It was as challenging, engaging and inspired a piece of theatre as I have seen in many a day. To my mind, it is ideal festival fare, stretching the boundaries of how theatre and music interact, demanding much of the audience and rewarding those who get into it.

What has surprised me is the negativity of many of the reviews and online comments about it.

The Giacomo Variations is best described as a chamber opera, meaning it is performed with an orchestra of less than 50 who are not only visible to the audience (rather than hidden in a pit) but to some extent interact with the action on stage, and as a play in which four actors act out scenes adapted from the 1790 memoir of Giacomo Casanova, Histoire de ma vie.

The theatrical scenes are interspersed and underscored by selected musical passages from the operas Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte and Le nozze di Figaro, as well as a couple of other excerpts from the music of Mozart.

The two male actors play the older memoir-writing Casanova and his younger self, often on stage at the same time – which mimics the style of the book (or at least the copy I have – there have been several versions), in which Casanova narrates incidents in his life and muses on various – very various – topics.

The two female actors play the Countess Isabella in earlier and later life, she who was the sister of the Austrian princeling who gave Casanova a home for the last 12 years of his life, during which he wrote the memoirs that keep him famous today.

All performers but the actor playing the older Casanova also play various other characters who come up in the stories, and the older male steps into alternate roles – characters from the operas whose roles he claims to have inspired or written himself.

The overall effect is to intertwine Casanova’s claimed autobiographical notes with lyrics sung by characters from the Mozart operas. Could these operatic characters have been based on Casanova? Could he have had a hand in writing them? Could he have done all the things he said he did?

That this could be more than grandiose fiction is borne out by Casanova’s known friendship with Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, and his acquaintance with key figures from the 18th century, including Madame de Pompadour, George III, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Rousseau and Voltaire. He met the Pope, escaped from the prison in the Doge’s palace and, most notoriously, enjoyed a string of liaisons across Europe that eventually made his name a byword for a champion of sexual conquests.

Significantly, not all of this is imparted to the audience of The Giacomo Variations. If all one knows of Casanova is his reputation as a womaniser – and none of his life as a law graduate at 17, an amateur physician, a failed priest, an occultist, a gambler, a Freemason, a Rosicrucian, an alchemist, a courtier and a spy – then much of this production will be a mystery.

That does not mean it is a failure, any more than an ignorance of the work of Mozart would. Only some of the sublime music was vaguely familiar to me.

While I greatly enjoyed the structure of the piece, its interweaving of theatre and music, of fact and fiction, of themes particular to that 18th century which saw the ineluctable shift from divine monarchy to revolutionary parliamentarianism, the absolute masterstroke of the production lies in the casting.

I can hardly imagine a living actor who could be capable of convincingly conveying the truth of such a man as Casanova, so seductive and so repellant, so witty and so cruel, so articulate and so emotionally stunted, as John Malkovich. I think he was superb, in total control and fully in touch with a person whose inability to love frightened himself.

I have seen Malkovich on stage before, in the 1990 West End production of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This, for which he was rightly lauded – which is only to say that I’m not starstruck about the actor, I just think he gave a superb performance.

I also think the rest of the cast was terrific. Ingeborga Dapkünaité was wonderful as the older Isabella, particularly at the beginning of the second act as she fruitlessly tried to get the old lothario to open his heart, only to be kept at a deliberate emotional distance. I don’t have much experience with opera, but if the singing is like that of soprano Martene Grimson and baritone Andrei Bondarenko I will gladly change that.

And the 41-piece version of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra sounded extraordinary to me, under the baton of Martin Haselböck. I think letting the players be visible (sometimes with full house lights up) and having some of them turn to occasionally watch the action on stage was a very clever and engaging tactic.

There is an obvious risk in a piece like The Giacomo Variations that allows theatre lovers to decry the musical interruptions and opera fanatics to abhor the talkie bits, but really, I would have thought a Sydney Festival audience could rise above that. The criticisms I’ve read seem to be emabarrassingly parochial, small-town and small-minded in nature.

