Valentin Silvestrov (born 1937), present at this opening concert by the London Sinfonietta under the dogged direction of conductor-pianist Reinbert de Leeuw, offered post-Webernian textures that were positively glittering.Yet it was difficult to find much continuity in the fragmentation of his Symphony No 2. And while his setting of the "Ode to a Nightingale", coolly delivered by the mezzo Susan Bickley, set up a clear image of icy birdsong against slow-moving chords, it offered little response to the changing moods of Keats's poem.As for the opener, Dancer on a Tightrope by Sophia Gubaidulina (born 1931): this dialogue, in which Andrew Haveron's violin strained upwards to escape the menacing clusters of John Constable's piano, so exactly duplicated its programme description it hardly seemed necessary to hear it at all.. The electro-pop star Imogen Heap's music has been used inThe OC and Six Feet Under, as well as in major films including The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Garden State and Shrek 2. Now Heap, famous for her layered textures of vocals and electronic rhythms, has adapted songs from her latest album, Speak for Yourself, for Frantic Assembly's new physical theatre production pool (no water), written by Mark Ravenhill. "I love the challenge of being able to adapt my songs for the show. In some songs I have taken out lyrics and made it more instrumental so that you are not being thrown on a different tangent to where the actual play is meant to be taking you," says Heap.Pool (no water) is a macabre tale about an artist who has a reunion with old friends. When the host falls in an empty pool of water, her friends, jealous of her wealth and success, take photographs of her bruised body for an exhibition about "the healing process", turning her suffering into a work of art, until the host gets the upper hand again."I had to take one of the songs to pieces because timing-wise it had to be perfect for the movements," says Heap. This book is the distillation of David Brown's prodigious knowledge of Tchaikovsky's life and works, previously presented to scholars in four volumes.
This more accessible volume is directed at readers "who may claim little or no musical competence", and can either be read as straight biography (by leaving out descriptions of the works), or used as a listening guide. The two of them deliver Mamet's fractured, groping and concealing dialogue beautifully. Cattrall begins as an impeccably groomed 1950s housewife but - under the weight of wanting to make a man of John at the same time as being given a good reason to hate men - fractures into a frighteningly vindictive aggressor; deflecting anger at her spouse on the two males left in her life.Henshall is excellent, radiating concern for the boy and transmitting his love of the mother and craving for a surrogate family. Readers looking for biography will find much to fascinate them, but may be frustrated by the tantalising glimpses Brown offers.
At the end of the first scene in this unbrokenly performed 65-minute play, he discovers a letter with a message that signifies that the male-bonding trip is off permanently.The boy is left to the misguided mercies of his mother (Kim Cattrall) and her gay, long-time friend, Del (Douglas Henshall). The gradual revelation of his complicity in the husband's adultery is painful to watch.The play's network of charged objects and duplicitous symbols (from an old photograph now viewed differently, to the husband's German pocket knife) is enhanced in this eloquently designed production, with its steep unearthly staircase which John ascends at the end, holding the knife with which he may cut himself or cut himself free.To 25 November (08700 606 624). All children are natural philosophers in the defamiliarising, fundamental questions they ask about the conundrums of existence and the world.But John is precocious in this department. He is also troubled by voices (echoes of marital rows, or premonitions of the impending marital split?). In The Cryptogram, his 1994 play revived in an immaculate and deeply disturbing production by Josie Rourke, the focus is on 11-year-old John, who is brought to naggingly-anxious-and-needy life in a performance of extraordinary empathy by Oliver Coopersmith. It's 1959 in Chicago and on the night before a projected rite-of-passage camping trip with his father, John cannot sleep.
