A puzzled room with an angry Stew

For once in my theatrical experience, I don’t quite know what to think. Being told that the brilliant, quick-reacting and baroque-writing Stewart Lee habitually harangues his audience and pulls the rug from under stand-up expectations was no help. He really did seem to think that he’d never had an audience as crap as we were at Wednesday's 9.30pm slot in the Leicester Square Theatre. The fact that he seemed to be genuinely cracking up in bewilderment at how awful we were made it seem real. He really wanted us to believe him that he’d gone off piste in the second half to give some good material (it was) to the worst of audiences.

Or have I been hoodwinked by the Chinese boxes, the smoke and mirrors? In drama, one would get signposts in amid the confusion to let one know, in one of Henry James’s favourite phrase ‘where we are’. A comic who really falters and blames his audience deserves no mercy, but enough people knew the ropes to respond kindly. So was every bit of it a game? Lee got his embarrassed silences from a crowd who seemed to be lapping it up at the start. The two guys behind me roared, I laughed a lot, just-21-year-old goddaughter Rosie somewhat less so. She wasn’t the right target when he slagged off apathetic, screen-fixated youth; I know no-one more politically active. 

The first routine in what he told us were try-outs for 30 minute TV slots was about being pipped to the post at the BAFTA Awards by Graham Norton, who didn’t do much more than say ‘Hello x, I hear you’ve got a film out’; x: ‘Oh yes, it’s awfully good’. The running gag was ‘not jealous, really, but…’ Bout Two seemed to aim more at uneasy silences than building a scenario, with the ghosts of dead comics at his shoulders who'd committed suicide because of shit audiences like us. Definite discomfort when he reeled off names of other comedians he’d shared a Montreal stage with who were no more. Slow fade, and a sense of irritation on my part that a comic should get away with blaming the audience, however jestingly; while there are bad nights, the performing essence is to work your magic on the crowd, and this worked in the other direction after a while.

Last half-hour, much funnier and including the apparently spontaneous detour I've mentioned, about Daryl Hannah showing interest in a script of his for Hollywood and his catching a glimpse of Matthew Broderick looking less than thrilled about press interviews (good exaggerated impersonation, but one needed to suspend disbelief about loserville: Broderick had a good run and on-screen success in The Producers. He's pictured above at that time. So much for downhill all the way after Ferris Bueller’s Great Day Out). The running gag knotted together these three ingredients:

Can’t spoil any of the jokes: when this was originally destined for The Arts Desk, the comedy ‘hub’ gave me some rules which revealed why reviews in that genre aren’t funny in themselves. Wednesday evening had me thinking that a responsible reviewer should go to see every comedian's show twice, just to disentangle truth from play; if I went again, I'd find out, wouldn't I? As for the overall impression, I suppose I was disappointed that no sequence rose to the heights of two stints I'd seen on YouTube: his Ukip attack ('bloody foreigners, coming over 'ere...') and his wicked play on Top Gear's 'only joking'. You can find a link to the first and an embedded second on this blog post.

The next morning I caught the train for a wonderful 24 hours in Edinburgh, with Robin Ticciati launching his Scottish Chamber Orchestra Brahms series in the kind of style I’d hoped, and more: one with wings which helped me pinpoint what was so awfully wrong with the lumpy Barenboim/Dudamel Piano Concertos I discussed with Sarah Walker and Andrew McGregor live on BBC Radio 3’s CD Review yesterday morning (it's on the iPlayer for the next month - we're on around the 1h15m mark, but I liked what I heard of Hannah French's Building a Library choice of Haydn Trumpet Concertos, so maybe catch that too). More on the rep anon.

Ticciati's Brahms One fired up in media res with crack timpani playing, silvery strings and wind, all inner parts clear but nothing unnaturally light about it. Right at the start, in the Academic Festival Overture, the detail made me realise that lines which I thought were the main events actually only served as counterpoint to thematic development one doesn't usually hear. Supernatural sounds in the symphony's dewy but never over-sentimental slow movement and crucially flowing intermezzo-like third echoed the tone quality ‘from the other side’ we’d got in the last few minutes of the Berg Violin Concerto.

