The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 49

ARTS 349 SUNDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 1993 THE OBSERVER Theatre Michael Coveney 9 Byrne or Billy Roche, for a look at fathers and sons and nephews in the workshop of the Chapel family billiards table company in 1966. As theatre, it would make good television. The old boy Chapel (Henry Stamper) is being threatened by his two sons (David Killick and David Horovitch) and they, in turn, by their respective sons: Reece Dinsdale, keen and edgy, as a go-getter with plans for expanding into the American pool market; and Adam Godley, quiet and zany, as a misplaced Ernest Dowson scholar with unexpected organisational abilities. The plot expires in a series of uninteresting second-act shouting matches. There is not enough here about the business itself, nor about the social convulsions initiated by televised snooker and the eclipse of billiards by this awful ersatz game of bar-billiards, beyond old Chapel recalling that he 'used to go out, play the nobs, beat 'em, sell 'em a table; now they flog 'em down the Mile End Road'.

And then, if you please, Mr Stamper demonstrates the art of plain ball striking on a red ball, resting his cue on a distinctly dodgy left hand bridge. Matthew Lloyd directs, listlessly. New American drama is feebly represented by Three Hotels (Tricyle, Kilburn) by Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Jack Gold, in which a disintegrating marriage between Ken and Barbara Hoyle (Peter Egan and Lindsay Duncan) is framed in three monologues (two for Ken, one for Babs) about the evils of marketing a baby formula to the Third World. What did this formula do; what did the Hoyles's baby die of; what happened, finally, in their marriage? Baitz forgets to answer the main questions posed by his own narrative argument. Jane Bowles's In the Summer House (1953) at the Lyric, Hammersmith, is a quirky resurrection, not quite a British premiere, for a strange, compelling and deeply personal piece much admired by Bowles's chums Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote.

It feels more like fiction than theatre, and falls apart somewhat in the second act. Rosemary Harris, in the Judith Anderson role of an agi Under a dark moon HAROLD PINTER'S Moonlight (Almeida Theatre), his first 'full-length' piece (it plays for 75 minutes) since Betrayal, has the potent evanescence of his earlier disjointed reveries, Landscape and Silence (1969), and the purgatorial, between-life-and-death bedroom bleakness of A Kind of Alaska (1973). Bridget (Claire Skinner) floats in a grey void by night. She is isolated, entranced, lost in a jungle, hidden. Her father, Andy (Ian Holm), a crude civil servant who kept his obscene language in the home where it belonged, and who has no remembrance of things past, is dying in bed.

His wife, Bel (Anna Massey), sits beside him, confessing her affection for Ralph, a football referee, whose wife, Maria, was Andy's lover. Andy's younger son, Fred (Michael Sheen), occupies a bed in another location next to him. He and his dominant brother, Jake (Douglas Hodge), slide over memories of Andy, barrack-room camaraderie and a strange scenario of war-time contacts culminating in the funeral of Lieutenant Colonel Silvio d'Orangerie whom Fred loved 'like a father'. They are visited by Maria CJill Johnson), and then by Ralph (Edward de Souza) who, after years at sea, gave the arts a chance, generally. For a time, it was all go: love, football, the arts, the occasional pint.

'Mind he adds, 'I preferred a fruity white wine but you couldn't actually say that in those In those days, Andy and Ralph walked down the Balls Pond Road, but the experience, like much else in early Pinter plays, has disappeared in this enveloping, slightly off-putting mist of poetic sleep-talking. Heretically, I hankered for the hard, cutting, political edge in the recent shorter plays. Moonlight is an inversion of The Homecoming; the brothers stay away, most decisively during a telephone conversation with their mother in which they pretend to be workers in a Chinese laundry. It is also the Holm-coming for an actor who electrified my generation with his still unsurpassed RSC double-act of Gloucester Richard Bed-bound and mesmerising: Ian Holm plays a dyingfather, who despises his sons buty earns to see his daughter, in Harold Pinter's new offering 'Moonlight'. Photograph by Sue Adler.

play, though I loved the Stop-pardian sequence involving Anna Freud's knickers, a bicycle pump and a Wellington boot. Jessica's point (and Jeffrey Masson's in The Assault on Truth) is that Freud's rejection of his own seduction theory was a moral sham, not an intellectual advance. Phyllida Lloyd's engaging production leaves Henry Goodman as the convincing Freud lookalike white beard, thick accent, mean glasses stranded, in self-pity as the set melts in a Dali-esque landscape populated with a few unlovely nude models. Tim Potter is a spindly, frenetic Dali in humbug-striped jacket and long johns, but the character's existence is desperately contrived, Stephen Jeffreys, like Terry Johnson, is one of our best new nearly-young playwrights, but A Going Concern at Hamps-tead Theatre is a severe disappointment. In this realistic work with power struggles, Jeffreys has plumbed part of his own past, in the manner of John buddhas, phallic totems, Persian carpets and Viennese furniture of Freud's resting place, and today's Freud Museum, in Maresfield Gardens.

