REVIEW: Oh To Believe In Another World – Brighton Dome
Sunday May 17
In 2007, to celebrate the centenary of Laurence Olivier’s birth, Brighton Festival screened Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Henry V. A crucial part of this memorable event was the live performance of the magnificent accompanying score by William Walton. This type of collaboration, music reflecting and enhancing on-screen events, is something we have become used to.
On Sunday 17th May, we were presented with a different approach, a film made in reference to and presented with an existing orchestral score, performed on this occasion by the splendid Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra. Oh To Believe In Another World, by artist William Kentridge, is a fascinating film that explores the Soviet attempt to build Utopia. The inspiration for the work is the mighty, excoriating Tenth Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich, on this occasion skillfully performed by Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra at Brighton Dome for Brighton Festival as a one-off performance.
Finished in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, the symphony itself is essentially plotless. However, musical clues, deliberately planted themes and cryptic motifs, indicate in non-narrative terms what Shostakovich had on his mind. Oh To Believe In Another World takes us through the decades from the 1917 Russian Revolution to 1953. It features Leon Trotsky, Elmira Nazirova, a student with whom Shostakovich was in love, the Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Mayakovsky’s lover Lilya Brik. Shostakovich himself, an enthusiastic initial supporter of the revolution, also appears in the film.
The upside-down idea of using an existing score as the starting point for a project is intriguing. However, it could be said that ignorance of Shostakovich’s work in this case would be a good thing. If you had pre-existing assumptions about and knowledge of the musical score, you may have felt distracted during Sunday’s event. If you went with an unencumbered mind, you would have found the experience fascinating.
Using collage, puppets and masked actors in his animated film, Kentridge created a dream-like “abandoned Soviet museum” to accompany Shostakovich’s powerful Symphony No. 10. Kentridge, one of the world’s leading contemporary artists, is known for politically charged work that interrogates memory, injustice and history, often drawing connections between Soviet repression and the legacy of apartheid in his native South Africa. He introduced this unique performance from the stage, offering audiences insight into the ideas behind this ambitious multimedia collaboration.
The result was far more than a concert. The show offered a meeting of sound, image, and political imagination where symphonic music became part of a larger artistic conversation about power, resistance and human resilience.
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