Gergiev and Lepage: Modern Magicians

I was lucky enough to have caught two musical gems - well one was a musical gem, the other a visual gem that had, almost apparently by accident, been paired with musical content - over the course of these past two days.

For two glorious evenings, I pretended I was a well-heeled, intellectually (and financially) patrician New Yorker. In a word, I caught two shows at the Lincoln Centre, the first the reknowned Valery Gergiev conducting the Kirov (Mariinksy) Orchestra and Choir in a performance of Sergei Prokofiev's scores for Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible and Alexander Nevsky and the second a production of Hector Belioz' La Damnation de Faust whose visual design was created by Canadian techno-wizard Robert Lepage (aided by an able team of light and effects mages, not to mention the superlative acrobats of Cirque du Soleil).

The Gergiev show (yeah, at heart, I'm really a bourg-y philistine) was the most thrillingly annihilating piece of live music I'd heard in a long time. And it really spoke to my obessesion with brooding, powerful, depraved personalities. On film, that is. I caught myself thinking all the while... if a score can so effortlessly convey the conflict between a despot's out-and-out brutal, powerhungry nature and his more patriotic intentions, it is no wonder that tyrannts like Stalin exercised so much control over the arts, especially the peforming arts. They speak directly to that subliminal, primal part of the human psyche that could be used either for mass revolution or mass control.

Other than the barrage of incredibly cinematic music, infused with that brooding, intense, savage quality that is a hallmark of Russian creative expression, I was mesmerised by Gergiev himself, a rough-yet-graceful Pan in white tie and tails, his hands, wrists, arms and shoulders all moving in a melange of circular and sawing motions that made for a totally individual semiotics. A code his musicians obviously knew unto the last flick and sway and with which Gergiev seemingly casually created an awesome array of dynamics.

Particularly hypnotic (though my beloved who accompanied me would have offered 'distracting' instead) were his fingers, which seemed to be playing an invisible fretboard one minute, then flicking phantom raindrops at great speed the next.

The evening also made me silently vow to myself to put Eisenstein's Ivan (thank you YouTube for clips to whet my appetite), and maybe even Alexander Nevsky on my 'to-view' list of DVDs. Given that my paternal grandmother was always reading the Russian literary greats, and my father's family spoke with such nostalgia for the heydey of the arts in Soviet Armenia, I've always felt I should dip into the mighty canon of, at the very least, Russian cinema. Alas, limited time and a somewhat short attention span has hitherto put paid to most of that ambition - though my love for the film version of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago - admittedly a diluted version of life under the Bolsheviks - directed by Englishman David Lean no less - might have, perhaps, gone some way to mitigating the blame!

If you want a less-salutory but more technical appraisal of the performance, go the New York Times' write-up by James R. Oestreich here.

As for Faust, despite the rather forgettable music, the pleasures for the eye were unrelenting; the high-point for me was the way interactive video technology that was part of the grand, multi-panel, multi-level stage brought the lighting and weightlessness of the ocean bed to life.

To sample some of the production's magic-making, go here.

An afterthought: I almost caught Lepage's one man techno-take on Hamlet - Elsinore - back at the Edinburgh festival of 1996, but his set had some glitch that prevented him from performing on the day I had free to see it. The beautiful artifice he created for Faust that I witnessed last night made the regret of my missed opportunity all the keener.



The image by Jennifer Taylor was taken from this site.