Notes on Girlhood

There's a pulsing energy and a desire to be free that fuels Celine Sciamma's latest film Girlhood. Set in a banlieue of Paris, the film follows the life of Marieme, a  black teenager who drops out of high school then joins a gang of girls (the bande de filles of the film's French title). A white director, Sciamma has been criticised for making a film that claims to speak of the experiences of black women. She's defended herself by saying that 'it's not about what it's like to be a black girl, it's about what it's like to be a girl.'

That this story is universal came through strongly: this might be a film rooted in a specific time (mobile phones, shopping malls, fast food chains) and location (mostly set in the towering blocks of flats that gaze towards Paris), but it's the universality of what it's like to negotiate growing up that sings true. Sciamma captures Marieme's easy intimacy with her sister, the mysterious thrill of first love and the the joy of being silly with friends – they dance on the metro, get all dressed up as if to go out, but stay in and sing, a memorable sequence set to Rihanna's Diamonds. 

Behind this there's a bleaker narrative: male violence, few job prospects, bullying, intimidation, stealing, drug dealing, fights. If I had a quibble with this film, it would be that Marieme's trajectory seems like an easy cliché, a predictable path based on banlieue stereotyping.Yet that overarching storyline didn't seem to be the point of the film. That was to capture what it feels like to be a girl. And throughout I kept on remembering how I felt as a teenager. How intense certain moments can seem, how exciting it feels to be alive, how frustrating it is when reality doesn't match your dreams.

In the final scene, we are left looking at Marieme - superbly played by Karidja Touré, making her acting debut - in tears. But then resolution takes hold in her eyes. She is off. We don't know where to, whether she will prosper or flounder, but, she has, at least for the moment, her courage and her freedom.

CD Review

Just in case you have a spare hour in the next fortnight, I was delighted to make my radio debut on Radio 3's CD Review a couple of weekends ago, talking about some new French chamber music recordings.

There's some lovely music to be heard, including two recordings of Franck's Violin Sonata, a disc exploring Chopin's Cello Sonata and music by Franchomme, the great French cellist who inspired him, another showcasing French clarinet music on period instruments, and to round things off, countertenor Philippe Jaroussky turning his velvety tones to French mélodie. And later on, there's JS Bach's St Matthew Passion to conclude the programme. Here's the link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pqp68

Chopin in Mallorca

On holiday in Mallorca a fortnight ago, I visited Valldemossa, the village in the mountains where Chopin spent a winter between 1838-1839, and worked on his Preludes. It wasn't a happy time for Chopin or his lover, the novelist George Sand. But despite their problems, Sand still found some solace in this corner of the island:

'When the sight of mud and fog in Paris makes me miserable, I close my eyes and see again, as if in a dream, that green mountain, those fawn coloured rocks, and that solitary palm tree lost in a pink sky … It is one of those views that completely overwhelm one, for it leaves nothing to be desired and nothing to the imagination. All that a poet or a painter might dream of, Nature has created here.'

Pictured above is the view the pair enjoyed from the empty Carthusian monastery where they rented rooms for most of their stay. 'Chopin's cell', as the museum now describes it, might be cold and stark, but the view must have made up for it – you get a sense of the landscape's green lushness, despite its rockiness, and its expansive sweep, in the photo above, even though it was taken in cloudy weather. And just below the wall, out of shot, were trees replete with oranges.

Longbourn

Jane Austen fan fiction is nothing new, but it can rarely have been done with such skill and imagination as in Jo Baker's Longbourn. It seems unfair even to call this novel fan fiction for, although it is set in the same milieu as Pride and Prejudice, Baker's characters inhabit a world entirely of her own creation. Events here cleverly match up with Austen's plot, but everything is seen from another point of view. For her characters are the servants to Austen's Bennet family, shadows that come to life thanks to Baker's imagination and thorough, though lightly-worn, research. It's fascinating to hear what toil, sweet and tears it took to keep the Bennet household running, what blood, guts and trauma were involved in the war talked of so flippantly. Themes are shared between the two novels, themes current in society at the time I imagine, in particular poverty, freedom and the nature of love. But, historical detail aside, this is really a coming-of-age story as the young housemaid Sarah deals with her own battles in love – that's what makes it such a compelling read.

Moses in Egypt

Welsh National Opera (WNO) has twice this year staged operas based on the story of Moses. But the  rum-ti-tum tonality of Rossini's Moses in Egypt couldn't be further removed in musical style from the stern rigour of Schoenberg's twelve-tone Moses and Aron. The 19th-century Italian's score, clearly an influence on Verdi's Nabucco and influenced by Mozart's Don Giovanni, is a mixed bag; but one thing's for sure, Rossini sure knew how to whip up the excitement at the key dramatic moments. He also added an 'impossible-love' subplot to liven up the Biblical narrative for his entertainment-loving audience, with Osiride, the Egyptian heir, in love with a Hebrew girl, Elcia.

Gorgeous voices, gorgeously complementary in their quartets and duets, made up the clutch of soloists for the Rossini. The Chagall-inspired colour palette for the costumes – lemon yellow, aqua blue, fiery reds and oranges and warm pinks – bathed the stage in a rainbow glow, making up for a rather insipid, functional staging. The parting of the Red Sea seemed marginally less miraculous when six stage-hands were clearly visible. Still, the effortlessly natural conducting of Carlo Rizzi and the WNO orchestra, and the glorious singing from all on stage, made this an enjoyable evening.

Hello 2015!

Happy New Year!

No resolutions so far, but I do have a beautiful new notebook for scribblings.

