Music review: Australian Chamber Orchestra – Cocteau’s Circle
The luminary of 1920s Paris, Jean Cocteau was an agent provocateur whom we need again now. The Australian Chamber Orchestra gave all the reasons why in a most spectacular show.
If one missed the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s artfully artless Weimar Cabaret with Barry Humphries in 2013, here was another chance to see what they can do so very well. Recreating the hedonistic atmosphere of 1920s Paris, Cocteau’s Circle was one of the cleverest things they have attempted, and you’d be sore if you missed it.
Joined by the British-Nigerian drag performer Le Gateau Chocolat (aka George Ikediashi) and the sublime Canberra-born soprano Chloe Lankshear, it brilliantly encapsulated the rebellious, exuberant energy that drove the French capital at the height of the ‘Années Folles’. Moving seamlessly through jazz, cabaret and avant-garde compositions, it captured all the imaginable vibrancy of France’s interwar period.
A continuous sweep of over 20 short pieces made keeping up with this program really difficult, but the overall effect was like stepping foot into the jazz clubs and theatres of Montparnasse, where so much of Paris’s raunchy nightlife took place.
Jean Cocteau was at the centre of it all as a sort of invisible presence, his story told and words recited in entertaining titbits from the inimitable Le Gateau Chocolat.
Glimpses of what Cocteau was all about was all one could gain – such was the show’s swift flow. One picked up that as a surrealist poet, playwright, filmmaker and visual artist, he has acted as a kind of agent provocateur in Europe’s intellectual scene at the time, attracting likeminded artists around him. Namely, these included a group of composers who were dubbed ‘Les Six’: Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre. All these prize reprobates were represented, except curiously for Durey, in pieces of light tunefulness and variegated mood.
You might like
There was copious other stuff as well, including pop songs of the era, pieces of a jazzier vein by Stravinsky, and even music by composers whom Les Six actively opposed. Thus in a sense, Debussy’s String Quartet, O.10, should not have made it onto the program, as Les Six took exception to this composer’s music, Cocteau explaining that he was “yesterday’s news” and too tied to Wagner. Nevertheless, the bouncy ‘Assez vif et bien’ middle movement of that quartet felt approximately at home, and even more the swift ‘Vif et agité’ finale from Ravel’s String Quartet – he being another composer they didn’t much like.
In arrangements by Tognetti, both these items added welcome substance to the program and genuinely exercised the ACO’s strings. Their vivacious spark here was another reason why Cocteau’s Circle was so spectacular.
But on top of that was the supreme clarity and athletic prowess of Lankshear’s singing whenever she graced the stage. First it was in Henri Christiné’s vacuous pop song from 1918, ‘Bien Chapeauté’, which has a bit of fun with superficial love.
Subscribe for updates
At the opposite end was Janis Ian’s searching ballad ‘Stars’, about the whole nature of existence. Caressing its words against delicate layers of strings and piano (gorgeously played by Stefan Cassomenos), this song from half a century later felt paradoxically right in focus.
“Some make it when they’re young … before the world has done its dirty job”, are its haunting words – summarising perfectly the upside-down world of Cocteau and his friends, and giving plenty of cause for reflection.
By all accounts, Cocteau had a magnetic personality but could also be quite self-destructive. Deliberately making himself a spectacle in Paris’s social scene but maintaining an aloofness at the same time, he needed an appropriate presence on stage to make it convincing. In every way, Le Gateau Chocolat supplied the winning recipe as Maître d’ and contributing vocalist.
What a wonderful sight he was. Attired in a magnificent black ballroom dress, and later a snazzy gold-sequinned costume at the end with angles protruding everywhere (apparently Cocteau favoured asymmetry), the bearded Chocolat also sported an outrageous hair-do and fingernails long enough to skin a cat.
Truthfully, as a singer he was not in the same league as Lankshear, but that proved neither here nor there in a show that favoured pure theatre. In Édith Piaf’s ‘L’Hymne à l’amour’ at the end, he contributed a verse after Lankshear that was drenched in uncontrollable emotion. So right.
With expert staging by Yaron Lifschitz, these fancy costumes by Libby McDonnell, and minor incidental pieces by Elena Kats-Chernin to accompany the monologues, this exceptionally polished show must go down as one of the crowning things ACO have done. All one says is more please.
Australian Chamber Orchestra performed Cocteau’s Circle on November 18 at Adelaide Town Hall