that work made for television did not meet my expectations of audiovisual artistic creation and revelation; however, my broadened horizons brought me to such wonders as Spike Lee’s miniseries remake of She’s Gotta Have It and Joe Swanberg’s miniseries Easy, which both expanded the form immensely in artistic consciousness and pure, joyous beauty. I look forward eagerly to finding more works like these and perhaps sharing them here with readers, together with the best cinematic works of each year.

Nobody reading this needs to be told that a selection of top movies is wholly subjective; a movie is good when you decide that it’s good, and the choice of the best movies out of any group is based entirely on your unique personal perceptions of each movie. Similarly, a movie becomes important not when it simply gets seen by many people, earns a lot of revenue, or is codified by a prestigious association, but when it makes a connection with the people who see it. The disappointment of the exclusion of Inxeba from the Academy Award nominations for Best Foreign Language Film was quickly eclipsed by viewers’ strong appreciation of the work, and even the controversy surrounding it did not match the enthusiasm of the movie’s supporters.

What to See This Holiday: Three Netflix Picks

Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman)

Available on Netflix.

Lazing on Brooklyn’s beaches, trawling the borough for weed, snagging clandestine hook-ups, the protagonist of Eliza Hittman’s movie Beach Rats, Frankie (Harris Dickson), is an exemplary shirker. Beach Rats is a stunning work of aimlessness and languor; the heat of the summer sun, and the vape and marijuana smoke add a haze to Hittman’s already indolent and largely wordless images. Normally I’m annoyed by or resistant to art-house films in which characters offer many meaningful looks but share few of their feelings, ideas, queries, and concerns; it often seems evasive, disdainful, or unimaginative on the part of the filmmakers. But the lack of talk between Hittman’s characters is a striking artistic depiction of the state of their intellectual and emotional lives: they have no expressive outlets, no communicative means at all of expression; they suppress true emotions and any hint of vulnerability; they don’t indulge aspirations or plans for the future, reflect, dream, visualise, contemplate; the silencing of their inner lives is a deliberately enacted by them, and is memorably evoked by Hittman.

And Frankie encounters distinct difficulties from this silencing. Whatever troubles of identity the other guys are evading, Frankie faces the added dimension of sexual orientation and identity: He chats with men via sex webcam sites and starts to meet up with them to have sex with them, but, as he informs one of his prospective hook-ups, he doesn’t really think of himself as gay. He also unenthusiastically starts up a romantic relationship with a girl named Simone (Madeline Weinstein). He avoids the thought of anything gay altogether, just as he avoids thinking of himself at all, and avoids talking about anything substantial with his family or his smoking companions (he asserts more than once that they’re not his friends). Hittman deftly suggests Frankie’s sensitivity and empathy, as he apologises to Simone after insulting her, and tries to hide emotional pain when considering his family’s suffering (his father is very sick with cancer). But, when given any opportunity arises to deal with his problems, such as when his mother approaches him, Frankie hardens his heart and erects an impenetrable wall of invulnerability. Hittman’s images inhere intimacy, energy, and density where her characters elude these qualities; the tension tightens and relaxes with the unease of youthful anxieties, and she suggests some of the disastrous consequences that such unease may lead to.

What to See This Holiday: “I Am Not a Witch”

I Am Not a Witch is the debut feature film of the filmmaker Rungano Nyoni. Nyoni was born in Zambia and moved to the UK with her family when she was nine years old. Her short films made after she graduated from the University of London earned her a formidable reputation, and this new feature has launched a promising international career in feature filmmaking, having played at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival (in the Directors’ Fortnight), winning Nyoni a BAFTA, and garnering a number of prizes at the British Independent Film Awards. I give this background merely because I’m so pleased to report the successes of an African emigrant in the art-house filmmaking world, and because I derive great pleasure from anticipating the work to come from young artists whose early works are already so strong.

I Am Not a Witch, which is mostly in Nyanja, with English subtitles, follows an eight-year-old girl (Maggie Mulubwa) who first goes without a name and is later named Shula (“uprooted” in Nyanja), and who is accused by some of the angry villagers around her of witchcraft. Shula is totally alone, afraid, and wholly uncertain of herself, and does not deny the villagers’ accusations, opening her to exploitation by local leaders who claim to protect witches. Shula is taken by the government official Mr Banda (Henry Phiri) to a camp for witches, where other accused women are kept practically as slave labourers and tourist attractions. A witch-doctor judges whether or not they really are witches (note that when a man can show capabilities of witchcraft, he enjoys a position of power) and, if they are, they’re fitted with harnesses to which ribbons are tied, keeping them within a tight radius around the camp’s truck that transports them from their beds to wherever the government requires them to be. Shula is singled out for witch-related work by the government: She divines guilty culprits from a line-up of criminal suspects and brings rain to the fields of farmers who pay her handlers, and is rewarded with favours such as biscuits and gin. With the help of Mr Banda’s wife, she grows in self-assurance, but also gains awareness of the grim situation she’s in and the abusive systems of power that brought her there.

