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?!

Another not-too-busy week

Monday: re-viewing of Woody Allen's under-rated classic 'Deconstructing Harry' on DVD. Funny how we often say of an actor 'Oh but he/she's always just playing him/her-self in whatever role...' and that's usually meant as a negative remark. For me the one exception is Allen the actor. You can't possibly picture him as anything other than the quintessential, neurotic, hapless, highly intellectual, vaguely nihilistic Jewish New Yorker. And why should he be?

Tuesday: the Guardian interview with David Hare at the NFT (I still refuse to call it the 'BFI Southbank'). We hadn't seen any of the screenings at the Hare season (TV films, really mostly 'plays on TV') but recently saw Gethsemane, his latest, at the National, which has just a few more final performances. Apart from the predictable moment when he couldn't help expressing irritation at critics who'd trashed The Reader ('Oh how satisfying it was to know that we lived amongst people who enjoy such moral certainties!'), it was a most enjoyable session. On the BBC's change in attitude towards drama (specifically, stage drama) over the years: 'Basically, journalists distrust fiction because they don't believe what we do that, by lying, you get to the truth more easily.' TV's 'fundamentally transient and transitory nature' distinguishes it from, say, the stage. On how/why all good plays are political on some level: 'The way in which what is happening makes us who we are.'

Wednesday and Thursday: in Paris, attending the Orchestre de Paris concert with a battery of Chinese artists: conductor Long Yu, cellist Jian Wang, composer Qigang Chen, and the army of (beautiful young female) soloists required for the latter's masterpiece 'Iris devoilee'. I'd got to know the work very well from recording but it was the first time I heard it live. A very full Salle Pleyel which greeted the artists with a thundering ovation at the end. A quick but efficient walking tour of the Marais (emphatically my favourite neighbourhood in Paris) and lots and lots of scrumptious food. Of which more later.

Friday: Aurelien Bury's uncategorisable, and totally triumphant theatre piece 'Les sept planches de la Ruse' at the Barbican. Simply stunning. My only regret being that I couldn't get more friends to see it as there was only one more performance left. It was obvious on Friday that, despite the mixed reviews (the critics really didn't get it this time! I'll write more about it later if possible) word of mouth had clearly got around already that this was a show not to be missed. I walked out of the theatre thinking how there was not a single wrong note in the entire production in any way, and our friend YY couldn't stop smiling with pride at the fabulous performers from her hometown, Dalian.

Saturday: 2 hours of rigourous Yoga with the incomparable Jaqui. I'd enquired last week about the possbility of joining an extra class of hers mid-week to ensure that I'm securely Yoga-ed through the week, and she brings me good news. A rare theatre/concert-free Saturday means the opportunity to catch up with laundry, grocery shopping, reading (at the moment, Alan Booth, 'Looking for the Lost') etc.

Sunday: more glorious sunshine! Full-table Middle-eastern breakfast courtesy of Waitrose (I'm quite convinced that I could live on nothing but hummous and olives for a long time - mind you, would have to be top-quality hummous and olives at that). There are many ways to spend a perfectly civilised Sunday afternoon, one of them being going to a 3pm piano recital at Festival Hall by our friend Stephen Hough. Only the best of artists could put together such a thoughtful and inspiring programme (Bach/Courot - Faure - Franck - Copland - Chopin), bound together by the themes of 'counterpoint' and 'Paris'. He said more with the brief but exquisite Faure Imprompu No.5 than some pianists could with an entire year's concerts, and the Chopin B minor sonata was delivered with such a combination of total assurance, technical virtuosity and thorough understanding of the poetry, it actually got me interested in Chopin all over again (not an easy conversion, after all those childhood hours I spent practising the same bloody Etudes, primarily to get all the right notes).

Life is good.