Circus Ronaldo consists of David Ronaldo and Danny Ronaldo, Belgian mimes and comedians. In La Cucina dell’Arte, David & Danny are head chef and assistant at a pizzeria, and they present an evening’s power struggle between the polished and bossy David, and the simple, good-hearted yet sneaky Danny.

A man and a woman from the audience are invited to the pizzeria and the two attempt to make a pizza for them. This involves numerous of broken plates, juggling roundels of pizza dough, plate-spinning, and lots of gags. The show reached its peak when Danny tried to set eight plates spinning on long rods sticking up from the pizzeria table, while David expected him to take down orders for pizza that he was getting from the audience, all backed up by frantic acordion music. Danny tried to get the man from the audience to help him with the plates, but the man had obviously seen enough crashing plates for one evening and preferred taking down the pizza orders instead. He was a natural for the role, getting magnificently confused when he couldn’t hear what David was shouting, jumping away when plates crashed behind him, and eyeing plates spinning above him with great nervousness.

The stage after the show

It was a simple story with simple jokes, but so well presented that the audience was roaring with laughter, with tears in our eyes. They were good mimes/comedians/actors, very expressive, ridiculous without going too far. They also had a very relaxed attitude about audience contact – not just the people who were invited on stage but also others they “conversed” with. Mistakes in tomato juggling meant tomatoes flying towards the audience (luckily not too ripe tomatoes); likewise torn pizza dough that Danny wants to hide from David. When the show was over, the stage was a royal mess of flour, crashed plates, lumps of pizza dough and used matches.

Lots of great pictures are available via the agents of Circus Ronaldo.

Cirque du Soleil is the most spectacular circus company I know of. Each act is more difficult than anything that normal circuses attempt, and performed to perfection. Individual acts are joined into a seamless performance with not a moment of silence or empty scenes. Costumes and decor are artful and resplendent. Music is written especially for each show and performed live, also faultlessly.

Indeed CdS are so far above normal circus that it would be unfair to even compare them. So I won’t. I’ll talk about Alegria, the latest of their shows to visit London, only in the context of other CdS shows.

Had this been my first experience of CdS I would have been utterly dazzled and charmed. But having seen four of them over five years, I have to say that it left me slightly disappointed. Somehow there seemed to be less life in this performance than the previous ones – the decorations are taking over and leaving less space for actual circus. Too much time was spent looking at pretty girls posing in pretty costumes. It was all a bit too courtly, where I would have liked to see more passion and energy. More action, please!

Russian bars	Trampolines

The music is a case in point: it was pretty enough, but almost indistinguishable from last year’s, and from the year before that, and therefore not very memorable.

The first CdS performance we saw was also the best: Quidam. It was a bit more adult and less sugary-sweetly pretty.

The two best acrobatic acts: tumbling on two long trampolines, and Russian bars (which is a wide bar in some sort of semi-flexible material, held on the shoulders of two men, on which a third performer performs somersaults).

But for the first time ever, my favourite part of the show were the clowns, especially one scene that was more mime than traditional circus clowning. The clown walked on stage, opened a large suitcase, took out a coat and hat, and hung them on a rope ladder. Another rope ladder laid on the floor, plus sounds of an old steam engine, hinted at a railway station. With that as his only props, he acted out a tender scene of taking farewell: his left arm animating the left sleeve of the coat, he was playing both voices of the conversation. He did it so well that the performance was vividly tragic and simultaneously absurd.

The next scene showed the same clown alone in a snowy emptiness. Then it started to snow little bits of silk paper. The snowfall grew until it swelled into a magnificent snowstorm, with howling winds and swinging lights, and “snow” falling over half the audience. It was so unexpected and over-the-top immersive that I laughed aloud out of joy.

(Yesterday.)
Dave Brubeck’s jazz quartet (4 white-haired old men) and the London Symphony Orchestra. Pleasant enough to listen to, and all well played, but ultimately just not very interesting. I was on the verge of falling asleep during the second half of the concert.

I don’t understand the point of adding a symphony orchestra to a jazz band… It took away most of the raw energy of jazz and smoothed it out to mellow “easy listening” music. And it feels like a bit of an insult to the orchestra. If you’ve got 25 violins, it’s a waste to have them all play the exact same (and rather simple) score – which is also the same as the score for the trombones and the cellos.

