I was at the Manchester Art Gallery a few weeks ago touring with family visiting in town.  We arrived halfway through a free tour of the gallery itself and joined in to hear more details of the collection.  The guide was very helpful and made some insightful comments concerning two pieces,William Holman Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd, and Francis Bacon's Portrait of Henrietta Moraes on a Blue Couch Painting. It was not only interesting what he said, but the fact that he juxtaposed these two paintings together which spoke volumes to me.

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Last Sunday Manchester's Bridgewater Hall hosted the BBC Philharmonic's performance of William Orbit's "Orchestral Suite" which he wrote for the inaugural Manchester International Festival. For those unfamiliar with Orbit's work, he's mostly known for bringing "electronica into the mainstream and gave Madonna back her cool. Now he's ditching the synths altogether in favour of an orchestra" (the Guardian). 

Orbit's transition into orchestral composition was a mix of contradictions. On the one hand it was everything I had hoped for.  Moments of beauty and ethereal repetitions bordered on the transcendent.  However, these moments of profundity were sometimes accompanied by cacophonies and dissonances which didn't always work. 

When attempting the genre of minimalist orchestral music in the foot print of Terry Riley's seminal "In C" or Steve Reich (iTunes) there is always a risk that the fine line between genius and naivety will be crossed.  At times, Orbit's repetitions and dissonances appeared as monotonous experimentalism. This was only worsened by the lack of confidence in which the sopranos in the choir executed their parts.  The trumpet faired little better and this deeply detracted from the beauty of the opening movement in particular.  I can only guess that this was due to a lack of preparation or some last minute additions which were not thoroughly ironed out. 

To cite a few examples of this mixed performance, the opening movement was beautiful and left me deeply hopeful for the rest.  But soon through the third I literally began to count the movements to keep myself engaged with where it was all going.  I began to contemplate the whole point of contemporary orchestral music these days and realized that more often than not it often follows the narrative of a film opens a TV show. Granted I'm not big on contemporary composers and claim no expertise, but I suppose I attended this event with a little bit of hope for a populist feeling which it did at times deliver. For instance, Orbit's work seemed to echo the opening of Six Feet Under and American Beauty.  As if to wake the audience up however, the raucousness of the sixth movement was more visually stunning than anything else and created as much noise and movement on stage as possible in order to reach that final moment when all the frenzied string sections' bows stopped leaving the predictable echo to reverberate. But just as my hope for this performance was beginning to wane Orbit closed the ninth movement in with a wonderfully warm hug which almost thanked the audience for listening through his experiment. 

What did I leave thinking? Was all Orbit's efforts worth it? I think, in the end, I sincerely hope that he will continue refining and polishing his talent for the ethereal and popularist sounds we've come to know and love him for. Whether that's with an orchestra is another question, but I believe there is great potential if he does continue in this direction.  "Orchestral Suite" was a fledgling work and I'd bet that once Orbit gets his wings he could really soar.

There is a moment at the end of the fourth movement in Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 6 in D Major, his Sarabande, that is so frickin beautiful it almost makes you weep.   There is much to love about Yo-Yo Ma’s modern interpretation of Bach’s Cello Suites, but as good as they are, many just blend into the background of whatever else my brain is doing during the day. That is, until that one moment where this particular Sarabande comes together with such emotion and power that my stream of consciousness is drawn beyond itself to something more than just 18th century slow dance music. This week, I found myself listening through the whole album again and again just to experience this one moment.

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Last night on BBC's Newsnight Review, the acclaimed British artist Damien Hirst was interviewed concerning his new Beyond Belief exhibition at the White Cube gallery in London. You can watch a bit of this interview on their website here. One of the pinnacle pieces in this exhibition is Hirst's diamond encrusted skull entitled "For the Love of God." "The 18th Century skull is entirely covered in 8,601 jewels, while new teeth were made for the artwork at a cost of £14m."  The piece has been appraised at just under $100 million. If sold, it would be the most expensive creation by a living artist.

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How do we talk about what went wrong at Virginia Tech this past week? We could talk about evil, but it's not quite enough. We could curse, and it might capture it better. The F word really is necessary at times. I wonder if it's a better word than evil in that it captures the profanity and shock at events like what happened. It captures the media's coverage and display of the suicide tape and inevitable glorification and ratings mongering. But it still leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe we should just be silent as the memorial this week called for. Maybe silence is all that is best. But then, we have to make amends don't we? It seems we must speak at some point about how to avoid such tragedies in the future.

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You may have seen or heard about Cosimo Cavallero's "My Sweet Lord" this Easter.  His life sized anatomically correct naked chocolate Jesus was to be displayed in a New York hotel for the last two weeks of Lent.  Evidently some Christian groups complained of the confectionary Christ and I found it interesting what the complaint seemed to be about.  On the one hand, they disapproved of the full nudity of the figure.  It seems it's not just the phallus of Christ which was offensive, but rather the chocolate itself seemed to smack of a cultural affront if not a sacrilegious blaspheme that sent these Christians on the defensive. 

The nature of this complaint was interesting to me for a couple of reasons and somewhat apropos for Easter. 

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The local Mancunian painter, L.S. Lowry was a brilliant observer of people.  One of the most striking things about Lowry's paintings is their almost cartoonish transfiguration of impressionism.  From a distance you get the feeling that he doesn't know how to paint and has just scribbled some dribble on the canvas.  Or maybe he is purposely presenting his subjects as rather naive simpletons.  This suggestion raises an important question in my mind which has haunted me since reading another brilliant set of observations about English people, Kate Fox's Watching the English.  Is Lowry painting his subjects as naive to make a class commentary?  If so, what kind?  Could it be that Lowry's depictions of naivete have something in common with what Paul Ricouer meant by second naivete?

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