CD: Jethro Tull - The String Quartets

★★★ CD: JETHRO TULL – THE STRING QUARTETS Is Ian Anderson's new LP faux-classical or just its own thing?

Is Ian Anderson's new LP faux-classical or just its own thing?

On Jethro Tull's classic "Songs from the Wood" Ian Anderson promised "all things refined". And refined the band certain has been. Musically educated, too. For 40-odd years they have specialised in baroque rock and minstrel ballads all served up with harpsichords and flutes. There were even a couple of albums featuring a full orchestra. Yet, notably, string quartets have only made the occasional appearance. 

In a way, then, you could say an album like this is actually a little overdue. The thing is, though, Jethro Tull – The String Quartets isn't really a Tull album. Nor is it even really an Ian Anderson LP. For the most part, this is the sound of arranger John O'Hara and the Carducci Quartet. The results are really rather convincing. 

That's partly down to the source material. Jethro Tull songs often start with ersatz 16th century melodies which then progressively move towards blues rock. O'Hara, however, pulls it all the other way. "Sossity Waiting", for instance, takes the melodies of "Sossity: You're a Woman" and "Reasons for Waiting" and arranges the flute and strings to sound like the work of an early English composer. Where a heavier more syncopated sound is needed, such as on (Living) "In the Past", it's achieved using slurs up the fingerboard and heavy duty plucking.

For classical purists, of course, the thought of Tull's music becoming even more faux baroque will be horrendous. But actually the album finds its most authentic voice the further it gets away from the originals. This is helped by Ian Anderson's sparing use of his own vocals. One song, in particular, illustrates why too much Anderson wasn't right. "Wond'ring Aloud" – featuring the main man on both guitar and vocals – was, no doubt, included because the original's use of strings virtually inspired the whole project. But it's not a particularly stirring version. Tull fans will be far more taken with the unexpected way O'Hara, Anderson and the Carducci Quartet have reinterpreted "Locomotive Breath". That really is something special.

@russcoffey

Overleaf: watch Ian Anderson talking about the String Quartet project

Michelangelo & Sebastiano, National Gallery

Exceptional loans redeem poor display in a tale of two Renaissance masters

The story of two characters whose friendship ended in bitter enmity is juicy enough for a typical spring blockbuster and yet this is an exhibition with a serious and scholarly bent. While the National Gallery is no stranger to academic exhibitions they are usually relatively low-key, occupying the small space of the Sunley Room, for which this exhibition feels as if it might originally have been conceived.

Madonnas and Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

★★★★★ MADONNAS AND MIRACLES: THE HOLY HOME IN RENAISSANCE ITALY, FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM Lovely, scholarly, multi-sensory insight into domestic Italy 500 years ago

Lovely, scholarly, multi-sensory insight into domestic Italy 500 years ago

A lovely, scholarly and gently revelatory exhibition, Madonnas and Miracles explores a neglected area of the perennially popular and much-studied Italian Renaissance – the place of piety in the Renaissance home. We are used to admiring the great 15th- and 16th-century gilded altarpieces and religious frescoes of Italian churches, palace chapels and convents, but this exhibition – one of the main outcomes of a generous four- year European funded research project – shows how the laity experienced religion in the context of their everyday domestic lives, as well as during extraordinary occurrences, such as the experience of divine miracles within the intimacy of their own four walls.

So we have a fascinating array of higher-end religious images (painting, drawing and sculpture) created to facilitate domestic devotion (some by notable artists), alongside household objects such as cutlery, furniture, textiles, ceramics, votive panels, books, rosaries and jewellery, and even tiny, screwed-up pieces of paper containing images and prayers. Pedlars and merchants (taking advantage of early methods of mass production, such as printing) produced and sold a wide range of affordable products alongside the more elite works. These may be cheaper and simpler, such as an endearingly clumsy early painted statuette of the nursing Virgin – but they were nonetheless as deeply treasured as some of the more luxurious objects (for example, an exquisite carved ivory Comb with the Annunciation, c.1450–1500, pictured below, Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin).Comb with The Annunciation , c.1450–1500 Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin The show – which has deep tentacles into the University of Cambridge – looks at how richly religious imagery and home life interacted with each other, framing activities from getting up, eating, going about one’s business, avoiding everyday perils (e.g. rabid dogs) and going to bed, to landmark occasions such as marriage, birth and death (a home birth or a "good" death was, of course, an intensely spiritual experience). It also shows how ideals of domesticity helped shape ideas of spirituality, resulting in "homely" religious images that adults and children could readily identify with. The Master of the Osservanza’s small luminous painted triptych of the Birth of the Virgin, a suitable object for female devotion, shows us Mary’s aged mother Anna, propped up in a bed with a glorious golden counterpane (in a prosperous domestic interior) shortly after miraculously giving birth.

