It’s a tacky attempt at the atmospheric: everywhere low lighting punctuated with red neon, swathes of black gauze running round the walls and making detours so as to curtain off several of the actual exhibits. The catalogue speaks enthusiastically about the erotics of space, but tart’s boudoir is all the exhibition can manage.And with the individual pieces, there’s very little opportunity for some old buffer to say: now you’re not going to tell me that that’s sexual! No, old buffers will swiftly be worn into assent, by perfume bottles and furnishings and pictures that wear their private parts on their sleeves. But there aren’t all that many, and the patchy selection only prompts queries, like (if you’re going to include Surreal art) why two pieces by Max Ernst and none by Meret Oppenheim? Choices look compelled rather than rigorous. But what should be in such a show? At this stage of history, it takes a very firm mind to insist that something isn’t erotic: you just sound prim or unknowing. And surely most things the Design Museum is concerned with could be said to have some sort of eros The problem must be what to leave out Or not, as it turns out The problem here is scarcity. The show concentrates on 20th-century artefacts, and includes household objects, furniture, vehicles, posters, garments, adverts and fine art works.
At the entrance there’s a video screen that flashes up with almost subliminal rapidity the words: phallic, hole, dominate, curve, instinct, Freud, taboo, seduction, touch, want, dream, perversion, reveal your fetish – a device playing precisely the same trick as the publican’s notice, though this time the promise is going to be kept. At the Design Museum, there’s an exhibition called “The Power of Erotic Design”, and it’s not blind either to power of certain basic terms. Now that I have your attention, please bring all glasses in from the garden. The Landlord.” And, of course, you feel stupid, realising your helpless knee-jerk excitement at the mere word. But in their own stupid way, these pub-notices make a sobering point: the point being that sex has become for us the very epitome of the interesting and the important. It’s such a big thing, we’re hard pressed to say why it’s interesting or important It could be anything.
Whitehead, poor chap, had to promenade round the stage with a crippled gait, unwinding now and again with a little circuit of runs and jumps.Eventually he managed to escape into the wings, and it was a relief when, after some more scraping and prowling by Balanescu, I could follow his example and depart.John Percival. Sex. Sometimes you find notices in pubs that begin like that, and you read on stalk-eyed “SEX. In one of the two non-danced items, Still With Me, he wore a brown gangster hat and recited a series of historical news items from eastern Europe, coming right up to last week with the story about Lenin’s tomb.
How far back in time he started I cannot say, because the first third or so was unintelligible, perhaps through having his mouth too close to the microphone.In the final dance, Silver, Balanescu (dressed as a portly undertaker) and the other musicians constantly pushed on to dancing space, threatening the soloist, Simon Whitehead, with their bows flicked like whips or, worse still, with their insistently sinister playing. But I suppose some of the sprightly steps came from the original old court dance, and Clarke is a dancer of rare quality and intelligence, so the result had an energy, complexity and interest unmatched elsewhere in the evening.Balanescu, besides writing all the music and leading his quartet, obviously fancies himself as a theatrical performer. The best number, a solo for Gill Clarke, was sabotaged by having the house lights go on for a while, and then the stage plunged into pitch blackness as the dance was reaching its climax.
This dance, called “The Galliard”, had the subtitle “every morning before breakfast” because the first Queen Elizabeth alleged to have danced it then A likely tale. And what the Hollywood-vamp red velvet frock and the frequent handstands had to do with the virgin queen I cannot imagine. When the decor for a dance consists of more than a hundred lighted candles spread in a wedge across the stage, and the choreographer calls the piece Exhale, it is not altogether absurd to imagine that at the end she will try to extinguish them a with one mighty breath, like those on a birthday cake No such luck at the QEH on Saturday. Rosemary Lee, tall and slender, wearing a more than floor-length blue dress, stood at one end of this illuminated phalanx, slowly waved her upstretched arms, crouched and beat her fists down, all at great length, and at the end just stopped. But actually the whole concert, a collaboration between Lee and the composer Alexander Balanescu, proved a let-down, made worse by shambolic delays and lighting errors.
Terence Robertson was a very late stand- in as Poliuto, and if it’s hardly surprising that he sounded stretched, he sang with plenty of feeling. But as so often in Donizetti, the colour of the drama comes from the lower male voices, and both Roberto Salvatori and Henry Waddington, baritone and bass respectively, provided sinister intensity. The chorus revelled in its prominence, and Brad Cohen conducted so as to ensure that any lack of finesse was swept aside by sheer energy. Bel canto tragedies have been somewhat marginalised in this country, and these two concert performances suggested that another revival of the idiom might be overdue.BBC Radio 3 broadcasts ‘Oberto’ on 28 JuneNick Kimberley. Dealing as it did with the fate of a third-century Christian martyr, Poliuto was banned by the Neapolitan authorities, and Donizetti rewrote it for Paris as Les martyrs, a French grand opera. Penelope Walmsley- Clark was right inside the part, well able to handle the twists and turns Donizetti’s idiom puts in her way.
