The 2014 Oxford Lieder Festival is drawing to a close, having presented this year’s audiences with the ‘The Schubert Project’: all of Schubert’s songs (over 600) have been performed over the last three weeks by such internationally renowned artists as The Schubert Ensemble, Imogen Cooper, and Bengt Forsberg.

The Doric String Quartet (violins: Alex Redington and Jonathan Stone, viola: Hélène Clément, cello: John Myerscough) have won several prizes and have a busy international concert schedule. They were joined for this concert by cellist Bartholomew LaFollette, whose solo performances in recital and concerto settings have received great critical acclaim.

Following the previous evening’s performance of the ‘Death and the Maiden’  (D.810) the quartet returned to the historic Holywell Music Room for Schubert’s last chamber work: the String Quintet in C Major, D.956. The dynamic between the first and second cellists was notable for its energy and this remained exciting throughout the performance. 

Some of the concert’s most striking moments were the frequent passages where two instruments play in dialogue. This was particularly the case with the cellists, whose low-register restless figures underpinned the higher voices with striking intensity; they played their gentle duet in the first movement with lyrical, well-blended tones. When the two violins took over this theme, they retained the rich tone and mirrored their perfect balance in the higher register.

The gentle opening of the Adagio was well-paced and the gradual harmonic shifts in the opening chords were subtly handled by the inner parts. This was flanked by sweetly played, but never indulgent, melodic interjections from first violinist Redington, and resounding, articulate pizzicati from LaFollette.

Schubert’s quintet is full of contrasts — the inner movements in particular have strikingly different central episodes characteristic of his later style. The turbulent centre of the Adagio was gripping, with Redington and Mysercough rhythmically exact and matching in volume and intensity. The low cello rumblings of LaFollette and the rhythmic urgency in the inner parts afforded this ‘volcanic’ episode the energy it deserves. 

The Scherzo was executed at a fast tempo, and the smiles of the quintet suggest they were enjoying it as much as the audience was! The music was allowed able to speak for itself — Clément and LaFollette gave their duet passages time to breathe, and the different voicings of the closing passage were brought out with subtle clarity.

Aside from one moment in the Finale where the highly technical violin figures seemed on the verge of derailment, the fast tempo paid off and the energy of the performance shone through. The final minute was perfectly judged and very exciting, and the closing figures were appropriately dramatic. The quintet was received extremely well by its audience, and the performance was a perfect end to an excellent season of chamber music at the Oxford Lieder Festival.

★★★★☆

Four stars

Walking in to see Esarhaddon: The Substitute King, I was not sure what to expect, but was immediately struck by the attention to detail of the set – rich red velvets, purple and gold embossed thrones, and a black and gold starry backdrop created a very regal atmosphere. 

As the action commenced, I was drawn in by the formal metric structure. This facet of the play is explained by writer Winsom’s immaculate attention to detail in following the style of her tablet sources when composing the play. Indeed, immaculate attention is visible across the board – the props fit perfectly with the set design and the costume design is impeccable – right down to the queen’s regal hair.

The action starts off a little slow, but soon builds to a fevered momentum. The formal metre of the speech meshes with the grandeur of the set impressively, and even if the lengthier soliloquies felt at times a little too lengthy, they undeniably enhanced the chronicling of Esarhaddon’s pain as his court and kingdom crumble around him. This production is an undeniably powerful rendering of the tormented psyche – at the most intense and disconcerting moments in the drama, the audience is, tellingly, utterly silent.

The clever use of the oft-eerie (and thoroughly well-acted) Chorus adds to the sense that this play could have come straight out of the classical canon rather than being so spectacularly new. The Chorus are perfectly in sync. The astronomer’s highly formal, possibly affected drawl might reminds one of the wise old baboon in The Lion King – but it fits. All the actors are convincing, strong performers, and their on-point characterisation of their individual roles is made all the more commendable in light of the two week rehearsal schedule they were working to. Almost every character is subject to a couple of small verbal stumbles in the first half – crucially, not one person lets this phase them in the slightest, and it does not disrupt the dialogue.