The only piece where the orchestra sounded really good was one that had originally been written for symphony orchestra & jazz band.
And the only piece that felt really alive was the encore, totally free from symphony. At least it ended well!

There’s good music, there’s great music, and then there’s music that transcends all attempts to describe it.
This was one of the latter kind.

I think that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Not only did the music sound fabulous; we also got to see Yo-Yo Ma play it. We had good seats (row 2) so we could see his face and hands really well. Some of the music was technically very demanding and it was a pleasure to see him work.

According to the programme leaflet, he plays “a 1733 Montagnana cello from Venice and the 1712 Davidoff Stradivarius”. Whichever one it was, it was a beautiful instrument to look at, with a red glow, and had a wonderful sound: melodious, soft, deep. I could have just listened to the sound of the cello, ignoring the music, and enjoyed that.

One man, one cello, up close – very intimate performance, despite the size of the hall.

He also turned out to be a very friendly, humble and good-humoured man. He appeared to be as grateful to the audience as we were to him. We managed to applaud three extra pieces out of him (which led to very pleased and humble gestures from him) and those were even better than Bach’s cello suites. One sounded decidedly Oriental (therefore probably from his Silk Road project). Another may have been a modern arrangement of some folk tune – it sounded modern but I thought it had some elements of old dance music in it. I have no idea what the third one was, but it was the best moment of the whole concert. I’ll need to keep an eye out for reviews of this concert, they might mention what it was.

Stringraphy is a room-size harp, made of silk threads stretched across the room. The installation we saw and heard had 4 sets of about 15–20 strings each, reaching from one end of the stage to the other. Two cups interrupted each string and amplified the sounds, like a string telephone. Different locations for the cups gave each string a different pitch.

5 women walked and danced between the strings and made music by rubbing and plucking the strings. They managed to produce an amazing variety of sounds – like traditional string instruments (violin / viola / cello), both “bowed” and plucked; something like an accordeon; sounds of wind and birds; croaks and squeaks; eerie whines. The cups were far apart from each other so that sound was coming from many places, filling the room – even though we sat in the front row and had a very good view of the musicians, the sound often felt disembodied.

The programme had something for all tastes, ranging from Twinkle twinkle little star and Greensleeves to Japanese children’s songs and original works by Kazue Mizushima, who’s the leader of the ensemble. While the popular tunes were pleasant enough, and well performed, the original pieces were far more interesting. When the instrument was used to play Greensleeves, it was just a very odd-looking violin (or rather like 5 very odd-looking violins with only two strings each, because each player could only rub two strings at a time). In the pieces written specifically for Stringraphy, its strengths and peculiarities were used much better – they had many more interesting sounds and combinations: varying the pitch by pulling the string away from its flat/straight position; playing long chords by rubbing two strings at the same time, etc.

I would gladly have skipped the crowd-pleasers, but I guess a purely experimental concert wouldn’t get much of an audience. Kazue says on the group’s web site:

When they asked me to play a familiar tune, I refused at first, feeling that there was no point in playing conventional music on a newly created instrument. But every single person who interviewed me made the same request, until eventually I thought I should at least try it. […] I was keen for a broad range of people to hear my music, and when I asked for feedback after performances, most people said that the part they most enjoyed is when I played their favourite songs.

Due to the size of Stringraphy, the concert was a very physical performance. The strings were around 10 metres long, with the lowest one below knee height and the highest well above their heads, so the musicians had to move and stretch to reach the strings. The concept of high and low tones was also made very visible, as their hands and arms moved up and down between every note.

Unfortunately the audience wasn’t allowed to touch the instrument, as they had two more concerts to come. I was really itching to try it myself.

The group’s web site is small and simple. Kazue’s notes from a workshop held in London in 1999 was the most informative page I found, but there are also “trip reports” from previous concerts.