Serial

Have you heard Serial? If not, you should. It's an American podcast created by the people who made This American Life. (Note to self: listen to This American Life.) I discovered it last weekend, thanks to a lot of excited Tweets. The series is eight episodes in; I've caught up with them all. There's even a podcast about the podcast. I've caught up with that too. I'm hooked.

In Serial, a journalist is investigating a real-life murder case from the 1990s. She's interviewing people, picking through mobile-phone records, replaying the court case that ended up with a conviction and a life-sentence – and asking if they got the right man. The storytelling is superb; almost to the point that it feels uncomfortable to be so interested in something so horrible that really happened. Writer Linda Grant has described Serial as 'essential listening for writers' and a 'cultural phenomenon.' I'm trying to think if I've heard anything else like it, and I can't. Journalist David Hepworth reckons there is nothing else like it and that this podcast is doing something that radio just couldn't.

Reviews for BBC Music Magazine

I've been a bit quiet on my blog of late, but that's because I've been chattering away over at classical-music.com – and also learning how to bell-ring. More of this later.

Here's what I've been covering:

• Cape Town Opera's Showboat
• Lisa Batiashvili plays Bach at the Bristol Proms
• Britten's War Requiem at the BBC Proms
• Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 at the BBC Proms
• Last Night of the Proms 2014
• Reflections from Cremona
• Daniil Trifonov at the Royal Festival Hall
• Poet Andrew Motion on his favourite composers
• Christian Blackshaw plays Schubert at St George's Bristol

Become Ocean

 

Become Ocean is one of the most overwhelming pieces of new music I've heard in the last few months. I had the pleasure of interviewing its composer John Luther Adams for BBC Music Magazine. You can read what he had to say about his Pulitzer-Prize-winning piece here. And there's also a short clip you can have a listen to. Even 40 seconds gives a bit of a sense of this 42-minute seascape.

A long lunch…

I don't normally take the lift. Not since we moved from the panoramic heights of the 14th floor to the lowly fourth floor of our office block, where we have twice as much space and half as much light. But after nipping out to buy a sandwich a few Fridays ago, I got into the lift to head up to our eating area on the sixth. The doors closed, we started our ascent. Up, up and then… a lurch large enough to make me step forward, followed by an abrupt halt, final enough to make me swear.

This was my nightmare. Trapped. Seven years without getting stuck in those lifts. It had to happen one day, especially given the regularity with which they break. But, reassured the disembodied voice over the alarm intercom, someone would be with us soon. We had an air supply (hooray), we should stay calm and on no account should we try to open the doors.

Of course, worse things happen at sea. And once the initial shock of it had worn off, it didn't seem so bad. There was the comically awkward moment where we – five strangers, despite working in the same building – realised that we were going to have to talk to each other, and not play the game of silence normal in Bristol lifts and the London Tube. Because it turns out that a quiet group of people in a space narrower and shallower than it is tall is more disconcerting than working out what to chat about in a stuck-lift situation.

And enforced small talk is a refined art. Discussion of the building's flaws (the window pane that recently fell out on to the street below, the cup of coffee that caused health-and-safety alarm in a fire drill) seemed to fit in with the theme of the afternoon; informing the group that last time it had only taken ten minutes to solve the lift problem was generally welcomed. Mentioning films featuring lifts – Die Hard, The Silence of the Lambs, Terminator 2 – not so much. Wondering if the alarm bell that started ringing was a fire alarm? Total faux pas.

We were stuck in that humid, small metal tin for 70 minutes. At that point the lift company was giving us estimates of anything up to an hour for the engineer to arrive: he was caught in traffic. But someone outside forced open the doors on the floor above, we prised the lift doors apart from inside and scrambled up to fresh air, freedom and, oddly, the flood of fear that had been held back. Time for a cup of tea and that tuna sandwich. And, yes, from now I will be taking the stairs.

Airport novels

The thought of the airport bookshop might suggest cheap deals on throwaway page-turners, but I've got flights from Bristol and Belfast to thank for two utterly brilliant books I've recently read.

Strange Weather in Tokyo, by Hiromi Kawakami, is a novel from 2001. It's only recently been translated into English, in 2012, and, though I don't have the first idea what the linguistic nuances of Japanese are, it seems to me that Allison Markin Powell has done a brilliant job of retaining its essentially Japanese character while making it as natural in English as if that's the language in which it was conceived.

It's a love story. And a tale of loneliness. It's less quirky than the whimsical title suggests; in fact, its original title was The Briefcase. There's a strong sense of place, the reader's senses are tantalised with descriptions of the tastes of food and drink. At moments the tale is firmly rooted in real life, real emotions; at others it seems like a hallucination, an invention of the narrator's mind. It's not a long story, coming in at just 176 pages. But it is perfectly formed, in 17 sub-titled episodes. It's quiet, understated, beautifully observed and beautifully written. If you read one book this year, I couldn't recommend this more highly.

Coming in a close second is Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. I can't tell you what that's about, though, I'm afraid, as there is a jawdropping twist that makes the novel. Suffice to say it is a story about a family and what happens when it falls apart.

Reviews round-up

Over at classical-music.com, I've been doing a bit more reviewing:

• Mitsuko Uchida playing Schubert and Beethoven at St George's, Bristol
• Under Milk Wood from Music Theatre Wales
• Brahms Symphonies Nos 1-4 performed by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Kirill Karabits at Colston Hall
• Schoenberg's Moses und Aron at the Wales Millennium Centre, with Welsh National Opera
• The Fall of the House Usher: Getty and Debussy, also in Cardiff and performed by Welsh National Opera
• Puccini's Manon Lescaut, a cinema screening from the Royal Opera House

Photo: Stephen Cummiskey