Full credit to director Michael Sturminger for coming up with the concept and executing it in a way that amply rewards those who get it. I feel I did.

Among his diverse range of projects is a weekly 30 minute radio show called Living is Easy on Eastside FM in which John explores health and lifestyle issues, with equal regard for alternative and mainstream diagnosis, therapy and medication.

John brings in experts on topics suggested by listeners, and is keen to use a web presence to expand on this kind of interaction: inviting suggestions and requests for topics for discussion on the show, podcasting the show, building the listener base – and seeing where it goes.

We used WordPress 2.9.2 as the content management system, adapting the Atahualpa theme.

For particular functionality and layout, we installed the following plug-ins:

Akismet

Contact Form 7

Podcasting Plugin by TSG

WordPress Category Archive

Some have shocked me, some have perplexed me, all have saddened me. The death of Kate McGarrigle took me by surprise.

She and her sister came to my attention in the early 1980s when I had moved from Hobart to Sydney to follow a tenuous path into theatre. Shared houses in Surry Hills, busking at Kings Cross, all night discussions of method, broken hearts … to a soundtrack of John Martyn (also RIP), Joe Jackson, and the McGarrigle Sisters.

There are lots of tributes to Kate at the moment. Here’s three sites that will lead you to some I found interesting or moving:

http://www.mcgarrigles.com/
http://dowackado.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/kate-mcgarrigle/
http://dowackado.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/kate-mcgarrigles-family-remembers-her/
http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?ArticleID=705

What he does is marry cutting edge technology with an audio artist’s aesthetic understanding to create truly superior loudspeakers.

In Brad’s case, that often involves creating the cutting edge technology required, or at least applying the known in a new way. He’s without doubt one of the best in Australia, and his speakers end up all over the world.

The brilliance of his products is not something you can easily demonstrate on a website. You’re saddled with whatever audio capabilities the site visitor has, and it becomes a bit like demonstrating colour tv on a black-and-white monitor.

But when you have fans and customers of the calibre Brad has, it’s not hard to demonstrate the popularity of his custom-made speakers with people who are either true audio afficionados or who depend on audio quality for professional reasons.

• That it can be downloaded. I’m really not fussed that the file quality means I’m not getting the best possible sound. Between the quality of my ears and my equipment, I can’t tell the difference anyway.
• That it is jaw-droppingly good. The music envelopes and invades me. I feel inhabited by it.
• That I can pay what I want. I paid $20 Australian. That’s less than the average CD I buy and more than the average album I download from iTunes. Unfortunately, I can’t pay what I think it’s really worth because I don’t have that much money. No-one does.
• That I can order a fancy-pants boxed set with proper-like artwork, if I want. I want. That much money I can get.
• That Thom Yorke sings so sweetly, and so agonisingly. And so well, like an instrument.
• That there are old-fashioned swelling strings as well as percussive effects that drill the base of my skull.
• That the bass lines are amazing.
• That Radiohead is avant garde enough to write good songs and then record them.

Technorati Tags: In Rainbows, Radiohead, music, music downloads

I’d been playing for a few years by then, originally pulled in by my older brother’s need to have someone play the bass line of Spicks and Specks while he sang and soloed.

By the age of 18, however, I’d outgrown Andy’s hand-me-down nylon string classical and even the serviceable no-name steel string acoustic my parents had bought me.

I bought a Maton CW80D from Allans Music in Hobart for $340.

That guitar was my best mate for the next four years.

I wrote songs on it, got up with friends at the St Ives Hotel, formed duos and bands that played paying gigs around town, serenaded girlfriends, played on a track that charted in Ireland and Germany, took it to the Netherlands and back, used it in a prac teaching class at Rose Bay High, busked regularly at Salamanca Market on Saturday mornings and dragged it around Tasmania for nine months doing school shows for TUK Theatre Co.

