A Night of Dance and Drama at the JPO

Due to a number of conflicts, I didn’t buy a subscription for the Johannesburg Philharmonic’s Summer Season 2020. But I did decide to go to the last week, conducted by Daniel Boico, as a birthday gift to myself, and for the experience of two works that I love and was keen to hear again. It turned out to be just about the most rewarding decision I’ve made so far this year, and one of the most heartening experiences I’ve ever had at a classical music concert.

The programme began with Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, in E-flat, the one nicknamed “The Emperor Concerto.” Larger and louder than Beethoven’s four previous piano concerti (or any other concerto that came before), this work often sounds like a piece for two orchestras, one of them played in a reduction by a single, heroic pianist. Last night, that pianist was Jan Jiracek von Arnim, a tall, thin, bespectacled teacher from Vienna, with an air of confidence and comfort that he was equal to the challenge.

The Metropolitan Opera’s Vital “Porgy and Bess”

As America was establishing itself as a cultural power, and setting up its institutions to garrison that culture, it conspicuously and contemptibly omitted much of black American culture and history from that sanctum. America’s hallowed depictions of itself in claimants to the Great American Novel and the Hollywood studio classics were not given to portray any African-American perspective, nor to consider the influences drawn from African-American culture or the significance of black history. George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is an enduringly great opera for a number of reasons, and one reason brazenly realised in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production is that it takes black history as American history itself, and it depicts the expressive and exuberant aspects of African-American life as the essence of America’s brash, new, singularly energetic place in world culture.

The most obvious feature of Gershwin’s musical style is the common attribute of American culture in general: It blends a variety of contrasting styles and origins, from diverse cultural origins, and arrives at something boldly new and flavoursome. Gershwin’s particular brand of the new musical styles was one that overtly paid respect to and acknowledged its roots in African-American culture. Taking a leaf from Dvořák’s bountiful and neatly compiled book, Gershwin saw that the way forward for music in America would come out of black people’s music, and he developed his personal artistic voice founded on that idea.

My Oscar Ballot – 2020

The best thing about the 92nd Academy Awards is how early in the year everything is happening: from the Golden Globes on 5 January to the Oscars on 10 February, a five-week awards season is the shortest in living memory, and the most gratifying in an age where the Oscars clutch furiously with their Gollum-arms at a veneer of prestige and relevance.

The worst thing about the Academy Awards is to mistake their importance. They have practical significance, in boosting the careers of certain actors, craftspeople, and other working celebrities, but they no longer reflect what the rest of the world is interested in watching nor any kind of majority consensus in what constitutes the best being made in movies today.

The Year in Movies – 2019

The big story in movie distribution over the past decade is how Netflix, Showmax, and other streaming services have made it easier for us to watch, rewatch, discover, and scrutinise many more movies, sooner and more frequently. Not only have they been buying and streaming various independent movies that we would not otherwise have seen in South Africa, but they’re producing their own independent content and showing us that as well, and, as with productions made by any studio or independent house, there’s the chance of great works coming out of this as well.

Each year, I split my list into movies that were distributed theatrically in South Africa and those that weren’t. Every year, some of the best movies are ones that most moviegoers have never heard of because they weren’t bought by Ster Kinekor or NuMetro and weren’t shown at shopping mall cinema complexes, and South African media outlets focus nearly exclusively — with a few notable exceptions — on movies that are theatrically distributed. This is where Netflix and Showmax (and a few more sources, some of less reliable legitimacy) fill in important gaps. Steven Soderbergh hit the point exactly when he said that he wanted his new film High Flying Bird to be seen by everyone everywhere, at the same time. High Flying Bird — one of the best movies not just of 2019, but of this entire decade — was indeed available to all of South Africa early in the year on Netflix, but most people never heard of it, because no newspaper or major website reviewed it. Movie theatres are already feeling the adverse effects of audiences that stay home to stream movies, and soon media outlets will too, for ignoring or marginalising a growing and vital part of the common moviegoing experience.