Today we saw and heard the 3rd and final of this weekend’s concerts of Islamic music (the previous two were Sheikh Habboush and Khaled). All three were part of a “Ramadan Nights” programme organised by the Barbican to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan. East London’s Muslim population is sizeable, and these 3 nights offered something for everybody: “classical” Arabic music and modern groovy North African rai for the Arabian Muslims, and today Sufi music for the Pakistani Muslims (and there are a lot of them around where we live).

This night’s concert was a triple act. The first, Sain Zahoor, was a bizarre fellow… described as a “dervish minstrel”, he resembled a fairy-tale evil wizard: golden clothes, golden shoes with curled-up toes, bright red turban, and so many strings of garish tassels hanging off his string instrument that they swung like a blanket when he was dancing. The music was OK to good; the sound again far too high (although not as extreme as yesterday’s).

He was followed by two brothers, Goonga and Mithu Sain, playing large drums, one each. These two looked like Punjabi rock stars: tall and skinny like scarecrows, long hair, bright red shalwar kameez with fair amounts of glitter, and big bling-bling gold necklaces. Plus when they really got going, one of them actually started headbanging. The only thing missing from true rock star style would have been smashing his instrument when he was done.
The drumming itself was quite varied, ranging from intricate to fast and furious. They could get surprisingly different tones out of a single drum each, using two different-shaped drumsticks + their hands, and each end and edge of the drum had a distinct sound. Very focused – they didn’t say a word to the audience nor look our way – and therefore very engaging. (And completely unamplified! Yea!)

The last and main act was Rahat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwali music. The sound technician was again making every effort to make the music hard to enjoy – gradually turning up the volume as the evening progressed, cranking up the higher tones to piercing sharpness until they were starting to sound distorted even to my untrained ears; loud drums which everything else had to compete with, and the backing chorus turned up to a point where they became an indistinct din. Would have been intolerable without earplugs.

Despite this, the music was so good that all of that could be overlooked. The programme included several excellent songs that I recognised from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s CDs. Qawwali is always great, and live qawwali even more so. Melodious, with dramatic singing, swaying and throbbing rhythms, it builds from a slow start to an ecstatic finish. Even though I don’t understand a word of it – or perhaps because I don’t understand a word of it – it swallows me completely, given enough time, and I ignore everything else around me. A great finale for the weekend.

PS:
From reading my recent posts in the Music category, one could get the impression that Asian music is all we listen to. Actually I listen to gipsy music, klezmer and tango too. No, seriously, while we do listen to a lot of so-called “world music”, we go to other sorts of concerts as well. It’s just that there has been a concentration of Asian music recently. We did hear Thea Gilmore last week, but her concert was disappointing (due to the venue and sound quality) but in such an uninteresting way that it wasn’t even worth writing about.

We’ve got several CDs of Khaled. I like them for his voice, and the swing and rhythm of the music. Much of it is very “dancable”, but at the same time the rhythms are more than the simple ONE-two-THREE-four of western pop.

So I thought I’d really enjoy him in concert this evening. I enjoyed it so little that it made me wonder about things.

#1: The setup.
On the CDs he’s often accompanied by only two or three instruments – acoustic guitar + accordeon for example, or drums + violin + piano. His voice gets a lot of space, and has a lot of depth.
Today, he was backed by lute, base guitar, 2 electric guitars, one whole rock-style drum set, one hand drum, two keyboards, and a 3-man brass section. His voice had two layers of effects (vibratos and echo) and during some songs, one of the keyboard players was doing more singing than Khaled himself. The net effect was that his singing got blended into a general mass of sound and didn’t stand out, and it all sounded more like a standard rock concert than rai.

Does his voice no longer work on its own – has he lost it? Or is this an attempt to capture larger Western audiences by adapting the style to what the average European is used to?

#2: The lighting.
A floodlight of pure white, aimed at the faces of the audience, and about 4 times larger and stronger than anything aimed at the stage. Not just a little spotlight, this was so bright that it made my eyes water even when I closed them; I had to block it with my hand. What does a lighting designer think when doing something like this? “Let’s weed out the weak ones?”

#3: The volume.
Start out somewhat loud-ish. Turn it up. (We don earplugs.) Turn it up some more. And then a little bit more. Until it got to the point where it we found it physically painful, couldn’t stand it any more, and walked out.

