In theatre – and in music, it seems – when it rains, it rains in many places at once. This is often most notable in the theatre, where a stage revolve can, after not being seen for a year, turn up in three productions close together, and now it seems the same is happening to classical music. For not less than a week after the premiere of Operamania at the City Recital Hall, where a full symphony orchestra squeezed up the back of the stage to give scant room to dancers and singers in front of them, so we have now, at the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House, much the same thing. It is Cirque de la Symphonie, and, thankfully, even though the Sydney Symphony has still had to smoosh up a bit, there is a tad more space to be had out in front. Plenty of space, actually, or at least for what Cirque de la Symphonie needed.
So what is it? If you’ve ever been to a Sydney Symphony concert where a film is being played while the orchestra provides the soundtrack (think Metropolis, think Lord of the Rings, think 2001: A Space Odyssey), then you’ll know what the dynamic is. And so, live music having the ability, like butter, to virtually improve everything it’s added to, we were to be treated to a series of circus acts accompanied by flesh-and-blood musicians. (Well, perhaps some of them are androids, but I’m not about to try and test the theory.) Guy Noble was our intrepid conductor for the evening, as well as humorous compere (a skill that is more important than most people realise in concerts/events such as these, and so is to be applauded).
If you were entering the Concert Hall expecting the spectacle of a Cirque du Soleil concert, then you’d be disappointed. If you were expecting the hilarity of La Soiree, then you’d also be a trifle dismayed. But as a genre on its own, Cirque de la Symphonie has a lot going for it. This is no doubt helped by the fact that the acts themselves are somewhat fresher than I had dreaded they might be. So often these days circus can seem like the same thing over and over again (just how many different ways can you juggle balls, for instance?) but Cirque de la Symphonie has managed to, for the most part, sidestep the issue, and even when they’re performing acts you’ve seen before, they still manage to keep that sense of danger (sometimes danger of physical harm, sometimes merely danger of failure – which is just as effective, I find).
We began with an orchestral moment, the Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila, before moving onto Aerial Silks to the music of Debussy’s Clair de Lune. (To the side of the stage, for those of you interested in the mechanics of such things, one could see the stage hands (some of them performers) pulling back and forth on the rope that led, pulley by pulley, to the top of the middle of the Concert Hall stage, where all the aerial tricks descended from.)
A Tango Duo was next, to music by Rimsky-Korsakov (‘Fandango asturiano’ from Capriccio espagnol), which involved a man and a woman dancing on a raised platform while performing quite a few feats of strength, perhaps most notable for the unexpected power of the woman. Ring Juggling to the Bohemian Dance from Carmen followed, with the clown for the evening, bedecked in red-and-white diamonds and a painted-white face, tossing a series of rings in the air, bouncing them off his feet and the ground when the mood took him as well.
Continuing with the juggling theme (sort of) was the Spinning Frame and Cube to another Carmen hit, ‘Les Toreadors’, which involved, at its most spectacular, a very large metal skeleton of a cube being spun around the stage until it blurred. A contortionist to the Waltz from Sleeping Beauty trailed after that, and then another aerial show – this time with a hoop – to the ‘Danse Bacchanale’ from Samson et Dalila.
After the interval we were treated to a Quick Change routine (where the woman changes on the turn of an instant into a variety of costumes) to the tune of Tico-tico no Fuba, then the orchestra piped up again for the Dance of the Comedians from The Bartered Bride. A rope was dangled from the ceiling for a performance to the Ride of the Valkyries before more juggling – this time with electrically flashing clubs that defied ocular focus – to the Galop from The Comedians. A Ribbon Dance came after that, to the Can-Can, before the orchestra chimed in yet again with the Intermedio from the zarzuela La boda de Luis Alonso. Yet another aerial act continued proceedings, this time a duo to the Waltz from Swan Lake, before a Strongmen act to Finlandia by Sibelius brought the show to an end (but not before a curtain call to Strauss’ Thunder and Lightning Polka).
There were a few acts that didn’t quite hit the mark – the Ribbon Dance standing out the most for its brevity and lack of astonishment – but all in all, there was plenty to amaze. What should be noted was that the aerial acts – so crucial, obviously, to this particular event, as more complex rigging for things such as a trapeze act did not seem to be available – were clearly delineated from each other, and each managed to be uniquely entertaining. The orchestral moments, however, seemed a tad superfluous, though one realises that for an audience member who doesn’t make a habit of seeing the symphony, there would be more value in these interludes than this critic found. But this was an evening in which I found much more to delight in than I had expected, and well worth a visit.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Cirque de la Symphonie
Sydney Symphony
Guy Noble (conductor), Alexander Streltsov, Christine Van Loo, Jarek and Darek, Aloysia Gavre, Sagiv Ben Binyamin, Vladimir Tsarkov, Elena Tsarkova (cirque artistes)
Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House
13 April
