History in dance, music, and theatre
I: So Are We: León and Lightfoot
Although the new double bill by Sol Leon and Paul Lightfoot (“So Are We”) for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden has received accolades, both its halves are really just slickly pretentious, tongue-in-cheek essays in surfaces and insincerity. León and Lightfoot have been a choreographic duo based at Nederlands Dans Theater for twenty years. Their first item at Covent Garden, “Shoot the Moon” (a new adaptation of a piece León and Lightfoot made twenty years ago) is a series of “chamber” scenes in which the dancers – five in all, but fewer for each scene – wear exaggerated facial expressions. Each scenes is in a separate room (the scenery revolves) for five star soloists, to a tepid piano concerto by Philip Glass’s tepid Tirol piano concerto. All the movements were highly staccato/marcato, timed to cues in the music but far more emphatic and brusque than that music.
The second scene, “Salle de Danse”, newly made, was a big piece in twenty-four episodes to a cheap commissioned score by Ilya Demutsky. Dozens of dancers were involved, though most of the individual instalments were solos or for just a few performers. At its best, Demutsky’s score sounded like the tackily thwacky arrangement of Czerny that’s used for Harald Lander’s ballet cliché-fest, “Études”. Each episode of “Salle de Danse” has some ballet-academic title (projected on the backdrop), such as “Ports de bras” and “Etirements” and “Ronds de jambe” – but the connection of the title to what we saw was loose or jokey. “Prima ballerina” was for the non-étoile Marianna Tsembenhoi. (Natalia Osipova, surely more prima by far, had already appeared.) Neither Osipova nor Tsembenhoi danced on point. Men were bare-chested, but women in trousers or dark leggings.
The movements are organised, nonsensical, energetic, taking raids from the ballet vocabulary without using it coherently. And everything was a hit. Whereas the old Covent Garden ballet audience was inclined to be stiffly conservative in the last century, today’s audience loves every part of “So Are We”.
II: Vienna State Academy
This year, like last year, the Linbury Theatre, downstairs at Covent Garden from the main opera house, has presented an early-summer period comprised of quick series of performances by prestigious European and British ballet schools. At the end of last week, the Ballet Academy of the Vienna State Opera has just presented there “Strauss 2225: Dances for the Future”, a strange concoction by Canadian choreographer Robert Binet. Officially this honoured the bicentennial of Viennese composer Johann Strauss II (1825-1899) by instead imagining a future bicentennial, ballet in 2225. In terms of stage sociology, Binet’s vision was modish but not futuristic: same-sex partnering ranks equal to opposite-sex partnering. Binet was using music by a number of composers reportedly echoing Strauss ideas (though this was hard to believe). If you looked through the dances, the young dancers were handsomely schooled, with lucid line and sensitive feet; but choreographically, “Strauss 2225” was dreary. Binet has done better in the past, but this was not a work that the Vienna State Ballet Academy should have been touring outside Austria.
III: Solomon’s Knot
The Wigmore Hall stage is seldom more crowded than when Solomon’s Knot – singers and instrumentalists – performs there. On Sunday 14th June, Solomon’s Knotdelivered three Bach cantatas. The first “Höchsterwünschtes Freudenfest” BWV194 – proved dull fare. The evening, however, rose: “Gott fähret auf mit Jauchzen” BWV43 and especially “Es erhub sich ein Streit” BWV19 marvellously demonstrated the richness and complexity of Bach’s thought.
IV: Stéphane Degout and the Quatuor Diotima
My admiration for the baritone Stéphane Degout keeps rising , and yet this is not because he sings with ideal bel canto vocal focus. His voice has a backward placement, with the result that his diction – I have heard him in four languages – is somewhat covered. Even so, Degout is a remarkable performer: the reason is his sheer largeness of spirit and mind. On Monday 16, he joined the Quatuor Diotima in a programme of nocturne music from late Romantic and modernist European composers of the early twentieth century: Ottorino Respighi, György Ligeti, and Othmar Schoeck.
Respighi’s cantata “Il Tramonto” (an Italian adaptation of Shelley’s melancholy “The Sunset”) is a rarity; Degout’s account was always eloquent, considerably extending our idea of Respighi with its inwardnesss. Schoeck’s “Notturno” (opus 47, composed in 1931-1933), set to a number of poems by the Austrian Nikolaus Lenau and one by the Swiss Gottfried Keller. It’s the final section, to Keller’s words, that lifts this long work (just under forty minutes) up to a peak.
