I would like to forward to you a review of last Saturday's show, written by one of our members, the actor and author Ursula Jones. You may remember that she kindly opened the FET Apreo on behalf of the absent President, Donald Douglas, on 11th April.
Nigel
Ursula writes..................“Asking a working artist what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it thinks about dogs”. So said the British playwright John Osborne in 1977.
Some eighty years earlier, in A Meeting Of Minds, the inaugural performance for FET at Le Colombier Theatre, the youthful Russian composer, Sergei Rachmaninov, is unable to hold his critics in similar ironic contempt. Sadly, he believed them.
A Meeting Of Minds, written and performed by Michael Lunts, opens with the distraught twenty-four year-old, until then a lionised young composer, reading the vitriolic reviews for his first symphony. ‘Music that rightly, will never be heard of again’ they gleefully report, causing Rachmaninov’s descent into three tormented and barren years. Unable to compose a note, he is stripped of his genius, his creativity and of his raison d’etre, not to speak of his living. When at last he is put in touch with the music-loving hypnotherapist, Dr Dahl, he begins a yearlong painful process of self-discovery that leads ultimately to a brilliant, renaissance of his art.
Put like this, one might expect to be in for a somewhat harrowing evening but Michael Lunts is as talented a writer as he is actor and pianist. The unseen Dr Dahl conducts his hypnotherapy sessions in a way that reveal Rachmaninov’s life at its happiest: his brilliant boyhood at the Moscow conservatoire for example – a delightfully portrayed fourteen-year-old – while at the same time exploring the composer’s disturbing but crucial confrontation with rejection: his father’s desertion, his sister’s death, his teacher’s rebuff. The narrative moves from the agony of a young man convinced, as only a Russian can be, that he is at the mercy of a vengeful Fate and that ‘the only certainty in life is death’, to the peaceful, childhood joy of attending mass with his grandmother and the consequent enduring influence of the Russian liturgy on Rachmaninov’s music.
Michael Lunts constantly changes focus, place and time with his beautifully played pieces of the composer’s piano music which, rather than being mere adornment, are an integral part of Rachmaninov’s struggle to resurrect his creativity. Meanwhile, the amplified ticking of a metronome underscores the therapy’s mesmeric qualities and the remorseless trap of tempo without inspiration.
The sense of outrage that men, of whom no one has ever heard, very nearly denied the world of a musical genius is by no means lessened when seen from the safety of hindsight, but the question that dominates Meeting Of Minds is how Rachmaninov is not only going to survive but to triumph. How did he come up with that famous Second Piano Concerto of his?
The answer is hinted at in Rachmaninov’s discovery of love for his cousin, a comic visit with Chaliapin to Italy (which he hates because it’s too hot) and finally emerges in the elated last few minutes of an intriguing and intensely moving evening.
Given this quality of work, the newly formed FET can only go from strength to strength.
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