Doing for and to Freud what Michael Hastings did for and to T. in Tom and Viv, Johnson jumps on the feminist bandwagon which supposes that Freud's suppression of his findings in his brilliant 'Aetiology of Hysteria' lecture of 1896 was a cover for his own infantile sexual experiences and the source of his overriding attribution of Ill and Pinter's Lenny. Holm is mesmerising as the bed-bound bastard who despises his sons ('a sponging, parasitical pair of ponces') and who aches to see his daughter and grandchildren. David Leveaux's reverential production seems to stutter to several false conclusions, losing rhythm in the last half-hour. Short plays can sometimes seem very long, and the split-level grey design of Bob Crowley requires some awkward movement in a piece which, ideally, should float like a dream.

Dream-merchants loom large in Terry Johnson's reasonably funny Hysteria at the Royal Court. Johnson's Insignificance, the play filmed by Nicolas Roeg, matched brains with beauty, Einstein with Marilyn Monroe. Hysteria elaborates a more factually correct encounter between Salvador Dali and Sigmund Freud. It is transplanted from Elsworthy Road, where Freud lodged for a month in 1938, to a stunning reproduction by Mark Thompson all encased goddesses and Bust is exactly that: a play written at speed, with the last lines finished two hours before curtain-up, about an ambitious Victorian versifier who deserted his muse and bust a gut to become, literally, a bust. The story has a sweet circularity.

John Nicholson, 'the Airedale poet', was an alcoholic wool-sorter employed by the teetotal Titus Salt. He went to London, got arrested for haranguing a bust of Shakespeare in a theatre foyer, and came home with a specially Immortality at last for Airedale's bust-a-gut poet Music Andrew Porter to ridiculous rape and sexual violence to the female victims' fantasy. The DaliFreud confrontation is expertly threaded through the intervention of a living case history, Jessica, whom the astonishing Phoebe Nicholls, too long absent from the stage, incorporates as dysfunctional victim, avenging daughter (of an abused mother), pliable model with an available armpit (hello, Dali), nemesis and sex-war bore. The farce episodes never quite gel with the argumentative core of the impersonate the poet, flanked by his equally local company, Northern Broadsides. They would stage the play in the mill's wool-sorting shop.

Under Harrison's direction, with the most rudimentary staging, this stirring tale bursts forth with an appropriately romantic wildness. Harrison has found a tone for his rhyming couplets which both undercuts and celebrates his hero's endearing naivety. 'Lead me, muse, along Aire's winding sing Veronica Dufjy in The Bacchae'. majorminor, triad). Tonal tunes melodies, then swaggering marches join the chromatic ostinato, which changes gait for a passionate slow movement in chaconne metre, and into 128 for a jig finale.

The Ciaconna which Rattle has also championed in Berlin and Birmingham is hardly a masterpiece newly unveiled. The jig is rather a plod. But it's an arresting, thoroughly composed work in the Junge Klassiz-itat vein charted by Busoni and also explored, in different ways, by Hindemith and Weill. Before the Ciaconna: a delicately wrought Afternoon of a Faun and Sibelius's great Violin Concerto with Ida Haendel Prom favourite for 56 years, looking young and attractive 'in a fuchsia-pink dress with black lace and sequins' (I quote the BBC announcer's fashion note) as an impeccably tuned, musically poised soloist. After it: the famous RattleCBSO account of Nielsen 5 which has been called, the programme reminded us, 'the greatest symphony of our century'.

At a late-night Prom, Brian Ferneyhough's Terrain for violin and the octet of Varese's Octandre his latest piece for soloist and ensemble had its British premiere. An exciting 12 minutes. The solo, 'tense, electric', was played by Irvine Arditti; the Asko Ensemble, from Amsterdam, was alert. 4 'A 4J From THE London Sinfonietta, founded in 1968, has held to standards such as William Glock enjoined when he was the music critic of this paper, and carried through the country when he became BBC music controller: no 'what the public wants' nonsense or compliance with surveys, but championship of what he believed to be necessary and good. The Sinfonietta has given the first performances of more than 200 works, half of them its own receht Observer UULV'JLCUl of Gordale its tremendous sang Nicholson.

'As I'm your local bard I see no needTo quote more from a poet you all must comments Harrison. And then he has fun. In these straitened times, do we suffer from a shortage of muses? No problem, says Harrison. 'You only need one part-time muse To squeeze Royal Birthday poems from Ted He harnesses Nicholson's wide-eyed wonder at Bingley's beauties, to set up an ironic con Photograph: Richard MUdenhall. One rode a roller-coaster of events, exhilarated.

Luca Francesconi's Riti neur ali, Ligeti's Piano Concerto, and Varese's Integrates completed a programme that Glock might have been proud to present. At the close, midnight approaching, the audience was clamouring for more. The Bacchae calls for music. 'Come and adore Dionysus with dance and song and a thunder of drums! Let the god of joy in your shouts of joy be Many composers Szyma-nowski, Wellesz, Partch, Henze, John Buller have been drawn to it. The Opera Factory Bacchae on the South Bank production by David Freeman, music by Xenakis was a wash-out.

C. K. Williams's translation was shouted at us, spit flying, in a variety of common accents and odd pronunciations. (Maenads were 'meany-ads'). The dramatic structure was undermined the heroine's late, shocking entrance anticipated by stage enactment of the Messenger's speech.