Until one day in 1981 I left it unattended for too long in one of the rooms at Salamanca Place. And it was gone.

That same week, TUK broke up and my mother died. In just a couple of days, my whole world turned upside down.

A few months later, I went to the Netherlands again with my Dad and on the way back visited some friends in Sydney. I stayed in the big smoke, became a working actor and bought a new guitar.

Fast forward to 2007. I live in Corrimal, north of Wollongong, with my wife and two kids. I’m a web developer and designer.

I take my coffee at Cafe Angeli in Railway St, and there’s a music shop a couple of doors down.

Two days ago, my passing glance fell on a familiar shape in the window. It’s a Maton, obviously, and an old one. Looking through the sound hole I can see it’s a CW80/6, a model that’s still in production (unlike the CW80D which was discontinued in 1983).

The guy in the shop tells me it’s from 1967, the year the CW80 line was introduced.

The price tag says “Responsible offers. Hmmmm”. I suggest he’s probably thinking around two grand? “About that”, he says.

Yesterday it was still in the window. “It’s still in the window”, I say. “Yeah, another bloke liked the look of it but he’s thinking about it.”

I emailed Andy. “Worth it as an investment alone”.

I talked about it with Hazel. “You’ve been working hard, you deserve it”.

This morning, I had to go to Sydney for a meeting. On the way there, I rang the shop. “Don’t sell it. I’ll be there by 3 o’clock with the money”. “It’ll be here for you – unless someone offers me three grand”. Ha ha.

When I went to pick it up, the shop guy said the other bloke had come back and was disappointed to be told it had been sold. But he wouldn’t even let the other bloke have a play of it. Shop guy took the chance that I’d be as good as my word. Thanks, shop guy.

I got it home and started playing. It tucks perfectly under my right arm. It has a beautiful action. The sound is like honey.

The back, sides and neck of these guitars are red-brown maple, with a slightly blonder spruce soundboard and darker rosewood neck and bridge. A dreadnought shape, with a black teardrop guardplate. The Maton “Double Thrust” Adjustable Truss Rod has kept the neck perfectly flat, even after nearly 40 years.

It looks – and sounds – like a classic flat top country and western guitar (that’s what the CW stands for, after all).

I go through some of the old repertoire: JJ Cale, Neil Young, James Taylor, Willis Alan Ramsey, The Band, Jim Croce, Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, G Wayne Thomas for heaven’s sake (“Day Comes”, one of the greatest surfing songs ever written).

Before I even get to any of my own songs, my fingers remind me that it takes time to develop those protective callouses. Even as I tap the keyboard now, the pads of my left fingers sting.

I think about my old CW80D. I hope it found a good home.

I know my ‘new’ CW80/6 did.

Technorati Tags: Maton CW80/6, acoustic guitar, music, Maton guitars

The WD06 conference in September was the first time I’d come across mashups – the use of two or more web applications to create new blended content that is greater than its parts.

An (already) classic example is taking Google Maps and applying it to Overheard in New York to create overplot.

Now it turns out that people having been creating musical mashups for simply ages – and no-one told me!

Luckily, I’ve stumbled onto the site of one Arty Fufkin.

Arty is a Melbourne DJ who has earned a justifiable reputation as one of the world leaders in the field of musical mashups.

Like Ben Lee (on whose site I found the link), I have to point out that I no way endorse the use of copyrighted material without permission to create mashups. On the other hand – have you HEARD this stuff???

OK, it sounds simple to use some software to mix bits of different tracks. What someone like Arty does is use a briiliant ear for what will work together with a deft editing hand to make you laugh, dance, snort and sigh with admiration.

Part of the fun is in recognising the musical and lyrical themes that he combines. So he takes Harold Faltermeyer’s theme music for the Beverly Hills Cop movie, adds Weezer’s Beverly Hills (“my fashion sense is a little whack, and my friends are just as screwy as me”), mixes in Beck’s Loser and Radiohead’s Creep, and rounds it out with bits of Nik Kershaw’s Wouldn’t It Be Good (“you must be joking, you don’t know a thing about it”) to create an anthem to Californian self-loathing: Beverly Hills Creep.