Giovanni Antonio Gualterio, Corpus for a crucifix, c.1599 © Victoria and Albert MuseumThe Fitzwilliam’s galleries have been broken up into small, richly coloured (forest green), Renaissance rooms with low-level lighting, so that the colours and materials of the paintings and objects really glow – to encourage prolonged looking. It works beautifully. Giovanni Antonio Gualterio’s ivory of Christ’s Corpus for a Crucifix , c.1599 (pictured)– which would be easily overlooked in its London "home" (amongst the treasures of the V&A in London) – is one of the highlights of the show. It succeeds (as it would as a treasured object in a private context) in inviting identification with Christ’s humanity and suffering and is intended, no doubt, to inspire love mingled with pain and acceptance.

Another highlight of the show is a large domestic "tondo" (round) panel painting from the studio of Botticelli, fresh from its recent conservation, with the dull varnish removed and the original vibrancy revealed. It is a refined, decorative and tender work, rendered affordable (for home consumption) by the fact that it is a studio production, lacking the emotional and compositional complexity of a work by Botticelli’s own hand, and devoid of the elaborate gold embellishment that a wealthy patron would have demanded.

Studio of Sandro Botticelli, Virgin and Child , c.1480–90 © The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge A more archaic Madonna and Child by Pietro de Niccolo da Orvieto (first half of 15th century) – with its painted marble back – also revealed by recent cleaning shows how such an image (part Byzantine icon/part Renaissance naturalism/part dream-like abstraction) would have been handled as an object, with the Virgin’s intense and benign gaze designed to meet the reverent gaze of the viewer, while the Christ child’s hand delicately touching his mother’s neck invites touching back. (Pictured above left: Studio of Sandro Botticelli, Virgin and Child, c.1480–90 © The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge)

A rare drawing by Fra Angelico of The Dead Christ (c.1432-4) has areas which are marked and abraded, possibly through the act of kissing and touching (the points of contact, as the catalogue explains, "seem to correspond with the places where Mary Magdalene and John the Evangelist touch and kiss Christ’s body in the Descent from the Cross altarpiece" (the figure is repeated from Fra Angelico’s masterpiece in the Museo di San Marco in Florence).

Among the more surprising objects are four 16th-century ebony or ivory-handled knives, each engraved with one of four voice parts and their associated music notation (see gallery of images overleaf). The effect, as the four voices sung the Benediction and Grace at the meal in a high-end home, can be experienced on the adjacent sound station (this is a well-designed multi-sensory exhibition). Another object, the humblest in the exhibition, is a tiny piece of paper, which would have probably been purchased cheaply in the piazza, containing three prayers (two on one side to protect against fever and thunderstorms, one on the other to protect against lost items). This early form of insurance – inhabiting a grey area between devotion, magic and superstition – would have been worn in a pouch close to the body.

At the end of the exhibition, we have the treat of being able to see 27 votive tablets, temporarily removed from the cluttered walls of three different church shrines in Italy, which have never been loaned before and are from three lesser-known regions (Naples, the Marche and the Venetian terrafirma). These cheap-as-chips panels, painted in tempera, give thanks for miracles received, with their imagery reflecting the response to prayers in moments of crisis (when the Virgin or Saints intervene on a family’s behalf). One – from the same area that has recently been ravaged by earthquakes – poignantly shows buildings collapsing from earthquake tremors around a family praying fervently in a domestic interior (who survived to commission the plaque). Here, thanks to this jewel of a show, we truly have history and a history of art told by ordinary people, rather than by wealthy rulers and learned institutions.

Click for more images from the exhibition

Bruegel, Holburne Museum, Bath

★★★★ BRUEGEL, HOLBURNE MUSEUM, BATH A distinguished artistic lineage explored through one of the country's finest collections

A distinguished artistic lineage explored through one of the country's finest collections

Painted in c.1640, David Teniers the Younger’s Boy Blowing Bubbles depicts a theme that would have been entirely familiar to his wife’s great-grandfather, the founder of one of art’s most illustrious dynasties, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569). Indicating the fleeting nature of life, the motif carries proverbial associations, its moral message one that in the 17th century was understood principally as memento mori.

