The annual reminder that this blog exists even though I don’t post on it any more. I do intend to get back to it next year. Let’s aim for one post per quarter, if that’s not unduly optimistic. Thank you for reading: I love you all. Happily the almost constant not-blogging has created much time for attending, reading and listening to various things, among which the following have been among the better specimens:
Top 4 books
INVIDIOUS to single out four from such a stellar bunch, but let’s do it anyway. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain repaid the few weeks of effort I put into it, one of those novels that engages and excites the brain. I always forget Mann’s quite funny; mea culpa. Edward St Aubyn’s quintet of novels about his alter ego Patrick Melrose enlivened the second half of the year. If I had to pick a single one, the second, Bad News, was a joy from start to finish, switching effortlessly from desperately poignant to scabrously funny. I haven’t encountered many writers with St Aubyn’s pithiness. Noel Streatfeild’s exceptional and sobering Saplings, telling the story of a family of six becoming fractured during the Second World War, hinted at a brilliance I’d only suspected from her children’s books. And I wouldn’t normally pick a reread, but the one novel that above all others blew me away in 2019 was Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. I’d read it before with admiration, but this time around it made my head swim. It’s so potent, so alive to the possibilities of … well, everything. The novel as a form, for one thing, but storytelling and myth and human existence generally. Mindboggling.
Honourable mentions to the likes of Dimitri Verhulst, Blake Morrison, Angus Wilson, Patrick Hamilton, Sayaka Murata, Sally Rooney, Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Elizabeth Taylor (the other one), Jacqueline Woodson… More anon.
Top 4 new films
The Favourite started the year off with a bang, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest oddballfest, full of joyous anachronisms and wild humour. I love Rachel Weisz to distraction. Like Lanthimos crossed with Aguirre crossed with Southern Comfort, Alejandro Landes’ Monos was indescribably audacious, the story of a band of trainee guerrillas in a remote part of South America. I loved its mixture of beauty and brutality, and Mica Levi’s score, of course. You can add me to the lengthy roster of people who found Adam Driver singing ‘Being Alive’ in Marriage Story a moving and erotic experience. Surely Noah Baumbach’s finest work to date, and great to see Julie Hagerty at the top of her game. I caught a preview at the Cambridge Film Festival at which Netflix heavies systematically beat to a pulp anyone observed using their phone during the movie. But my film of the year was probably Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory. His most elegiac film, perhaps, his most reflective, anchored by a humane, sympathetic turn from Antonio Banderas, and full of tenderness and melancholy. It’s the only film I went to see twice this year, and I’m already keen to revisit it.
Honourable mentions: Booksmart, Midsommar, By the Grace of God, Eighth Grade, If Beale Street Could Talk.
Top 4 old films
Sergei Parajanov’s unorthodox biographical drama about the Armenian poet Sayat Nova The Colour of Pomegranates is a film the like of which I’ve never seen before, and perhaps the closest to poetry that cinema has come for me. Bewildering, intoxicating, overwhelming. I’ve never seen such colours on screen. Something rich and strange. Seriously, drop what you’re doing for a moment and try this for size.
I’d somehow avoided Preston Sturges until now, but Sullivan’s Travels has converted me. I felt almost anything might happen. Another film I had a long overdue date with: Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story. So beautifully, classically constructed, and told with such care and quietness. They’re an unlikely pairing, Sturges and Ozu, but I think they share a humanity. And lastly, the Brazilian director Anna Muylaert’s The Second Mother, a warm but incisive drama about the power dynamic between a wealthy family and their maid (amazing Regina Casé), which shifts when her daughter moves into the family house. It’s sensationally good, and (spoiler alert) it ends happily. I laughed with joy.
Honourable mentions: Yi Yi, Nebraska, Arrival, All About My Mother, Leave No Trace, Miracle in Milan, Palindromes, Alice in the Cities, Paris, Texas, Midnight, Dry Summer…
Top 4 Edinburgh
My best Edinburgh yet, I think, in terms of both quality of things witnessed and not suffering burnout from my foolishly intense schedule (this year, 22 shows, a photography exhibition, a sung Mass and a piano recital in the space of three and a bit days). Peter Fleming: Have You Seen? was the pick of the shows, a great concept and a virtuosic performance. Paul Foot: Baby Strikes Back! and Ivo Graham: The Game of Life were the best shows I’ve seen from either performer. Foot’s pre-show spiel about Princess Michael of Kent opening a school for autistic children was a joy. And Lucy Beaumont: Space Mam was a much needed change of pace from most of the shows I saw, such a warm and generous performance. The first time I’ve seen her live, but not I hope the last.
Honourable mentions: Tim Key, The Delightful Sausage, Tarot, Kieran Hodgson (as usual).
