Edinburgh Playhouse
five stars
Rock and roll, Beat poetry and contemporary classical music aren't
exactly staples of Edinburgh International Festival's programme. The
appearance of composer Philip Glass and singer, poet and shamanic force
of nature Patti Smith to pay homage to counter-cultural guru Allen
Ginsberg, however, is a bold and unexpected move that should point the
way for EIF's future. The New York duo's opening performance of Smith's
Notes To The Future before an audience of ageing hippies and young
bohemians is all too appropriate in this respect.
The evening is divided into four loose-knit sections. In the first,
Smith reads words penned by both Ginsberg and herself, with Glass
discreetly underscoring on the piano. As Glass leaves the stage, Smith
is joined by guitarist Tony Shanahan, who accompanies her on emotive
renderings of songs from her back pages. Glass returns to play three
solo miniatures before Smith rejoins him for some final excursions into
disembodied poetics. All this is accompanied by back-projected images
of Ginsberg, from young rake to Beat generation icon to wise old sage.
This only hints at the sheer power of a compendium of work that goes
gloriously off-piste from the advertised programme, with Smith
pre-empting each song with readings of several Robert Louis Stevenson
poems for children culled from a book she bought the day of the gig in
a shop opposite Stevenson's birth-place. A sense of both their own and
Ginsberg's mortality permeates the evening, and, while mournful and
elegiac, the rolling thunder of Ginsberg's words becomes thrillingly
transcendent in Smith's similarly unfettered delivery. By the end,
Smith's arms are raised in an act of homage and salvation in a
life-affirming evening to cherish.
The Herald, August 14th 2013
ends
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