Othello, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Kurt Egyiawan's Moor takes arms against a sea of production troubles, but in vain

There's no reason why ruffs and candles shouldn't mesh with bursts of contemporary speech, song and lighting, given a defter hand than director Ellen McDougall's. Shakespeare's timeless issues of racism and sexism have plenty of mileage in them, though in less skewed proportions than they find here. Many of this production's components are promising, but the whole is a strident mess.

Hamlet, Almeida Theatre

HAMLET, ALMEIDA THEATRE Andrew Scott, predictably unpredictable, is subject to Robert Icke's slow-burn clarity

Andrew Scott, predictably unpredictable, is subject to Robert Icke's slow-burn clarity

How often do you leave a production of Shakespeare's most layered drama in tears, thinking "what an astonishing play!" even more than "what a fine Hamlet!" (or not)? Last night the Bard proved even greater than his Dane. Not that Andrew Scott was ever less than mesmerising and unpredictable. But it was Robert Icke, a director you might expect to play fast and loose with text and structure, who in giving us more Hamlet than most these days respected the slow burn and the long vision, with a few surprises but no gimmicks on the journey.

Scott will not disappoint either his huge fan club or Hamlet hunters. His Prince's rages are terrifying, triggered by the conjuration of the ghost from close-circuit security screens – a very real father allowing the bereaved son to express physical affection; there's no ambiguity about his appearances, however much Hamlet might doubt their provenance. I fear slightly for Scott's vocal self-preservation in extremis; his range is higher than usual, embracing a spooky falsetto that must be unique among leading men, but also throat-ripping just below the break. There's a long way to go in the run, though selfishly I'm glad he pushed it so far last night.

The real revelation, though, comes in the quiet talking, broaching an intimacy which the Almeida encourages (what a privilege to hear a top-notch Hamlet at such close range). We're in no doubt where this bewildered young man's heart lies: at first, with Ophelia; with the memory of his old relationship with a female Guildenstern (Amaka Okofor, sympathetic); when pushed, with his mother; but above all in directing the play-within-a-play, a gamble enhanced by David Rintoul doubling Ghost and Player King, taking up with supreme eloquence the Pyrrhus speech from the well-educated prince who knows it so well. Icke encourages absolute unhurried naturalness in the test of the play itself, shared between Rintoul and Marty Cruickshank as Player Queen (pictured below). Hamlet's got the video camera trained on Claudius, sitting in the front row until he gets up and simply walks across the stage rather than crying for lights. The assembled crowd sits in anxious silence, and so do we, until the cue for the first interval strikes.Players scene in Almeida Hamlet
That's brilliant toying with the audience. So, too, are Hamlet's soliloquies, delivered very directly and mostly quietly to us, Scott valuing the silences and pauses, using eloquent arm and hand gestures held high to articulate the sense. The best of all, though, is a monologue rather than a voice in the head: Hamlet's to Horatio with the skull of Yorick in his hand. The quiet philosophy is well established by Barry Aird's gravedigger. When you listen to this reflection on mortality in Scott's performance, you have to wonder if any poet ever captured thoughts on transience and the passing of the world's glory more eloquently.

Icke is master of pace and tension, though not everyone in the ensemble really comes up to the mark. Luke Thompson's Laertes is a hollow counterfeit of Scott's Hamlet – maybe that's the point – and Angus Wright, as in Icke's Oresteia, seems too much of a stuffed shirt to play a calculating authority figure like Claudius (though that, too may be the intention). Reaction, though, is all – supremely so from Juliet Stevenson's Gertrude (pictured below) in as vivid a climactic mother-son scene as I've ever witnessed; the terrorised makes her mark as much as the terroriser, while the body-dragging and its aftermath are among Scott's most hallucinatory moments.

Juliet Stevenson as Gertrude in Almeida HamletThis Gertrude's stares and defiant flickers at the man she fell in lust with once she knows the truth are compelling, too; you can't take your eyes off Stevenson, and you're drawn in to what is, along with Rintoul's, the most beautiful verse-speaking of the evening, the "willow grows aslant a brook" narrative. Jessica Brown Findlay rises to the challenge of Ophelia's madness, taking over the mantle of Hamlet's calms and psychotic rages in his absence. Peter Wight gauges her father's control-freakery at just the right naturalistic level.