Top 4 theatre
I was on an Andrea Dunbar kick early in the year, and made a pilgrimage to Bury St Edmunds to see Out of Joint’s excellent production of Rita, Sue and Bob Too in the unlikely surroundings of the the country’s only surviving Regency playhouse. Good to tick it off the list. The return of Follies to the National Theatre brought into focus things I’d missed last time, Peter Forbes’ superlative Buddy a case in point. To see him dancing in ‘The Right Girl’ opposite Harry Hepple as his younger self was a great joy. English Touring Theatre’s Equus was an intense production of a play that never feels satisfactory to me, though its brilliance seemed more evident than ever before. Zubin Varla, so impressive as the father in Fun Home last year, was a very fine Dysart. And Travis Alabanza’s Burgerz, my second show in a row at Edinburgh’s Traverse to feature live cooking on stage, was a vital call to arms, a reminder of the importance of showing up for people who need support. Must do better. People were in tears, and not just because of the onions.
Top 4 student
My student theatre highlights all came at the ADC in the first half of the year. A couple of musicals in Lent Term, firstly She Loves Me, that least resistible of shows. The 2016 Menier production was fairly fresh in my mind, but the cast of this one was good enough to efface some of those memories, Robin Franklin and Annabelle Haworth an adorable Georg and Amalia. The show had umpteen choreographers, and it showed. Then, Legally Blonde, a piece of fluff really but a dream in the moment, with a host of fine performances. If the production of Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, wasn’t quite as impressive as the previous ADC one in 2013, it did have some superb performances (Leo Reich, Bilal Hasna, Billie Collins and Conor Dumbrell the standouts), and I’m delighted that the production team has taken the bold move of staging Perestroika next year, which is what I’d hoped for last time but didn’t get. The best thing I saw on stage all year, professional or not, was The Revlon Girl, Neil Anthony Docking’s play about a group of mothers bereaved in the Aberfan disaster. It’s a devastating piece of work, and was done full justice by a cast impeccable in every respect, who deserve to be named here: Meg Coslett, Martha O’Neil, Freya Ingram, Amelia Hills and Emily Webster. I don’t cry easily at anything (or I didn’t use to), but I cried three times, and it’s not a long play. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking how stunning it had been, and it haunted me for a long time afterwards.
Top 4 classical
A CUOS production of Carmen in February, which I’d half-hoped might be half-decent, turned out to be very impressive both visually (a West Side Story-esque background of brick added an edge) and vocally. The star turn perhaps Maximilian Lawrie’s Don José, though I felt Mercédès and Frasquita stole the show. It helps that they have some of the best music, such as the trio with Carmen ‘Mêlons! Coupons!’ which turns out not to be about grocery shopping (apologies, I will keep flogging this joke to death until someone laughs). A couple of Camerata Musica recitals in Cambridge delivered the goods: Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber doing Mahler (a stunning Kindertotenlieder the highlight), and Lucas and Arthur Jussen playing two-piano and piano duet music by Mozart, Schubert and Stravinsky (an incandescent Rite of Spring), plus the Sinfonia from Bach’s BWV 106 as an exquisite encore. And at the end of November, the musical high point of my year, a concert performance of the Bergen National Opera production of Peter Grimes at the Royal Festival Hall. Stuart Skelton was a bit under the weather, but that didn’t seem to matter. The orchestral wash, those electrifying choral moments, and a cast to die for, among whom Roderick Williams’ Balstrode, Susan Bickley’s Auntie, Robert Murray’s Boles, James Gilchrist’s simpering Adams, and Clive Bayley’s randy Swallow were outstanding. I had the music in my head for days. Recording to follow, apparently.
Missing out narrowly: piano recitals by Arcadi Volodos and Steven Osborne, and Billy Budd at Covent Garden. No Yuja Wang this year, always a bad sign.
Top 4 albums
Actually it’s been a Yuja year anyway, because her Berlin Recital live album has been a constant companion. I heard her play a similar if not identical programme in London. Her Scriabin 10th Sonata is out of this world. Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson’s 1988 album Hear Victor & Barry and Faint (available on YouTube) has brought me a great deal of entertainment and consolation. All together: ‘Use your condoments lavishly when ingredients aaaren’t fresh’ etc. etc. I wangled myself a copy of the Chandos 19-disc Grainger Edition, which is a treasure trove featuring every imaginable iteration of the music of a composer who becomes dearer to me each year. (Only eight versions of the ‘Colonial Song’? Surely there must be more.) And the opulently restored Film Score Monthly edition of the soundtrack of Dr. Seuss’s still drastically underrated The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. Who can deny its charms?
Props to François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles for their Ravel Ma mère l’Oye, Pollini’s Schumann Fantasie, op. 17, and Marvin Hamlisch’s soundtrack to The Swimmer. I also had a G&S binge in July, listening to all the 1940s/50s-era D’Oyly Carte recordings. Martyn Green and Ella Halman, fabulous.
Is that it?
I’d like to put in a word for Junior Bake Off, from whose general niceness I derived an indecent amount of pleasure. Let’s hope it returns in 2020. Also coming up next year: Igor Levit, Yuja, The Boy Friend, Sunday in the Park with George. See you there.
Somewhere Boy 