Particularly powerful were the performances from Thomas Lodge as Esarhaddon himself, Rebecca Hannon as Naqia and Sarah Wright as the Exorcist. Lodge’s king acts out Esarhaddon’s deterioration impeccably convincingly and movingly, his voice cracking and breaking at moments of insurmountable emotion. Hannon’s queen is a force to be reckoned with throughout the play, capable of switching from proud reserve to spewing vitriol in a second.

The heightened climatic pace of the pivotal final scenes of the play is enhanced by the decision to have the Chorus rise and circle the tortured king.  It is hard not to notice, too, the carefully choreographed movements on stage – this performance has been immaculately and impressively assembled, all the more so when you consider  the limited time-frame the small production team were working with (and the team is small: as I leave the director is about to start cleaning up flour from the stage). Overall this production is powerful and transporting.

Conflict breeds creativity. Some of the most famous cultural achievements throughout history have been borne out of life-long rivalries. Although undoubtedly geniuses in their own right, James Hunt may never have won Formula 1 were it not for Niki Lauda; Mozart may never have composed The Magic Flute were it not for Salieri; Steve Jobs may never have come up with the iPad were it not for Bill Gates.

One such creative rivalry was that betweenthe two painters, HenriMatisse and Pablo Picasso. Both of them lived in Paris in the early 20thcentury, members of a wide network of highly creative personalities, including Surrealist figures such as the poet André Breton and the painter Salvador Dalí. Both were trying to forge the new cultural direction in the plastic arts, revolutionising artistic practices.

Matisse, eleven years Picasso’s senior, was the first painter to create ‘ugly’ art. This inspired Picasso to break completely from artistic prec- edent and paint works that were disjointed, challenging, and far from aesthetically pleas- ing. The same year that Matisse painted hisBlue Nude, Picasso produced one of his most famous paintings, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,both of which were radical departures from traditional European painting in their portrayal of women as grotesque, confrontational and menacing. Matisse in turn borrowed from Picasso, incor- porating African artefacts in his paintings, for example in the portrait of his wife, Madame Amélie Matisse, in which she wears a tribal African mask.

That is not to say that Matisse and Picasso were similar as men. For one thing, Matisse  was a Frenchman and Picasso, a Spaniard. In addition, Matisse normally wore a simple tweed suit, whereas Picasso preferred a worker’s uni- form; Matisse had one wife for 41 years, while Picasso had scores of mistresses; Matisse liked to launch into conceptual discussions about art that would captivate the room, whereas Picasso shied away from speaking, self- conscious about his spoken French. Matisse once said of him and his rival that they were “as different as the North Pole is from the South Pole”.

“I’ve spent so much of my life being sexy that I haven’t gotten anything else done. I’ve been balling from Maine to Mexico. I haven’t a dime to show for it, but I had a swell time.”

For the hour and forty five minutes that Jason Holliday/Aaron Payne is on screen he performs an entire life to us. He becomes once more the hustler, cabaret singer, domestic worker, and sex worker of his past, and reveals himself as an astute social commentator and greatest of all, a truly captivating storyteller. We become completely immersed in the world of queer New York he inhabits in the late 1960s. Jason’s narrative is peppered with anecdotes of the shocking racism he experienced as a black, gay man and even episodes of incarceration which are all told alongside his riotous impressions of Katherine Hepburn and his star-studded anecdotes, perhaps the best loved of these the one featuring Miles Davis. 

It is the bold method of director Shirley Clarke which leads to this diverse human revelation. The feature was filmed over the course of one evening in Jason’s hotel room and gives the distinct impression of being edited live by Clarke. As Jason drinks more and is goaded by Clarke, the audience is left to question not only his stability and the veracity of what he is saying, but the ethics of what Clarke is doing here.  A chance to tell his story as he takes to the stage of his suite seems at first a portrayal on his own terms, but Jason remains the sitter in Clarke’s portrait. Her voice is certainly an intrusive one and as she coaxes more and more from him the film becomes intensely uncomfortable to watch and takes on an exploitative and far darker edge. The audience is left to question the reality of Jason’s performance, the ethics of Clarke’s, but never the power of the film.

Portrait of Jason is showing free at St Catz at 8pm on Tuesday of 4th Week. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion.

Even if you don’t remember their name, you surely remember the dance. You weren’t a noughties kid if you didn’t spend school discos trying to emulate Las Ketchup’s hand gestures in the music video for their 2002 Number 1 ‘The Ketchup Song’ .