Inevitably, others take up Arty’s ideas and mash up some videos to go with the tracks. YouTube is a godsend. It only took a couple of days before someone put together a video mashup to go with Ben Leaps (Ben Lee’s Catch My Disease, Paul Kelly’s Leaps and Bounds, plus bits of Chisel, Oils, AC/DC, INXS and the Voice – an all-Australian masterpiece).

As one happy visitor noted, Art can mix up songs you don’t even like into something that is irresisitible. Mariah Carey + Cyndi Lauper = fan-bloody-tastic. Who’d a thunk it?

Arty doesn’t give much info about himself on his site (on A Page, he says “No really its just a page – go away!”), but we can assume he’s named himself after Paul Shaffer’s marvellous loser record company rep Artie Fufkin in the movie This is Spinal Tap.

No way is this Arty a loser though – the guy is a genius.

Technorati Tags: Arty Fufkin, mashups, music, Australia, web development

Bob released an acoustic solo album in 2003 called Suburban Kid, recalling for me other favoured singer songwriters like Evan Dando and Grant Lee Phillips.

He has now moved up to another level with Suburban Songbook, recorded in Nashville with producer Brad Jones. The songlist is really strong, pushing Bob into a higher level of accomplishment. The Dando / Grant Lee notes are still strong, but the arrangements have moved into a more polished sphere.

Not surprisingly, there are some country touches with a slide guitar here, an ex-Wilco drummer there. They by no means diminish the album, adding rather to the rich tapestry of musical influences that highlight Evans’ intensely personal songs.

Among these, I could hear the music hall theatrics of Ray Davies, the musical magpie that is Beck (not so much his hop hop beats, but most everything else), the naked emotionalism of the Neil and Tim Finn (separately and together), Beatle-ish orchestrations and instrument choices and some fairly lush arrangements that might have something to do with Jones’ previous work with people like Sheryl Crow.

Based on Suburban Songbook, I’d put Bob Evans in the vanguard of Australian singer songwriters alongside Josh Pyke, Ben Lee, Tim Freedman, Tim Rogers and Glenn Richards.

For anyone who likes new music that is nostalgic and romantic.

Chaos will give you samples of all tracks, while the very flash (in both senses) Bob Evans site offers a few tracks in their entirety.

Technorati Tags: Bob Evans, Suburban Songbook, Australian music, singer songwriters

However, I have a whole new take on the man after listening to his one hour XM Satellite Radio show.

Theme Time Radio Hour has a simple format made clear in its name: Dylan has one hour in which to play songs related to a stated theme – weather, drinking, mothers, coffee, etc.

Not only is his choice of tunes engaging and revealing of his musical influences and preferences, the great man is immensely entertaining in his commentary. Understated as you would expect, but often very funny in a sly kind of way.

That’s Bruce Springsteen … I think he’s from New Jersey.

Some people say we play a lot of old songs … the truth is there’s more old songs than new songs. But we don’t have anything against new songs … stay tuned.

He’s from Texas, the place where they kill presidents … then kill people who kill presidents.

If you think the summer sun is too hot, just remember, at least you don’t have to shovel it.

Dylan frequently provides the back story to a tune, revealing his genuine interest in American musical history. On his radio show, Dylan is probably the most accessible he has ever been.

The show is spiced with emails – I’m not sure how genuine (G. Clooney about his aunty? R. McGuinn about his biblical song?), stories of how the songs came to be and occasional soundgrabs from the singers, musicians and songwriters who produced them.

My respect for Bob Dylan could hardly be heightened, but my appreciation of him as an entertainer is certainly enhanced by TTRH.

MP3 downloads of past broadcasts are available from White Man Stew.

Technorati Tags: Bob Dylan, Theme Time Radio Hour, TTRH, XM Radio