This was even more of a surprise because the Barbican can usually be relied on to provide good (or at least reasonable) sound quality – unlike the South Bank Centre (Royal Festival Hall / Queen Elizabeth Hall) that we’ve stopped going to for concerts, because their sound been bad far more often than good.

This is not the first time we leave a concert because it actually hurts, so we’ve asked ourselves the same questions before.
How can everybody stay there and seem to enjoy it? Are they all half deaf, since they’ve been hearing music at this volume for years? Do they hear but don’t mind?

And more importantly, why is it done this way? Do people like it? Are the sound engineers deaf themselves? Or does everybody in the audience have tiny tinny speakers at home, so that they don’t know what music sounds like when it’s good – when the sound is well balanced and the volume is appropriately loud?

So I Googled for a bit (“concert too loud”). The most informative page I found was Edward Tufte commenting on the same issue on his web site (which has a whole lot of other interesting stuff too). Here are some of the responses:

The stage foldback (or monitor) system is independent of the main sound system and creates an intentionally different mix (often a separate one for each member of the band). The level is often extremely high to get control of the mix (eg if you have a double Marshall stack right next to you, the vocals in the foldback have to be loud enough to get above the guitar level). This does mean the house system (the audience’s) has to be loud enough to get above any ‘spill’ from the foldback system.

I had an interaction with a sound engineer setting up a performance. I expressed my concern over the high sound levels. He reassured me that his group had found that if the levels started low and then gradually increased, the congregation is not aware of the high levels of exposure.

In my rock club experiences, the sound engineer is typically the deafest person in the room. The engineers have subjected themselves to more loud music over the years than even the band members since many of them are “house” engineers or, if touring with bands, are out in front of the band night after night, soaking up the decibels. The ubiquity of “treble creep” is overcompensation caused by hearing that is literally notched out by damage in the higher tonal ranges. This explains the excruciating sharpness so common in live rock audio mixes these days.

I think another factor here is key, the specious practice of amplifying the drum kit. I think this got started when rock bands began playing arenas, but it then became fashionable to do this in even the most intimate of clubs. For anything but the most expansive club, the typical rock drummer is already playing at ear-splitting levels without any amplification whatsoever. Amping it just makes it worse, and a byproduct is that all the other instruments have to turn up to compete.

And a related comment regarding sound quality (from a standup comedian):

It is harder to be funny in a room with a very high ceiling – because the all-important start-up laughter from a small part of the audience has little contagion effect with the rest of the audience. The start-up laughter at a remark takes several seconds to go up to the high ceiling and come back down, too faint and too late to reach the yet-to-be amused members of the audience. The Comedy Connection has a low ceiling for good reason.

All quite interesting. I think the only conclusion from this is that in the future I will think twice before buying tickets for a concert by one of the big-name artists. The less mass-market ones are likely to care more about sound quality.

Today, we went home and enjoyed Khaled on CD instead.

We went to a concert earlier this evening – Syrian Sufi music with whirling dervishes. One lead singer, a flute, a zither, a percussionist, two whirlers, and 3 background vocalists. The lead singer was good and had a pleasant voice, and the zither player was very skilled. Some parts of the show were a bit coarse and rough – there was a tendency for the sounds to become indistinct, as the group gravitated towards the “more! louder! faster!” school of music, where a more subtle and nuanced style would have suited better. (They played some taped sufi music after the show, as people were leaving the venue, and the difference in quality was clear: the taped music had a heartbeat-like natural pulse, where this evening’s performers had a harsher feel.) Even so, the concert as a whole was pleasing.

I enjoy many sorts of religious music – gospel, hymns, Russian and Greek orthodox and Gregorian chants, qawwali etc. Music has a different quality when it has a soul, and musicians sound slightly different when they sing/play for their belief and not for money – their commitment and devotion shine through. And I like the calm and weighty feel of chanting.

(The concert venue was, quite fittingly, a converted church: LSO St. Luke’s, in Old Street. It’s a nice space, simple and open. The nave has been opened up completely, and a balcony built along the north and south sides; the stage is towards the East. The walls are bare, and all the large windows with many small panes have been left in place, although they’ve been covered up for some concerts. It should look great from the outside at night.)