What to See This Holiday: “Paris is Burning”

Available on Netflix and on DVD.

Fans of the reality competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race would do well to learn about the roots of the drag culture represented by the series, and perhaps the preeminent audiovisual guide to that culture’s development is the documentary Paris is Burning, by Jennie Livingstone. In fact, it comes not from the roots of the culture, but was filmed and released at what many saw as the end of the Golden Age of New York City drag balls, in the late 1980s. Livingstone films some of these drag balls, and interviews members of the black, Latino, gay, and transgender communities of New York City who participate in them.

Livingstone met a group of young gay men in Manhattan while she was a film student at New York University, who introduced her to the drag ball culture. She met the dancer Willi Ninja, who gave her an education in drag competitions and the peculiar phenomenon of “voguing,” of which he offers an extended explanation onscreen in Paris is Burning. Ninja subsequently became an important figure in popular music and dance, and was crucial to introducing voguing to the mainstream culture.

Livingstone also interviews a number of prominent drag queens onscreen, who explain various aspects of drag culture, as well as a few young gay and transgender people, who relay their experiences as queer and vulnerable people in a tough, brutal city. Of particular interest to Livingstone is the young trans woman Venus Xtravaganza, who was a teenager when she was first interviewed by Livingstone.

A Highlight of 2018: “Support the Girls”

If I post only one more review this year, I want it to be one that draws readers’ attention to one of the highlights of my movie-going year. Andrew Bujalski’s new feature film, Support the Girls, may, at first glance, seem an unlikely highlight, because the style is so understated and muted, but the movie in fact packs powerful emotion and such brilliant, original insights to its story that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days after each of the couple of times that I saw it.

Support the Girls all takes place in one day, following the activities of Lisa (Regina Hall), the manager of a Hooters-like sports bar called Double Whammies, serving, in her words, “boobs, brews, and big screens”. Her primary concern is the wellbeing of her staff, the tightly-clothed waitresses of Double Whammies, and she doesn’t hesitate to put a leering or loud-mouthed customer in his place when one of her girls is disrespected.

The JPO’s Splendid Evening with Yasuo Shinozaki

This review was originally posted on the Artslink website.

The trouble with our local symphonic music scene is not that we lack talented musicians or enthusiastic listeners, but that the resources of time and money are so tight that a performance under any particular conductor can only be as good as the conductor is skilled in getting a lot of heavy work done in short bursts of rehearsal time. It was a great pleasure at the JPO’s concert this past Thursday to find that the Japanese conductor Yasuo Shinozaki has exactly the right kinds of skills to get the job done.

From the first moments of the overture by Mendelssohn, Shinozaki established a strong presence and authority. He gave a very clear, very precise beat, and the orchestra played with a wonderfully unified rhythmic precision. There were moments throughout the evening when the string section sounded like one single mammoth instrument, not only nearly perfectly synchronised in their attack and rhythms but also unified in their articulation, phrasing, and tone.

Fury and ecstasy at the JPO & KZNPO joint concert

This article was originally posted on the Artslink website.

An orchestra’s gala concert is a culturally important event, but its artistic significance is always a gamble. Daring originality often yields to respectability, and listeners hear a competent performance rather than an inspiring one. But no such problem beset Thursday night’s Johannesburg Philharmonic concert, which commemorated the centenary of Albertina Sisulu. The American conductor William Eddins and the additional forces of the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra exalted concertgoers’ experiences far beyond expectations. The audience’s mood rose very quickly in the evening from delighted anticipation to genuine, ecstatic joy.

The tone was set well by the welcoming dignitaries. The Chair of the KZNPO Board, Saki Makozoma, welcomed concertgoers and visitors from the Sisulu family and foundations, including Max and Elinor Sisulu. The Chair of the JPO Board, retired Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke, spoke tenderly about Albertina Sisulu, her place in the history of South Africa, and his own connection to that history. Minister Lindiwe Sisulu spoke after the intermission about her mother’s joy in music and introduced the commemorative work commissioned for her centenary, MaSisulu Sinfonia, by the South African composer Bongani Ndoda-Breen.

Power and splendour at the UP Music Festival

This article was originally posted on the Artslink website.

At a time when diplomatic relations around the world seem at risk, the visit of a foreign artistic group to our country for a goodwill tour of concerts is particularly welcome; even more so when that group is a rapidly rising part of its country’s – and the world’s – artistic pantheon.

It has been reported that the Minnesota Orchestra is the very first full American symphony orchestra to perform in South Africa. As unlikely as that sounds, their performance at the University of Pretoria on Thursday, 16 August, as part of the music department’s annual music festival, evaporated any considerations of first-time feats and brought our attention solely to artistic accomplishments.

After a spirited playing of both the South African and United States national anthems, the Minnesota Orchestra music director and Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä launched into the tone poem En saga by Sibelius, a composer whose work he’s become lauded in America for performing with this orchestra – and it turns out that that laud is entirely justified.