Georgia on Everyone’s Mind Dancers From a War Zone Are Among This Week’s Honoured Performers, Writes Keith Bruce

By Keith Bruce

AN INCREDIBLE run of success at the Bank of Scotland Herald Angel awards by Scottish Opera continues this week with an award to The Two Widows, the first production to be conducted by the company’s new music director, Francesco Corti. The company has previously received Angels for productions including Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Verdi’s Macbeth and John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, and it is a decade since it received a Herald Angel for an Edinburgh International Festival production of Smetana’s Dalibor.

The new production of one of the Czech composer’s lighter pieces stars Jane Irwin, herself a double-Angel winner, and Kate Valentine in the title roles, and was directed and designed by Tobias Hoheisel and Imogen Kogge. The vibrant, colourful production opens at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal on Friday, October 10, for three performances only.

The first appearance at the festival by the State Ballet of Georgia has attracted great attention because of the the situation that has developed in their homeland, but it would always have been an event. Following a staging of Giselle, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the pit at the Playhouse, that impressed balletomanes, the company presented a mixed bill that ranged from the exacting work of Georgian-born George Balanchine, to Yuri Possokhov’s lively Sagalobeli, using traditonal music. Nina Ananiashvili’s company have been a great presence in this year’s festival programme.

So, too, have been the theatre company TR Warszawa from Poland with a staging of Jewish folktale, Dybbuk, followed by Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis, which takes its title from the time in the small hours when the will to live is at its lowest ebb, and which opened at the King’s last night. Illuminating both productions is Magdalena Cielecka, a well-known and very prolific actor in Poland. There is a clear parallel between her performance as the possessed bride Lea on her hen-night in Dybbuk and the tormented woman at the centre of Kane’s modern classic, and both are roles requiring great commitment from the Polish star of large and small screeen.

The final of the four Angel awards to the International Festival this week goes to the Song and Civilisation series at Greyfriars Kirk. Last year’s programme of early music in this venue proved the surprise hit of Jonathan Mills’s first festival, and its successor has also been playing to packed pews. This has been a voyage into the unknown for many of the audience, but they have willingly gone on journeys to Turkey and Corsica and heard some of the very earliest known music and chants. From the first concert, the classical audience has had the fullest exposure to “world music” in its widest sense.

In the lovely acoustic of St Andrew’s and St George’s church in George Steet, the African Children’s Choir has been presenting Africa’s Rhythm.

The choir, founded by Ray Barnett following the aftermath of Idi Amin’s brutal regime in Uganda, has been working with the most vulnerable children in Africa for nearly 25 years, raising awareness of the plight of the orphaned and abandoned. The choir is currently caring for several thousand under privileged children throughout Africa and tours constantly, and will have been seen by many people beyond the fringe. In his review, Rob Adams praised this “huge isotonic drink of a performance” and added: “If you don’t leave this show smiling, you need to go right back in and try again.”

Another group of young people have been causing a sensation at the Traverse. “Once and for all we’re gonna tell you who we are so shut up and listen” is the product of a year’s work with a group of teenagers by director Alexander Devriendt of performance group Ontroerend Goed. The 13 adolescents in the show all give superb performances about being who they are. For fans of Channel 4 series Skins, this is like an packed hour of all the best bits. It is a show about being young now and, like the choir, induces an ear to ear grin.

This week’s Archangel goes to a drummer and music promoter who has been part of the Scottish scene since the 1970s. Bill Kyle had led countless bands and served on the boards and committees of numerous organisations before opening his own club on South Bridge. Sadly, no sooner had it established itself than it was destroyed by the fire which also claimed the Gilded Balloon and La Belle Angele on the Cowgate. After a long search for replacement premises, Kyle came to rest round the corner on Chamber Street where the Jazz Bar has nearly 150 gigs during the fringe and operates an open house policy that chimes exactly with the ethos of the fringe.

The Little Devil this week goes to Norman Lebrecht. There is no other critic with whom our music writers are more likely to completely disagree than Lebrecht, so when his session at the book festival was plunged into darkness by a weather-related power cut, it only seemed appropriate. The show went on, in stygian gloom, with Lebrecht commenting that it was “just like the Blitz”, demonstrating his great gift for cliche.

Originally published by Newsquest Media Group.

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