Longing For Fluency Of Yesteryear

The Age

Saturday October 18, 2008

Clive O'Connell, Reviewer

BOOK OF LONGING

State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, October 15-17 Running time: 95 minutes

THIS collaboration between Canadian poet-songwriter Leonard Cohen and composer Philip Glass enjoyed its Australian premiere in March at the Adelaide Festival, a co-sponsor of its commissioning. In neither words nor music is original ground being broken; rather, two senior figures in North American culture revisit - and not with much success - themes and techniques that both have explored for many years. The products are at best soporific, at worst tedious; Thursday's live-performance experience of Book of Longing resulted in making this listener yearn for release of a more immediate kind than spiritual/physical fulfilment.

Glass contributes keyboard input to the instrumental octet that supports these songs and provides interludes between them. None of the well-amplified players impresses for well-shaped phrases; in fact, a good deal of the solo work is roughly hewn, although certain segments, like the saxophone solo of Andrew Sterman and Gail Kruvand's straining double bass, made inventive gestures rather than following the usual Bach-exercise cell repetition that, naturally enough, typified much of the night's vocal and instrumental labor.

In choosing singers Glass has paid more attention to their expressive abilities than technical expertise, so bass-baritone Daniel Keeling showed a nice enough timbre in the centre of his register and a welcome verbal clarity but the top and bottom notes of his part were areas of tension. Will Erat's tenor, pleasant and light, remained under-amplified in solos and ensemble work; mezzo Tara Hugo entered willingly into the muffled raunchiness of A Sip of Wine, setting the pace for her colleagues by focusing on the work's emotional landscape, exercising the same romantic mobility that Glass adopts when playing his solo piano music. Soprano Dominique Plaisant lived up to her name, showing clear signs of orthodox training with few signs of the old-time chanteuse style that permeated her peers' work.

As well as being provided with a booklet of the Cohen poems, the audience was treated to plenty of the poet's black-line drawings and water-colours, projected on to a set of panels behind the octet. Mainly self-portraits and female nudes, their quality did not impress and you wondered if they would have attracted any attention outside this concert's context. If intended as a visual complement to the musical action, they succeeded chiefly in showing that Cohen's self-absorption extends to art forms outside his verse.

Perhaps the poet's admirers - and they are legion - might have gained something from this concert but its overall impact was dour; even the attempts at humour seemed to lack bite. Glass' vocal settings tend to become glutinous when he moves into three or four-part harmony, but some of the instrumental complexes still make you sit up to decipher what's going on; not often, but enough to jolt you out of the temptation to drift along with the inevitable ostinatos and relentless arpeggios that never develop into new patterns with that persuasive fluency evident in the composer's music of 20years ago.

© 2008 The Age

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