Bending and blending

Watching Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s contemporary four-act opera “Einstein on the Beach” at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre’s Grand Theatre as part of the 41st Hong Kong Arts Festival was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It wasn’t just because the performance runs for more than four hours without an intermission but also because when I watched the video recording as part of my studies in the mid-1990s, I didn’t expect that I would have a chance to see the production live. I have however watched Glass’ subsequent works in Singapore, New York and Melbourne.
The revival of “Einstein on the Beach” premiered last year. It is trotting slowly around the globe and Hong Kong was the only city in Asia to witness this seminal work. With no plot or narrative plus a great deal of repetition in the music score, it is obviously not for everyone, though the majority of the audience stayed until the end.
But that’s not the reason why I think it’s as avant-garde as it was when it premiered in the mid-1970s.
The whole experience was like peeking into the life and mind of one of the greatest geniuses of the last century. It was not possible to make sense of every single part of the performance but again, what Einstein was capable of thinking of is foreign to most of us. Wilson’s signature set and lighting designs, which used a limited number of strong colours, were as pleasing as they were theatrical yet never stole the show from the performers.
Actresses Helga Davis and Kate Moran who performed the “Knee Play” scenes, which reappeared like punctuation marks in-between other scenes, were as commanding as the chorus members who not only sang but also moved and acted, as did solo violinist Antoine Silverman who dressed up as Einstein.
More than a decade ago, there was a plan to bring Wilson’s “The Black Rider” to the Bangkok Playhouse. I still do not know what went wrong but I am sure that many theatre and opera fans would concur that his work is overdue for Bangkok.
A few evenings later, I spent more time on Hong Kong’s subway than usual, as Uzbekistan-born and France-based pianist Mikhail Rudy’s recital “Pictures at an Exhibition” was presented at Sha Tin Town Hall’s auditorium, outside the tourist and expat areas. It was well worth the journey, not least because the acoustics did justice to the performance.
The first part prepared the audience, not only for the period but also for Rudy’s artistic risks, as the pianist interpreted works by Scriabin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. The highlight came after the intermission when Rudy’s grand piano was pushed to stage right. The centre stage was given to the screen where animation videos created by Rudy from Kandinsky’s sketches were projected. This accompanied his captivating rendition of Mussorgsky’s suite “Pictures at an Exhibition”, which Kandinsky staged in 1928.
It was another reminder that art genres are more related than our arts appreciation classes would have us believe and that artists, while professionally practising one genre, may have interests or backgrounds in others.

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“Einstein on the Beach” will be in Melbourne in late July and Los Angeles in mid-October. For more details, visit www.PomegranateArts.com.