Stewart's Blog

Posted 2007-08-21 12:12:19

Klimt - a film review

Posted 2007-08-21 11:30:23

If life seems to be rushing by in a flash, if weeks appear to pass in an instant and you wish everything would just slow down a little, then take in a screening of Klimt, where you’ll spend an hour and thirty-seven minutes that feel like an eternity.

The film is written and directed by Raoul Ruiz and stars John Malkovich as the great Viennese painter, and right from the top, as the opening credits roll above a musical score composed by Jorge Arriagada, you know that something is terribly wrong.

The music is faux-Mahler, with Arriagada creating a pastiche of Mahleresque orchestration, phrasing and sudden shifts of mood and tempo without, needless to say, any of that composer’s genius. Later on you hear snippets of Berg’s Violin Concerto – specifically the open 5ths from the beginning of that work – accompanied by cheap, faux-Berg. If Ruiz was so intent on incorporating the musical sounds of the era, perhaps he should have used original compositions, as Visconti did so evocatively with Mahler’s Fifth Symphony Adagietto for the Death in Venice soundtrack. But that might have created an equally serious problem for Mr. Ruiz: a brilliant musical score overwhelming a tedious, disjointed and incoherent film.

There is no plot line, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But the film tells us little about Klimt himself, and unlike the great art films – and this film is trying its hardest to be an art film – it sheds no real light on the human condition.

The film opens with Klimt, the victim of syphilis, on his deathbed, and the “story” unfolds as a hallucinatory dream. Characters inexplicably weave in and out of the narrative. There is the requisite discussion of art, and the viewer learns too that Klimt really liked sex, and had lots of children for whom he took no responsibility. Malkovich sleepwalks through the role.

Klimt is such a huge disappointment because, with the rich material it had to draw from and the talent involved in making it, it should have been much better.

Great works of art often present demands on the public. Just like the film’s musical score, with its veneer of Mahler and Berg, Klimt has the aspirations and veneer of great art without being art. It looks intellectual, and is difficult to understand - but dig into it and you find there just ain’t much there.

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Remembering John Wyre

Posted 2007-04-20 09:28:45

On March 25th a memorial concert for percussionist John Wyre was held at Toronto’s Music Gallery. John was a remarkable person and a unique artist who I feel honoured to have known since I was a young percussion student. He passed away on October 31 at the age of 65 in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

For most of his adult life John, who was born in Philadelphia, lived in Toronto where he’d moved to assume the timpani chair of the TSO in 1966. He was a wonderful timpanist, who drew a warm, dark sound from the instrument. Seiji Ozawa prized his talents so highly that he enlisted him to perform with the Boston Symphony whenever he could.

He played for the TSO for eleven years, and anyone that attended concerts in those days surely won’t have forgotten him: tall and slim, with a long, flowing beard and shoulder-length hair, he was a doppelganger for Jesus Christ himself. And many young percussionists, myself included, were followers.

He was 1960s hip, and his downtown apartment, above a hairdresser on Yonge Street south of St.Clair, was unlike anything I’d ever seen.

I remember the thrill I felt walking up the narrow staircase and into a room filled with exotic instruments: Balinese nipple gongs, assorted African and Chinese drums, cymbals of all shapes and sizes, and bells hanging everywhere. He collected flower pots too, which he’d suspended from the ceiling and would play with yarn mallets. He was in love with sound in its purist form.

He also had brake drums (yes, the ones from cars; strike them and they produce a resonant “ping”) so I paid a visit to a wrecker for a set of my own. They were proudly displayed in my bedroom, and when I hit them with a mallet, bits of rust would spill onto the floor. I also collected some bells and picked up a dholak – a North Indian hand drum that I never learned to play.

In 1971 John co-founded the renowned percussion group Nexus. Each member of this remarkable ensemble brought something unique to the whole, but I can’t help thinking that within John, more than anyone, rested its soul.

In the early 1980s John began producing and directing a series of monumental World Drum festivals. He pulled together 250 drummers for Vancouver’s Expo ’86 – including tribal drummers from Africa and Indonesian gamelan orchestras. Rhombus Media documented the event in the film World Drums.

He retired from Nexus in 2002 and, with his wife Jean Donelson, moved to St. John’s Newfoundland in order to focus on music composition. He had already distinguished himself as a composer, with his Connexus having been performed by the TSO as well as the Cleveland Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. I only saw him once after that, at a concert in Toronto. He’d written a book, his memoirs, which I bought and had him inscribe. I spoke to him briefly over the phone when I heard that he was struggling with cancer of the jaw. It came as a shock, though, when I heard that it had taken his life.

The memorial concert brought together musicians that had been close to John. Several of his compositions were performed, as were pieces from Africa, Brazil, Georgia and the Middle East. An old interview was broadcast. Bill Cahn, of Nexus, and percussionist Sal Ferreras shared reminiscences. Though most that attended were personally touched by John’s passing, the tone was upbeat – a celebration of a profoundly rich and rewarding life. But when Nexus performed the final work, a traditional Zimbabwean piece called Tongues, I choked up a little.

The lead instrument of the piece is the mbira, also known as a thumb piano. It’s mounted within a gourd topped with beads that buzz ever so lightly when the tongues of the instrument are plucked. The sound it creates is clear and gentle. The music itself has a haunting beauty; simple and direct, it has a lilt to it that produces a calming effect. It wasn’t until I began writing this piece that I looked up Tongues on Nexus Percussion, where I read: “In the Shona culture of Zimbabwe, the mbira is strongly associated with memories of departed ancestors and with the experience of remembering in general.”

Mbira is also the name of the mystical music the instrument produces. John himself was a spiritual man, and I discovered that this was his favourite piece. Not surprisingly, I heard a lot of John in this music.

He will be remembered by his colleagues and friends as a unique musical voice and a beautiful human being.

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