Statistics of the past week

ONE each of disapponting and good theatre trips that bookended the working week. 'Private Lives' (Noel Coward) in a new production at Hampstead theatre on Monday - the only merit of the evening ended up being the venue itself. We'd not been there before but was hugely impressed by the building. The auditorium was almost a mini version of the fabulous new opear house in Copenhagen: lots of Scandinavian-style wood panels and good view/sound from every seat The cast and crew should be praised for their effort, which unfortunately was wasted on an underserving play. Coward's best moments, for me, are the farcical scenes involving multiple characters (I'm especially thinking of some of the most hilarious moments from Present Laughter) - which are the few truly funny moments in this play about an ex-couple bumping into each other on their respective (collective?) honeymoon with their new spouses. His two-person exchanges, be they smouldering or fiery moments, are not effective in any way. Pity. On Friday the ferociously topical 'Roaring Trade' (Soho Theatre, about - you guessed - a bunch of traders at an investment bank) played to a roaring full house. It reminded me of the (equally popular) store-floor-set production of Oxford Street we saw at Royal Court Upstairs last year, in that neither tried to be didactic about any grand theme or profound theme, but instead depicted a specific corner of life with totally convincing vitality from everyone involved.

TWO Japanese films at Barbican's 'After Tezuka' season, brilliantly curated by the resident expert Helen McCarthy. She's one of those people whose intrinsic enthusiasm for the object of her studies (which is an almost degrading term - Japanimation is clearly the air she breathes) is so totally infectious, her way of presenting the subject so succinct yet erudite, witty yet serious, that I would have happily gone along for the pre-screening talks alone. Of course the films themselves weren't half bad either: Dororo (which is actually a live action feature film) serves up all the best ingredients of a proper blockbuster, only with heaps more class and style than the regular Hollywood fare could ever dream of; Akira, being a 20-year-old manga animation, blends dizzying visual kaleidoscope, multi-layered narrative convolusion and metaphysical themes (Darwin, Nietsche, Foucault, Freud, you name it) all in one breath in such sweeping manner, that I stepped out of the dark screening room feeling physically drained.

THREE performers in the totally undefinable site-specific performance 'The Memory of W.T. Stead', in the most unexpected - and unpredictable - space that is the Steinway showrooms on Marylebone Lane. There were two hour-long performances each on three consecutive evenings, with seven invitees/audiences at each, for a specific reason. It's the sort of things that happen a lot more in downtown Manhattan (and probably far too much), but not nearly enough in London (which has both the venue possibilities and the potential audience to offer - someone smart will soon put two and two together, no doubt). We're seated in the eerily surreal ground-floor showroom, each between a pair of Steinways. They become performers already in this silence and semi darkness. Then someone appears, equipping us each with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and all-concealing eyemasks. With the murmurred instructions, reminiscences, echoes and fantasies through the headphones (pre-recorded and live) we enter a mysterious world with our invisible guides. There's a sombre-looking piano tuner in the far corner of the room. Or is he there? How did he get there? Are we really in a perfectly real, perfectly tangible building moments away from the bustling Oxford Street, or have we somehow fallen into a (David) Lynchian world of intrigues? The performers (Swedish dance duo Lundahl & Seitl, British pianist Cassie Yukawa) explored every inch of the available space, both in the tuning workshops and in our consciousness, and made perfect judgement of the elasticity of their materials. We emerged out of the building, a bit stumbling in our steps trying to find our way towards the tube station. It would have been more reassurling to have the directions whispered to us through the headphones.

FOUR pianists heard in contrasting circumstances. On Tuesday, Cassie Yukawa's performance of Bach's Fugue in A minor (BWV 543, arranged by Liszt) was the deeply personal yet powerful climax of the performance installation 'The Memory of W.T.Stead' (see above) - all the more striking as she conjured the entire piece out of almost total darkness, literally. On Thursday, Simon Crawford Phillips and Philip Moore's piano duo recital at LSO St Lukes offered two 20th-century classics by two Russians who were both master composer-pianists themselves - Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Knowing both well as iconic cornerstones of the orchestral repertoire of the last hundred years, hearing them in this version, side by side, was a revelation, with the shining winter sun as backdrop. On Saturday, Nikolai Demidenko gave an effortlessly exhilarating reading of Shostakovich's second piano concerto with Philharmonia Orchestra and Tugan Sokhiev. I felt all the more fortunate for having heard the rehearsal the previous afternoon in the intimacy of Henry Wood Hall - as the only 'audience' up in the gallery, I was washed over by the opening strings of the second movement, and then the piano solo, as played by this London-resident Russian, made me realise for the first time how Shostakovich did the impossible: the cross between Mozart and Rachmaninoff.

(No.) FIVE of Tchaikovsky's immortal symphonic output, with Philharmonia Orchestra under an increasingly impressive Tugan Sokhiev. One of those pieces that I know inside out (not least because I had to do a three-hour presentation about it during my academic days, now happily in the past) and frankly had got a bit sick of (reason: see previous brackets). And he gave such a fresh reading, including some remarkably daring but effective tempi and - all too rare in Tchaikovsky interpretations - meticulous precision, that it shed interesting new light on the piece for me. In a week when an older and (for now) much more famous Russian compatriot is giving a string of headlining concerts across town at the Barbican, with his own two home bands from London and St Petersburg, it pays real tribute to Sokhiev's star quality that his two Philharmonia concerts filled Festival Hall. Yes, the programms offered some big blockbuster items (second half of Saturday's concert was Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony), but London's audience wouldn't really be so generous with their ovation afterwards if the performances hadn't been so genuinely outstanding. I expect his star to rise much higher still in years to come. On top of everything else, he's so nice in person that it's impossible to envy his posession of youth, talent and good looks.

SIX more cultural events I'll have been to by this time next week. If you prefer to read about something else, let me know.

TWELVE: the number of times a certain friend told me he went to see 'Push' (the lauded collaboration last year between maverick British choreographer Russell Maliphant and iconic Parisian ballerina Silvie Guillem), because he liked it so much. And you thought I was a culture vulture of the mad kind?!