But even such original dance moves set to nonsense Spanish couldn’t stop them from being pushed off their pedestal of fame after a week at the top.

Yet they did manage to claw their way back up.

For a few minutes in 2006, Las Ketchup played in the homes of millions across Europe as they represented Spain in Eurovision. They were playing under extremely shady circumstances (no one would ever reveal how they were picked) and even the Spanish didn’t like their song, ‘Un Blodymary’, but they did have another shot at the limelight.

Maybe if their entry had sounded better than a screeching children’s choir, or had some sassy dance moves, they could have had a shot at the top spot again. Thanks for the memories Las Ketchup, but please don’t attempt to resurrect your career a third time!

★★★☆☆

Three Stars

New Zealand duo French for Rabbits return this year with their new album Spirit. As the title might suggest, it’s a pretty ethereal affair, an album full of gently melancholic minor chords and indulgently wistful vocals. While it certainly makes for some very laid back and atmospheric listening, unfortunately it’s an album with little originality or distinction.

French For Rabbits are a very elusive group, or at least they certainly wish to appear so. Should you want to make contact with them, their website will direct you to a page entitled “commune”, or indeed should you want to find out what they’re up to, their news page is called “oracle”. This airy aloofness may however be their greatest asset as artists and performers.

What we do know about French for Rabbits is that they are comprised of vocalist Brooke Singer and instrumentalist John Fitzgerald.

Singer is very talented and thoughtful. Her expressive range is particularly interesting — her voice can vary from sensual and intimate to gently unhinged with impressive ease. Lyrically it is often hard to make out what she is singing, but the few words that I can make out speak of obligatory heartbreak, sadnessand betrayal. To her credit it is very difficult to describe her sound by comparing her to other singers, but something akin to Florence Welch’s Lungs period seems about right.

Her counterpart Fitzgerald is a highly versatile instrumentalist in the number of sounds he combines. Where he really shines is as a guitarist though. The tone of his sound is very smooth yet distinct and you can definitely seethe influence of bands like The xx in some of his arrangements, with the hypnotically looping single notes as background to the vocal spectacle. Chromatics is also a good point of reference here in the general tone and sound that comes across.

All of this sounds great on paper, The xx-cum-Florence and the Machine-cum-Chromatics with a floaty folk twist. The trouble is that the actual result is just a little underwhelming. Put it like this, it went well as an accompaniment to an essay crisis: gentle, inoffensive but ultimately not all that interesting.

Justified or not, the group do seem to take themselves quite seriously. No doubt as their range develops their image and style will amass a following who will cherish Spirits as a tragically underrated early classic. But I think for the rest of us, it just makes for a mellow autumnal afternoon listen.

★★★☆☆
Three Stars

DJ and producer Sebastien Mullaert has released Reflections of Nothingness in collaboration with Israeli electronic producer Eitan Reiter. As with every new electronic release, standing apart from the swathes of material appearing on the web every day is essential.

Reflections of Nothingness, a name that may initially sound like the title of a gap year student’s account of their year abroad in a Himalayan monastery, actually provides something profound enough to meditate upon.

‘Enter The Spiral’ opens the album in a mechanic yet uncompromising fashion, slowly progressing from distant, reverberated beats and distended soft synthesiser touches to enter a hypnotizing sonic world.

The music takes a distinctly more trance-like step with ‘Ash Layla’, consisting of a danceable beat layered with effects (one of which sounds frustratingly like a vibrating phone). The machine enters a shut down phase by the final track ‘Faith’, some faint yet haunting vocals ring out sadly, and are looped and distorted.

As with so many albums, it is easy to break Reflections of Nothingness down into two distinct sections; the first of which has a more upbeat trance vibe, and the second of which is purely focussed on experimental synthesised downbeat.

If Mullaert and Reiter have done anything expertly, it is to create a soundscape where changes in tempo and sounds from the real world bring the listener into a new dimension.

The idea behind North Atlantic Explorers’ new concept album My Father Was A Sailor is a simple and unsubtle one. Its title sums up its subject.

The album apparently charts the blossoming of a parents’ relationship, against the backdrop of the sea and long periods spent apart. A sweet idea, but not an entirely successful one.