I wonder what an Arabic-speaking Muslim would experience in a concert like this. I do not understand any of the content (calling it “lyrics” doesn’t seem entirely appropriate) and I only know purely factually that these are devotional chants. I cannot be part of it the same way as the dervishes are.

And I also wonder what music sounds and feels like in Eric’s head. I know it must be an experience that’s very different from mine. For me, the percussion-backed song / chanting was the best part of the performance – immersive, meditative, passionate. Eric on the other hand enjoyed the zither most, and I could see others in the audience agreeing with him. I found the zither too alien: even though I’ve heard fair amounts of non-Western music, it was too different from what I’m used to hearing, and its music kept slipping out of my grasp. There was nothing that I could recognise as melody or rhythm, and while it made a pleasant sound, I was unable to really appreciate it. Sort of like a babbling brook – pleasant but ultimately not interesting.

Interestingly, about a dozen people left early, at various points during the concert. Did they buy tickets without knowing what Middle Eastern Sufi music sounds like, and find it too strange?

Following from yesterday’s post: I’ve now found the Tom Waits “song” that I was looking for. It was “Russian Dance” from The Black Rider.

I wonder what the theatre show looks like. I’m imagining something dark and bizarre and twisted.

It took me years, literally, to get used to Tom Waits. It’s an acquired taste, sort of like whiskey or spicy food. Give any of those to a child and they’ll spit it out.

In the beginning I really disliked his music, but Eric liked it, so I kept hearing it again and again. With time, I got used to it, and after a while grew to really enjoy it. It grows on you. By now, some of his songs are among my absolute favourites – and I like them even more because in my head they are inextricably linked to Eric. To me, Tom Waits is Eric’s music (not that Eric’s dark and bizarre and twisted!) and listening to them always makes me think of him.

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen three performances of contemporary dance. In a way they were all similar, and all could be described by the same headline: “a humorous mixture of dance and circus”. Today’s performance was James Thierrée’s “La Veillée des Abysses”. I’ll try to write about the other two later, perhaps – “Opus Cactus” by Momix, and “Tricodex” by Lyon Opera Ballet.

The show had a decidedly French feel, the way Jeunet’s “Cité des enfants perdus” (“City of Lost Children”) could only be French. Somewhere between mime and dance, fanciful and intense, yet managing – like French circus/dance often does – to strike a balance between a wild imagination and a slight feeling of poetic sadness.

Five performers were all on stage all the time and made this a very coherent piece. While it wasn’t really a narrative, there was definitely an underlying story, with one scene fading smoothly into the next.

The first half circled in and around what seemed to be a dusty and ageing castle – a place of decaying opulence, with fading red velvet, cracked wood and ornate iron gates. The dancers themselves are dressed in half-tattered evening gowns and worn uniforms. The scenes can best be described as conversations that go on so long that they get out of hand. One of the reviews I read describes this part as being marooned in an old house – imagine this, and add gentle humour as the dancers start playing games to fill their long evenings. Trying to fit four people in a sofa for three, that then starts swallowing people. Or locking the gates, and making up elaborate passwords (passmoves?) consisting of such complicated gestures that the guardian himself forgets the correct order.

The story then shifts from evening to night, and stranger things start happening. A sleek green cat/dragon creature crawls and climbs on the gates, pulling the gate guardian into a lovely pas de deux on the gates. Decorative suits of armour transform into bats, and a princess with her maid turn into a menacing horse. All done very sparingly with simple materials and few moves, so that the wild and imaginative props stay secondary to the dancers themselves.

The tone then changes for a while, and the feeling of magic is replaced with a starker setting and less interesting sketches, where both the dancers’ actions and the audience’s laughs are predictable. But towards the end, the magic returns, now with a half-wrecked ship instead of a castle – with billowing white sails, a man swinging in a high lookout point, and high waves and wind.

The sounds are as well designed as the sets and costumes, and vary from live piano, to Nina Simone’s Lilac Wine and Tom Waits. (I know that Tom Waits song so well, but can’t remember which one it is… now I have to listen through all our Tom Waits CDs to find it!)

Dreamlike and fantastic, beautiful, combining playful humour with melancholy and decay. Wonderful piece.