Quietly remarkable, Hildegard Bechtler's sets work in tandem with Natasha Chivers' lighting and the best of Tom Gibbons' sound – I'm not so keen on its ambient omnipresence, but the use of Dylan songs is superb – to change scenes with cinematic ease. It's good to have the Norwegian threat played out on Danish television, and the fencing filmed, too, with some of the crucial lines purposefully drowned out by Dylan.

I won't spoil the visual wonder of what happens as Hamlet approaches the shores of the undiscovered country before TV gives him a state funeral (and a final publicity shot of happy royals which is more than just deadly ironic). Suffice it to say that the image which has most stuck with me from any Hamlet is when Ingmar Bergman had the besmirched Ophelia, restored to her flower-crowned innocence, emerge from the huddle of umbrella-holding mourners at her funeral and walk slowly downstage centre and off. Icke and his team achieve a parallel wonder here. The overall impact is to be taken in tandem with his Mary Stuart, a play of almost equal resonance with no less revelatory performances, as a diptych to match the wonders of his Greek season (the all-day Iliad and Odyssey readings; for me, the Oresteia not so much). What on earth on the same level can he turn his attention to next?

 

OTHER GREAT DANES

Andrius Mamontovas, Globe to Globe. Lithuanian take on the Danish play puts on a frantic disposition

Benedict Cumberbatch, Barbican. Visuals threaten to swamp Shakespeare – and, yes, Sherlock

David Tennant, RSC/BBC. Star looks for life in an infinite space beyond the Tardis

Lars Eidinger, Schaubühne Berlin. Acrobatic Hamlet, outshone by the earth and the rain

Maxine Peake, Royal Exchange, Manchester. An underwhelming production, but Peake is gripping as the young Prince

Michael Sheen, Young Vic. Sheen is riveting as the crazed Danish Prince in Ian Rickson's terrifying psychiatric-hospital staging

Rory Kinnear, National Theatre. Kinnear isn’t a romantic Prince, but an unsettled, battling one in Nicholas Hytner's staging which is modern, militaristic and unfussy

 

Overlear: Robert Icke's career so far

Best of 2016: Art

BEST OF 2016: ART A handful of new galleries, British modernism revived and old masters revisited

A handful of new galleries, British modernism revived and old masters revisited

Before we consign this miserable year to history, there are a few good bits to be salvaged; in fact, for the visual arts 2016 has been marked by renewal and regeneration, with a clutch of newish museum directors getting into their stride, and spectacular events like Lumiere London, and London’s Burning bringing light in dark times.

Love's Labour's Lost/Much Ado About Nothing, RSC, Theatre Royal Haymarket

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST / MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, RSC, THEATRE ROYAL HAYMARKET These sunny comedies are rich in delight but lacking in darkness

These sunny comedies are rich in delight but lacking in darkness

“The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.” A sudden cold breeze blows through the endless summer afternoon of Love’s Labour's Lost in the play’s final moments. Death enters Shakespeare’s Edenic garden and innocence is lost. But what, asks director Christopher Luscombe, might happen if those songs were to return? What if these youthful courtships were resumed by characters older, if not wiser, scarred by life but still hopeful of love?

Corkin, Siglo de Oro, Allies, Shoreditch Church

CORKIN, SIGLO DE ORO, ALLIES, SHOREDITCH CHURCH Choral light in midwinter darkness

Choral light in midwinter darkness

Advent is as profitable for choirs as it is tricky to programme. How to delight the palates of carol-hungry audiences while offering them new treats? How to reconcile the fairy-lights of ubiquitous consumption and satiation with the Biblical call of the season as a time to wait, take stock and look forward?

The Sixteen, Kings Place

THE SIXTEEN, KINGS PLACE A glorious finish to this year's Choral Pilgrimage

A glorious finish to this year's Choral Pilgrimage

And so it comes to an end. Six months, 33 concerts, and many miles of travelling later, The Sixteen’s annual Choral Pilgrimage is now finished for another year. With so many concerts it’s inevitable that the singers’ relationship to the repertoire evolves and develops; the performances we heard last night will not have been those the audience at St John’s College, Cambridge experienced back in April. So what is the effect of living so intimately with this small handful of works?

Subscribe to 16th century