The vocals of Stuart David (of Belle and Sebastian fame) sound more like the opening to Balamory than the intended shipping forecast. An instrumen- tal follows and I’m about to give up hope. But then enters the single ‘Don’t Want Anyone Else’.

The soothing twanging of banjos complements the choral harmony perfectly. It is a simple yet sweet song, and an early (and rare) highlight in the album.

If Neutral Milk Hotel and Slow Club had a love child, chances are, in their infancy they would sound like North Atlantic Explorers. My Father Was A Sailor uses similar orchestral arrangements, piercing trumpets and uncomplicated guitars.

You can feel emotion outpouring in ‘Spiral Into The Sea’, the simple beauty of which the sentimentalist in me cannot help but appreciate.

‘Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle’ is the album’s lowest point, yet you can’t help but smile when he utters “Goodnight gentleman, good sailing” as the album comes to a close.

★★★★★
Five Stars

Life Story opens with David Attenborough lounging around in the desert with some meerkats. Perfect, this is exactly the sort of thing you want from a BBC nature program, I think, especially one whose first episode promises to be about baby animals taking their ‘first steps’ in the world. I’m watching it while I’m doing the washing up, just about to make myself a cup of tea, not really interested in the meerkats, if I’m honest, but I’m enjoying the cosiness of the thing and the soothing tones of Attenborough’s voice, which has a similar effect on me to that of a large whiskey.

And then come the goslings. That was a one-clause sentence for dramatic effect, yes. What can be so dramatic about some goslings, you ask? If you’ve seen it, you’ll know exactly what I’m on about; if you haven’t, take a minute before you open up iPlayer to remind yourself that, of course, nature isn’t all about baby meerkats frolicking in the sand — it’s about the constant struggle for survival. 

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We’re in Greenland, in the Orsted Dal valley, where barnacle geese bring their young into the world. Due to the constant threat of predators, they are forced to nest at the top of 400 foot high, vertical cliffs, which are pretty terrifying in themselves, especially in HD. Here are the goslings, four pathetically cute fluff-balls nestled under the wing of mother goose.

The problem is that barnacle geese only eat grass. The fundamental irony of Greenland is that there isn’t actually much grass — especially not on top of huge rock pillars. So, the ‘first steps’ of these babies, whose wings we are told are too undeveloped to work yet, involves following Mum and Dad off the edge of a cliff in search of food.

And, blindly, off they go. I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen still wearing my rubber gloves, staring at my laptop in abject horror as five helpless baby birds base-jump off a cliff. This just isn’t practical, nature, I think, as the chicks rocket towards the ground, wings desperately outstretched, slamming again and again against the edge of the jagged rock face to dramatic music (thanks, BBC). It’s so distressing to watch that I’m actually whimpering by this point. My housemate (who is watching American Horror Story in the next room) has to come in and ask if I’m okay.

Two out of five of the chicks die in the fall (we see it happen!); the two chicks on the ground are visibly shaking, and there is a heart wrenching searching-for-baby-goose scene before third chick emerges from behind a pile of rubble. The little family then hobble off to safety, thank bloody god. 

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The hits keep on coming. The next ‘life story’, for example, features the birth of some baby praying mantises. They aren’t cute, but they’re sort of beautiful in an alien way, and the camerawork is spectacular. I’m just warming to them when they start eating each other. One of them (the protagonist?) then wins a fight with a massive spider before being eaten by another bigger mantis, possibly its mother. “Praying mantis, after all, are cannibals” says Attenborough, happily.

By mid-way through the program, even the baby meerkat is savagely devouring a huge scorpion. So, Life Story is brutal, it’s honest. But it’s also ridiculously, breathtakingly beautiful, a great deal of which has to do with the quality of the photography; I spend a great deal of it wondering if it isn’t actually just really, really good CGI. Of course it’s not; according to the ‘making of’ it’s just some very big lenses and a lot of waiting around. This, I think, is the magic of Life Story. It’s the sort of camerawork we have come to expect from big-budget blockbusters. The editors work wonders in creating parts of the animal world, seen in more detail than anyone would actual plot lines, narratives, almost characters.

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This isn’t just nature watching: it’s a thrilling insight into some of the most dangerous, cut-throat parts of the animal world, seen in more detail than anyone would ever manage to achieve with their own eyes.