The Best of the Decade: 2010 to 2019

To Start Off With ...

Above my Top Ten, I’m listing the entire output of Terrence Malick from 2010 to 2017, which is undoubtedly my favourite cinematic work from this decade. I rewatched each of these movies, trying to settle on one to place at the top of my list, but Malick’s body of work amounts to a greater achievement than the sum of its parts, and the ideas, emotions, images, and stories that flow through each of them form threads that can start in one movie and run through another.

The Tree of Life is the movie that awakened me to the full possibilities of movies, of how great thought and feeling can be conveyed through sounds and images, and of how deeply and intimately I could be moved by any movie. Malick searches for and devises new ways of looking at every subject (and every object), and each image in his movies packs a concentration of meaning, a focus on the essence and potential of each living thing and the matter that surrounds it, and an abiding sense of the eternal and the cosmic scheme into which it fits. I look at my own world differently now after having seen through Malick’s lens, and it’s a wondrous transformation.

My Wishlist for JPO Programmes

After being thrilled to see the lineup for this past JPO Spring Season, I have a wishlist of pieces I would still like to see appearing on future JPO programmes. As an ardent supporter of classical music (a term that needs to be retired but can’t be supplanted), I faithfully attend all its concerts with any programmes it puts up. But, ultimately, what I want from an evening with a symphony orchestra is the kind of inimitable experience that draws people to live performances of any kind: sensitive, vibrant, revelatory renditions of classics, as well as exposure to the less familiar.

The JPO’s primary function is to provide good performances of works in the orchestral repertory. But there’s an important secondary, curatorial function to any symphonic orchestra; the works that are chosen to be played are the works that are implicitly designated as important to the culture, the ones that are chosen to last. The canon is built by the decisions of what to perform, as well as by what to leave out.

For too many people, the “classical” in classical music means definitive, or etched in stone. A great orchestral performance can prove that classical also means radical: the works that have survived the ages can still yield new experiences, new visions, new worlds of feeling, and the works of today that look forward and open up music’s paths into the future yield nothing but the new.

James Gray’s Sublime “Ad Astra”

I don’t know a contemporary filmmaker who communicates such fervent emotions so immediately across the screen as James Gray. He has already made one of this decade’s most passionate melodramas in The Immigrant (from 2014, starring Marion Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix), and a stirring neo-classical adventure tale about ardent dedication to a noble cause, in The Lost City of Z. To briefly describe the experience of watching his new movie, Ad Astra, which is currently in release: I was held in rapt fascination, and profoundly moved. It’s the most beautiful movie I’ve seen this year, and to think about it afterwards, with wonder and appreciation, heartens me, even when some of my friends who saw it with me didn’t seem to enjoy it much at all.

That Gray makes movies of such deep-seated emotions, that express ideas and feelings with so authentic and idiosyncratic a style, is what makes his cinema beautiful. His images, while richly textured, and shot by Hoyte van Hoytema (who previously shot Interstellar) with purpose, tenderness, and a concentrated focus, are muted; they point to deep wells of emotion, rather than stoking them. The intense experience of a character onscreen is finely sketched with exquisite attention to suggestive and surprising details. The point is to preserve and exalt the purity of the emotions felt, not to gratuitously stimulate them in the audience. Gray eludes the striking and the picturesque, for images of sheer sublimity.

“The Laundromat” is a Lesser Success by Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh emerged from a short-lived “retirement” with the trio Logan Lucky, Unsane, and High Flying Bird — a one-two-three of upward leaps for an already formidable filmmaker. That his next movie, The Laundromat (distributed by Netflix), is a lesser work will not seriously blight his career. Nor is it as bad as many reviewers would have you think. (High Flying Bird and Logan Lucky are also available to stream, as well as his earlier success Side Effects.)

