Brundibar

Conductor  Gerald Wirth

Vienna Boys (sic) Choir
Berkshire Youth Orchestra

The Garden, by Joseph Tal, libretto by Israel Elirar, translated by Gila
Abramson

Diane Atherton      Eve
Darren Fox          Adam
Timothy Davies      Serpent

George Badacsonyi   Conductor
John Abulafia       Director

Both today's performances were part of the 9th London International Jewish
Music Festival.

The Vienna Boys Choir (I suppose boys is in apposition to choir) is an
institution in trouble. Its director has just resigned, saying that she
cannot run the choir school without more subsidy, and will not increase the
touring programme to raise the money because it is not in the interests of
the boys. Unfortunately, judging from this performance, the choir is itself
not in particular good shape either.

The first part of the concert consisted of mediaeval and renaissance German
carols and a set of Mozart/Brahms/Schubert songs, the sort of thing your
school probably rolled out for parents. With rocky intonation, soggy tone
and little sense of what they were singing about, this choir would barely
have impressed even their parents. (They were noticably happier in a
feelgood contemporary number that they did as an encore.) I'm not sure how
much of what I heard was a specifically Viennese pretty singing style that
just doesn't sound right because I'm used to King's, and how much was pure
sloppiness and poor preparation. But there was something clearly amiss.

This was advertised as a family concert of folk songs, and the young
friends I took along  were understandably seriously uninterested in most of
the first half. They enjoyed Brundibar more, mainly because there were
animals in it. I'm afraid I didn't. The small orchestra played the
attractive music -- simple songs with orchestration somewhere on the
Weill/Goldschmidt vector -- reliably, and there's definitely something well
worth performing here, a straightforward parable of children and animals
getting together to defeat a bully. But the boys, singing in a mixture of
German and English, didn't seem to have any sense of the style of the
music, and the staging was chaotic and unconvincing.

The concert was redeemed when the Austrian Ambassador announced at the end
that the profits were going to an integrated school in Northern Ireland,
via the Peace and Reconciliation charity. Though the reminder that the
government funds segregated schools and a non-segratated one needs
charitable funding didn't cheer me up that much either.

The Garden, written and first performed, presumably in Hebrew, in Israel in
1988, also turned out to be a retro-central-European event, a dryly
humourous parable about sex. But it got a thoroughly proficient
performance.

The composer Joseph Tal was born in Poland in 1910 and educated in Germany
before emigrating to Palestine in the early 1930s. Eleven years younger
than Krasa, his music is somewhat similar, interestingly when his life has
turned out so differently. He describes his work as "modern classical". In
this case, he uses a cabaret-style ensemble of flute, clarinet, oboe, horn,
tuba, saxophone, cello and percussion (with all the wind players doubling a
related instrument), and sets the libretto as dramatic speech, with
intervals of theatre music.

Adam and Eve return to the garden of Eden to try to sort out the misery of
their marriage, and find that they replay the events of scripture in modern
terms. Adam is always making speeches about the world. Eve's sexuality,
liberated by a carton of apple juice from within a North London housewife,
runs riot. And the serpent has become, as he says, angelic, senile and
impotent, a wry observer completely out of touch with the modern world, not
particularly interested in Eve, but still going through the motions of
philandering because that's all he knows. A game of golf with Adam and a
Polaroid photo bring a degree of understanding, but he's really only the
ringmaster in La Ronde reduced to a twosome driven both together and apart
by desire.

I had a sense that this wasn't simply a lament about "liberated" women and
the state of the world gone to pot, but more a reflection on the power and
resonance of the scriptural story and archetypes even when we think we're
beyond all that. I think this came more from the enjoyably arch music and
the witty performances than from anything specific in the libretto. Timothy
Davies as the serpent (a speaking only role) was opaque, and often quite
funny. Diane Atherton was suitably petulant, but quite sexy with it, as
Eve. Darren Fox was suitably dull and long suffering as Adam. Their second
exit from the garden, with Eve heavily pregnant, was almost convincing
psychologically, a reflection of the awareness that trouble in paradise is
still trouble, and that the demands and constraints of ordinary life are
actually a consolation because they free you from having to think too much
about yourself.