But the whole programme’s chief peak had occurred at its start, before Degout began. The Diotima quartet played Ligeti’s first string quartet, “Métamorphoses nocturnes”(1953-1954) . Their playing, exceptional in its dynamic contrasts and extremes, revealed this to be a startling masterpiece, both influenced by Bartók and highly imaginative in itself.
V: “Quartet in Autumn” at the Arcola
During this century, the profile of the Arcola Theatre – none too easy to reach if you travel by Underground – has kept rising. I was happy to return there on Wednesday 17 th June, to see Samantha Harvey’s adaptation of Barbara Pym’s novel “Quartet in Autumn” (1977), as directed by Dominic Dromgoole. My particular reason to go was to see the four actors – Anthony Calf, Kate Duchêne, Pooky Quesnel, and Paul Rider – but it’s wonderful to enter Pym’s poignantly comic study of four single people at the end of their working lives and addressing solitude in old age. (One of the four dies during Act Two.) Everything – acting, direction, writing – works together. Each of the four actors creates a three-dimensional character, funny and serious, each on the cusp of caricature, and each with the kind of line-reading that turns text to gold. As Edwin, a polite widower who has now committed himself to churchgoing, Anthony Calf places a fabulous pause before he says the word “lingerie” as if he has needed to pick up courage. As Marcia, Pooky Quesnel catches all the notes of paranoia and hysteria in genteel ways that somehow put the other three off the scent of how crazed her condition becomes. Letty’s notes of cheerfully nonsensical optimism are beautifully judged by Kate Duchêne; while Paul Rider, as Norman, the most reactionary of the four, does a subtle keep-fit routine that stays hilariously in the memory.
VI: Haydn and J.C. Bach
The church of St Martin in the Fields is celebrating its three hundredth anniversary. On Thursday 18th June, theEnglish Baroque Soloists, conducted by Peter Whelan, delivered a “Haydn in London” programme that included one work by “the London Bach”, Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782), who spent his final twenty years in London. His Symphony in G minor (W. C12); a dramatic masterpiece, added richly to the concert.
Haydn’s second cello concerto proved the weakest link, for reasons of bad intonation problems on the part of the distinguished soloist, Christophe Coin (founder cellist ofQuatuors Masaïques), only resolved, after several subtle adjustments, in the third movement. Too bad, since Coin’s phrasing of his cadenzas was of rare refinement. Two of Haydn’s greatest London symphonies – no 100 (“Military”) and no 104 (“London”) – sandwiched the programme, with the Baroque Soloists rising exuberantly to the challenge and with Whelan setting exhilarating tempi.
I find Haydn invariably good company, and, more important, invariably stimulating in his experimental way of making music, trying new sounds and new effects. To think that he was here for two periods of the 1790s – and was hailed – changes my idea of London itself.
VII: Adele Astaire
Another change to my idea of London comes when reading Kathleen Riley’s superb book “The Astaires” (2012, Oxford University Press). Fred Astaire and (the greater star) his elder sister Adele Astaire were a stage sensation on both sides of the Atlantic from 1924 to 1930, with the royal family leading the admiration. One night George V and Queen Mary came to admire the Astaires onstage – at least three of their sons had already been – and the next morning Adele and Fred were invited to view the as yet unphotographed young baby Princess Elizabeth. Both the future Edward VIII and, in particular, his younger brother George were thought to be seriously taken by Adele’s perfections. (“Nothing like since the Flood,” said one review.)
Adele in due course married into the English aristocracy; her husband, Lord Charles Cavendish, was second son to the Duke of Devonshire. Even though Fred Astaire had performed solos and had been the main choreographer of the duo, nobody seems to have yet foreseen that he could sustain an important career once Adele retired.
Although the rest – the rest of Fred’s international fame on screen – is certainly history, it’s fascinating to find that Adele in 1936 briefly considered making it into the movies too, making a screen test. In Oxford on Tuesday 16th June, speaking to Dansox at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, Riley presented that very screen test, with Adele speaking and singing (the Gershwins’ “‘Swonderful”). Adele could reward closeup; her charm transcends the decades; she has the same charm in speech and song. She chose not to pursue the movies, recognising that her brother’s career was not at a stage to benefit from her arrival on the screen. The two remained lifelong friends, even though Adele’s marriage proved unfulfilling. To see her screen test – to think what might have been – has been one thrill; so has been a re-reading of Riley’s book.
@Alastair Macaulay 2026