What works is the movie’s core, the main plot and the host of surrounding subplots. What I don’t enjoy is what reviewers have zeroed in on — the unnecessary asides by Gary Oldman and Antonia Banderas, addressing the camera directly with explanations of the financial schemes they employ, à la The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short. The many strands of the story are like the web of real-life people implicated in the Panama Papers scandal, one of the largest data leaks in history and the true story on which the movie is based. Well, it’s the factual event on which the movie is based. I’m not sure how many of the plot elements are from actual real-life stories; obviously Oldman and Banderas’s characters, Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca, are the real-life partners of the law firm Mossack-Fonseca whose data was leaked. But I haven’t checked up on whether anything else in the movie is based on anything real, and it doesn’t matter either to the movie or to its real-life implications.

The Pleasures and Limits of “Parasite”

Parasite arrived in South African theatres with a strong reputational backing. It won the Palme d’Or, the highest honour at the Cannes Film Festival, becoming the first Korean film to do so. It’s grossed over $100 million (in comparison, Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman made $93 million worldwide last year). And, not insignificantly, Leon van Nierop has been advocating passionately for the movie for weeks, encouraging viewers to see it once, and once again while it’s still in theatres.

It’s definitely an entertaining movie, and, if it were in English, there’d be very little about it that would be niche or unappealing to a mass audience. In fact, my friends and I went to see it at the upstairs Ster Kinekor movies at Brooklyn Mall, not at Cinema Nouveau, where it was expected to play. The movie is in Korean throughout, with English subtitles, and is, I think, every bit as enjoyable to an English-speaking audience as to a Korean one.

A Very Exciting JPO Spring Season 2019

The Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra has announced its programme for the Spring Season 2019 and I’m delighted to see some of the works that are coming up. I unfortunately missed the last season, due to a number of inescapable priorities, but I’m too excited to miss a single one of the upcoming concerts for the rest of the year.

In the first week, selections from Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess have been programmed; the accomplished Cape Tonian soprano Linda Nteleza and the veritable international star baritone Musa Ngqungwana will be singing solo parts. Porgy and Bess resides in the very top tier of operas composed in modern times — in any time, in fact — and has also risen to eminence as one of the most popular contemporary musical theatre showcases. It’s a prime example of great, ground-breaking art that also has mass appeal, and it’s exactly the right vein for the JPO to strike. The second half of the week’s programme is just as exciting: we’ll hear the First Symphony of Gustav Mahler, a staple composer in the programmes of overseas orchestras, whose work the JPO has never played before. Mahler was no less a genius than Gershwin; it’s a spectacular finish to a promising evening. The conductor will be Wolfram Christ, a longtime principal violist in the Berlin Philharmonic.

What’s Good and Bad About “Big Little Lies”

Available on Showmax.

I confess that I don't love the HBO series Big Little Lies, though I watch it with fascination, and find it really interesting and somewhat entertaining. Much of what there is in the show that I don’t like comes from television conventions. The story is spun out in ways that are designed to luringly drip information onto viewers just too slowly for us to stop watching, and the emotional tension is kindled misleadingly until the conclusion reveals that the point of the suspense doesn’t even matter to the story. The approach to and execution of the plot’s structure are dismayingly manipulative and overdetermined. Conversations are cut off; the characters get many good chances to hurl their feelings and barbed comments at one another, but conversations only go so far and characters exist only so deep as the plot requires, and don’t develop into a fuller story lived out by fuller people.

What I do like about it are unique and specific to the show, and come to the fore in Season 2, which, as my viewing companion Sizo agrees, is much better than the first season. Season 1 depended on flashbacks and artificially stoked suspense and intrigue to deliver viewers from the story’s beginning to its tragic (yet supposedly cathartic) end. Season 2 jumps off of that, and observes the characters as they navigate the aftermath of the homicide that closed Season 1. There’s no longer a specific end point to which we’re being ushered, and (again, as Sizo perceptively pointed out) the development of the characters is now the very substance of the plot. What they think and feel, and what it leads them to say and do, is what takes the story from the start to end of each episode.