concert review: Peer Gynt at SFS

[calimac]

Well, that was a mistake.

I was foolish enough to be attracted by the concept of a program combining Edvard Grieg's incidental music to Ibsen's Peer Gynt - thus implying more than the two standardized suites of it - with Peer Gynt music by other composers, initially listed as "including" Alfred Schnittke and Robin Holloway, but turning out to include nobody else, which I think is a violation of the rights of the word "including".

But instead of a Peer Gynt-themed concert program, what we got was a semi-staged production of an abridged (fortunately) version of the play, with bits of the contributing composers' music inserted where appropriate.

This did have the advantage of clarifying the role in the play of Grieg's music, often criticized as incongruously sweet for Ibsen's cold, inhuman drama. What it does is cut the bitterness, same as a little sugar cuts chocolate's.

But not enough. Staging it this way turned the focus from the music to the play itself. From the one perspective, this forces you to have to care about Peer and his adventures, and I just don't. He's a willfully unlikeable character who stomps on the feelings of everyone he knows. And from the other, such a play performed under such circumstances is sure, in acting and directing, to be deadly, and oh, was this ever.

This was the most tedious performance I've attended since Menlo put on Stravinsky's pointless L'Histoire du Soldat with equally desperate actors, and that was a lot shorter.

Comments

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

I, on the other hand, was entranced and am delighted that I went.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm relieved that somebody liked it.

I found Ibsen - Strindberg too - pretty deadly when I saw plays by them at Ashland. Scandinavian music is definitely my thing; Scandinavian drama, based on these experiences, evidently not.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

By contrast, I saw an absolutely magical production of Peer Gynt - but that was the Royal Shakespeare Company with a translation by David Rudkin, that transposed the action to Ulster. Listening to Derek Jacobi and an ensemble of dedicated professionals wrap their tongues and understanding around the language and accents of Northern Ireland was an exercise in sheer indulgent pleasure, to the point where I have almost no memory of what the actual play was actually about...

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I do not know the story of Ibsen's play, or of the original fairytale it is based on. When Z was a child loving the music he asked the story, and I made one up based on Grieg's titles -- so there's a mountain king with a hall -- and the feel of the music. Mine is a cheerful traditional fairytale in which the main character is definitely likeable and the main event is a game of Grandmother's Footsteps with trolls.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Have you seen this video clip (from this year's Golden Globes) example of making up stories based solely on titles?

Of course, that was deliberately bad, and I'm sure you did a fine job with Peer Gynt, better than Ibsen's original (as if that'd be difficult). I'd love to read it if you wrote it up and sold it. Another useful service would be to provide a better story for Khachaturian's Gayne, an awesomely mawkish Socialist Realist ballet about heroic Stakhanovites and evil deviationists on a collective farm, but it's got this great music ...