I’m confused. The program has set my brain adrift, it has. I just – I just don’t understand. To begin with, the program got the running order for the concert wrong, as Juanita the Spanish Lobster was the piece played right after the interval, and not at the end as this critic was expecting. (But changes of the order of pieces are of very little matter to the critic, mind you, so long as there are no additions to what is to be played. Critics as a whole tend to have a de facto urge to listen to the new in the world, but they need to be suitably warned beforehand, lest they have to scrounge around for a pen in the dark so as to take some hurried notes about what they’re unexpectedly hearing.)
And I realise that the title of the concert was ‘Dame Edna with the Sydney Symphony’ (the emphasis being on ‘Dame Edna’), but as the program told me that two of the pieces for the night were to be narrated by Barry Humphries – Dame Edna’s manager, and a bon vivant in his own right – I was suitably concerned. Yes, Barry Humphries had done a rather marvelous job with the Australian Chamber Orchestra a couple of months ago when he had emceed their Weimar Cabaret night, but I was there to see Dame Edna, after all, even if I’d been to her farewell concert last year and had never expected to see her again.
So the concert was to be one of impossibilities, it seemed, as well as grand miscalculations (the estimated running time in the program being the worst guess of a duration I’ve seen). I was even beginning to believe that perhaps Barry Humphries and Dame Edna were the same person, but, as I am a critic who prides himself on his intelligence, I’m not stupid enough to really think that.
We began, sans gigastar from Moonee Ponds, with Paul Dukas’ most famous piece – indeed, the only piece of his we ever really hear about – The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Now forever linked with the Disney film Fantasia, wherein an apprentice who looks suspiciously like Mickey Mouse learnt of the disasters that can befall a manager who takes a too hands-off approach to their work, it is a fun and engaging piece, and a delightfully loud one as well. In this performance, conductor Ben Northey managed a mixture of chaos and inertia that is so vital to its climax. It was to take about 12 minutes to perform, according to the program, and in reality it took, not surprisingly, about 12 minutes to perform.
The next piece, Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals – Grand Zoological Fantasy for two pianos and ensemble (the ensemble here being magnified to symphony-size) was to take 25 minutes to get through its many movements, combining with its predecessor to a first half of 37 minutes, give or take some stage-resetting time. It was 67 minutes later, however, when the interval came, and the extra half hour was due to Dame Edna and Dame Edna alone.
Coming onto stage in one of three fabulous frocks for the evening, Dame Edna proceeded to regale the audience with a quarter hour monologue in which she covered the death of subscribers, how she inspired Utzon in his famous design of the Sydney Opera House (whose Concert Hall we were in), how she was devoting herself to charity work (the Sydney Symphony being near the top of her list), among many other topics. When she finally got around to introducing the Saint-Saens, we were informed that the poems, written by many famous poets (Ogden Nash, Noel Coward, Michael Leunig) and meant to be read in between movements, were not up to snuff, and so she had written her own. And what a joy they were. Here, for instance, was her introduction to the Royal March of the Lion:
‘The lion has green eyes and yellow hair,
He is the logo of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
If you’re a zebra or an antelope and
You run into a lion abandon hope.
So watch out if you’re near one, or if you’re the slightest bit chubby –
He’ll go for your throat like Nigella’s hubby!’
Part of the wonderful pleasure of this concert, it should be noted, was watching the orchestra laughing with the audience, and taking a schadenfreudian approach to waiting and seeing if any of them might miss a note or two between giggles. The two centre-stage pianists for the piece – Caroline Almonte and Bernadette Harvey – got the full brunt of Dame Edna’s majesty, including, after a short movement entitled Kangaroos, a casual aside – ‘I thought that was a little bit underwhelming – didn’t you?’ Her poems ranged from a naughty-yet-sweet innocence to political incorrectness and tastelessness. Wonderful stuff.
After the interval came a premature Juanita the Spanish Lobster, by David Haslam and Johnny Morris. It tells the story of Juanita and her desire to go to the land. Dame Edna was not the best singer for some of the songs – indeed, she was rather grating at times – but that was all part of its charm.
Manuel de Falla’s Two Dances from The Three-Cornered Hat (the Miller’s Dance and the Final Dance) provided a non-Edna interlude, before she returned, in an elaborate dress with the shells of the Opera House on her shoulders, to narrate Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, prancing about the stage during the piece, and introducing the instruments before it started. (‘A bassoon,’ she said, ‘is kind of like a European didgeridoo.’) And so the evening, two and three quarter hours later, came to an end. The one drawback to the whole experience was that the music itself played second string to Dame Edna’s virtuosity, but when one is having that much fun, who cares?
Rating: 4 ½ stars out of 5
Dame Edna with the Sydney Symphony
Sydney Symphony
Conductor: Ben Northey
With Dame Edna Everage (narrator), Caroline Almonte (piano) and Bernadette Harvey (piano)
Paul Dukas – The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Camille Saint-Saens – Carnival of the Animals – Grand Zoological Fantasy for two pianos and ensemble
David Haslam and Johnny Morris – Juanita the Spanish Lobster
Manuel de Falla – Two Dances from The Three-Cornered Hat
Sergei Prokofiev – Peter and the Wolf
Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House
22 June
