Without fanfare, the composer Philip Glass stepped out on stage last week, just as a deeply personal homage to him from the writer, director and actor Phelim McDermott was drawing to a close. It was an electric moment. For two hours we had heard of Glass’s influence on McDermott’s life and work and listened to a dozen of his newly minted pieces, and suddenly here he was, moving silently towards the piano.
Appropriately for a show that explores the influence of dreams on artistic creativity, this felt like a reverie in real time. McDermott lay horizontal on the stage as his 17-year-old self, listening to a track from the album Glassworks, which morphed into Glass himself at the keyboard, running his fingers over those trademark repeated arpeggio patterns, with surprisingly generous use of the sustain pedal.
Tao of Glass, a Manchester international festival commission, is an astonishingly original show about making a show. McDermott, acclaimed for his productions of Glass’s operas Satyagraha, The Perfect American and Akhnaten at English National Opera, tells how he, Glass and co-director Kirsty Housley workshopped a ragbag of ideas concerning creativity, life and mortality in the course of just one week, with Glass composing new music as the narrative emerged.
It sounds rather earnest, but the result is far from that. A warm, funny, self-deprecating semi-autobiography evolves, with McDermott recalling how the prospect of going to the theatre as a child made him sick with excitement, how Manchester’s Royal Exchange acted as a catalyst in his young life, how, as a teenager, he would drive his parents crazy listening to Glass, the master of repetition, “on repeat…” Years later, when he goes to Glass to discuss his ideas, Glass nods off. “I had bored him to sleep! This, the man who has put more audiences to sleep than anyone else!”
Circularity plays a key role, from the nature of theatre in the round, to the “cone of consciousness”, represented by three concentric rings suspended over the stage, under which McDermott talks of our understanding of dreams and creativity. And, naturally, there is the circularity ever present in Glass’s music. His dozen new pieces for Tao share many of the characteristics we expect – tightly clustered patterns, shifting and returning – but in some, such as The River, a lyrical melody breaks free, sent on its way by the golden playing of violinist Rakhi Singh. This serenity has darker echoes in the spare single lines that make up Coma, a musical evocation of deep consciousness, performed by Glass in absentia, on a piano adapted to record and play back exactly the impressions of his fingers on the keyboard. This way, future performances that may not feature Glass himself will still have his disembodied presence.
The show acts like a collage of ideas, ranging over Taoism, Japanese art, where music comes from, where dreams are made and what they mean. Scenes are accompanied by innovative puppetry, mostly achieved by conjuring shapes from mere tissue paper, but also featuring a strikingly lifelike child doll, manipulated as in Japanese Bunraku theatre, which represents both McDermott as a boy and, occasionally, his own son. It is all immensely moving, but so absorbing is the action, it often eclipses Glass’s music, relegating it to an accompanying rather than complementary role, which cannot have been McDermott’s intention.
A pesky bluebottle threatened to upstage the exciting young Georgian pianist Luka Okros at the South Bank’s Purcell Room last week. Okros had programmed all four of the Chopin ballades and had just settled into the sweetly lilting lullaby that opens No 2 Op 38 in F major when the fly descended, plaguing his face and hands and settling on his sleeve. Okros attempted to bat it away, but it persisted, only to be repelled briefly when the central anger of the piece burst forth. He admonished the insect for not buying a ticket before coolly moving on to No 3, imbuing its languorous beauty with just the right level of aching nostalgia.
Still the bluebottle flew its sorties, dodging valiant audience attempts to swat it. When Okros reached the titanic No 4, the creature crawled briefly inside the tail of his jacket, but, undeterred, Okros ploughed on to triumph, venting his frustration with an impressive display of virtuosic pianism. Take that, fly. He closed with an insect-free performance of Liszt’s epic Piano Sonata in B minor, which he said he viewed as an “opera for piano”. And what an opera: playing doesn’t come much more dramatic than this.
And opera doesn’t come much more heartwarming than Blackheath Hall’s outstanding production of Offenbach’s fizzing La Belle Hélène, featuring a massive all-age, all-ability community chorus, sturdy orchestral playing and a starry lineup of principals, led by Ellie Laugharne as the beautiful Hélène and Oliver Johnston as her lover, Paris. James Hurley directs with real wit and conductor Christopher Stark holds the hilarious mayhem together admirably. The last performance is today; those lucky enough to get there won’t stop smiling.
Star ratings (out of five)
Tao of Glass ★★★★
Luka Okros ★★★★
La Belle Hélène ★★★★