Isabelle Faust (pictured above by Detlev Schneider), maybe the Berg Concerto's best living interpreter, was the perfect colleague there, making true chamber music with some of the world’s most charismatic orchestral principals, and also a voice from another world in the Bach encore (it could only ever be Bach after Berg). The best of the Brahms had to come last, with perfectly-gauged vollies of volatile excitement after Alec Frank-Gemmill’s perfect horn call bearing out the quality of the SCO's new hybrid horns (mixing valves with the sound of the natural instrument). How he got that quality was revealed to me by Robin T in what I can only call a Brahms One masterclass plus the next morning, and will have to wait until the interview appears.

Congratulations coincided with the launch of the series: RT takes up a new post in 2017-18 at the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (formerly the Berlin RIAS Orchestra made so great by Ferenc Fricsay, an imaginative, focused temperament not unlike Ticciati’s). Their first and only previous collaboration  – a Berlin concert featuring Britten’s Cello Symphony with Steven Isserlis and Bruckner Four – was love at first sight. Much fascinating work still to be done in the meantime – and hopefully beyond – both in Scotland and at Glyndebourne.

The (almost) 24 hours were not wasted. Installed myself in the amiable, quiet and comfortable Parliament House Hotel on Calton Hill and then walked through Princes Street Gardens via Oktoberfest strains coming out of a big tent and passing a lot of young people in Lederhosen to have a quick snack with Debra Boraston opposite the Usher Hall. On to the concert with godson Alexander, who drummed his enthusiasm for the electrifying end of the symphony, his dad Christopher - who'll write up his thoughts on the concert along with the second in the series for The Arts Desk - and the delightful Vina Oberlander. Afterwards we crossed the road to Bar Italia which has changed hands since I last went there and now does superb dishes of home-made pasta with many original variations.

After the interview with Robin in the splendid Balmoral Hotel by Waverley Station, I wandered via the Fruitmarket Gallery to the inevitable National Gallery of Scotland, where I spent time on a Tintoretto I’d never really studied before – an unusual Entombment – wondered at how ‘real’ Rembrandt’s self-portrait from a year of terrible crisis seemed compared to its neighbours and went downstairs to the print display. The Renaissance works in question showed mostly scenes of immortals torturing mortals in horrible ways, including two ‘Flayings of Marsyas’; this one, by Melchior Meier operative in Tuscany between 1572 and 1580, incorporates Midas’s ass’s-ears punishment too. The flayed body is especially horrid.

A boy was going round the exhibition with his dad looking intently at each print: ‘Poppa, that swan and that lady seem to like each other. Poppa, that swan and that lady are kissing’. I’m not sure how much detail Poppa gave Oscar about the state of Prometheus’s liver or the the skin of poor old Marsyas.

Upstairs between the French 19th century paintings and 18th century treasures – another 'real' picture, a typically quirkily composed Stubbs, knocked spots off the rest - there was a half gallery of loans from the Lunde Collection in New York, mostly of powerful landscapes led by Norwegians Johan Christian Dahl and Thomas Fearnley (a nice complement, Sue's comment below prompted me to remember, to the later landscapes of Nikolai Astrup I wrote about in my Bergen blog entry). This Bernese Oberland view from above Lauterbrunnen to the Jungfrau massif by Alexandre Calarne isn’t that special, but it triggered off a great Sehnsucht to rediscover that very special part of Switzerland I didn’t really appreciate as a schoolboy.

Quick lunch - excellent boudin – at Chez Jules on Hanover Street, then just time to pop into the Scottish National Portrait Gallery where I got no further than the first room to the left – a brilliantly juxtaposed selection of portrait sculpture mixing old and new (the deconstructed head below is by Jonathan Owen).

Loved most of the captions, the Sultan Ahmet medallion, the several Epsteins and these three: John Duncan Fergusson’s bust of the Anglo-Saxon Eastre subtitled ‘Hymn to the Sun’, possibly a portrait of his wife Margaret Morris;

Kenny Hunter’s down-to-earth red fibreglass bust of Trade Unionist Jimmy Reid, which sits on a plain low table; 

and Glenys Barton's ceramic bust of Jean Muir, instantly recognisable but totally original.

Then to pick up bag from the Parliament House Hotel and catch the 3.30pm back to London, beguiled all the way by the latest in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series, the simply beautiful Lila. When I've finished it, I'll have to go back and re-read the first in the sequence to be published (you could actually read them in any order). A day, then, that ticked many of the boxes needed to make it a good one.