When Freeman produces opera, a composer controls the pace. A spoken play lets him slow things to boring-point. Xenakis musicked just the choruses, in Greek as monotonous, uncomprehended chant, holding up the drama, adding nothing. But a word of praise for executants who had evidently worked hard. commissioned bust of himself.

He begat numerous progeny, carved his name on a prominent local rock, and drowned, one drunken in the Aire by Salt's Mill. Moss grew over the carving; a memorial bust erected by his friends in a Bin-gley park was That was ISO years ago. Two months ago, discovering both the carving and the overgrown plinth in the park, Harrison decided to give the man the immortality he craved. Barrie Rutter, another local lad, would Lacrimosa begins with a trumpet call soft to loud, a rousing D-major signal chromatically wrenched and moves surely through many emotions. In the final Sanctus, string counterpoint of quiet, Beethovenian pressure, intimate bluesy colloquy between trumpeter and pianist, echoes and exchanges between the trumpeter and two colleagues high in the balconies, and reminiscences of earlier events are contained in 10 minutes of moving music.

Knussen clarified textures that can readily clot. Crossley was eloquent. Hardenberger was disappointing: easy to imagine more telling timbre, more affecting utterance (especially after hearing John Wallace, in Edinburgh, as the soloist of MacMillan's new concerto). Tuesday's Prom was another 'occasion'. A 90-year-old composer, obscure since the Nazis banned performances of his first opera, Der gewaltige Hahnrei (The Mighty Cuckold, produced in Mannheim in 1932), was cheered by a packed and largely young audience.

Berthold Goldschmidt, Schreker pupil, then Erich Kleiber's and Carl Ebert's assistant, came to England in 1935. In 1947 he conducted Macbeth at the first Edinburgh Festival. In 1951, his Beatrice Cenci won a Festival of Britain prize, but was not produced. (The first staging is due in Magdeburg next year, while Berlin stages the Hahnrei.) In 1958 he abandoned composition, resuming 25 years later with a clarinet quartet for Gervase de Peyer. On Monday week, in the Pur-cell Room, there's a concert of his recent chamber music.

The 12-minute Ciaconna sin-fonica, which Simon Rattle and the CBSO played at the Prom, dates from 1936. Goldschmidt was 32 when he began it on a 32-note theme, chromatic but built of four-note cells with tonal implications (the first a majorminor, the last an Offbr THERE'S nothing more powerful than a poem in its place, as Tony Harrison knows full well. He it was who took the Oresteia home to Greece, and his clog-dancing Trackers of Oxyrhyn-chus, after a London stint, back to its Bradford roots. He it was who died a slow death at the National last year, with his own grim production of his verse epic on the history of weaponry, Square Rounds. He has now galvanised Bradford with a new clog-dancing epic at Salt's Mill.

Poetry or sublime commissions. For 17 years Michael Vyner, until an Aids-early death in 1989, was its inspired director. Hans Werner Henze my near-contemporary, chronicler in lyrical notes of the turbulent years through which we both have lived embarked on a Requiem for Vyner with an Introitus performed at a memorial concert in Covent Garden three years ago. It has grown to a nine-movement Requiem without singers, but with the pianist Paul work llilil ti, one'ltline world's on Thursda; with the Gallery's Director of France. For tickets below.

trast between Attic ambition and homespun achievement. Rutter holds the proceedings together with shining eye and wonderfully exaggerated gesture: pure Dickensian melodrama. His clog-dancing colleagues play mill owners, mill workers, muses and political activists with authentic conviction. Everything is revelled in rhyme, Yorkshire speech rhythms, drumming feet, choral harmony. Poetry in its place.

Michael Church Classical releases GILBERT SULLIVAN: The Zoo, The Sorcerer (London 436 807-2); Princess Ida (436 810-2); Utopia Ltd (436 816-2); The Grand Duilre(436 813-2)D'Oyly Carte Company Recorded 1965-76, re-issued to complete the canon. The Zoo is early without G. The Sorcerer was their first full-length piece carefully, exquisitely composed, here well performed (Valerie Mas-terson is Aline, Isidore Godfrey conducts) and recorded. Princess Ida, once neglected, is in favour again; the romantic score survived even the vulgar ENO staging, just. Here Elizabeth Harwood is Ida, Masterson is Melissa, and Sargent conducts the Royal Philharmonic.

Utopia Ltd (admired by Bernard Shaw) and The Grand Duke were the last operas (The Grand Duke was counted a failure because it ran for only 123 performances). They are well worth exploring. Since the plots are elaborate, the absence of spoken dialogue (as in all these sets) means recourse to a libretto but every properly stocked home has at least a paperback S. One needs it; soprano words are often unclear. The men are better Kenneth Sandford, in various roles, is especially pleasing.

What a sure, graceful composer Sullivan was. Orchestra pieces serve as fillers (Mackerras's Pineapple Poll with Ida); the Macbeth overture is impressive. JOHN HARBISON: Words from Patersonf Simple Daylights Piano Quintet San ford Sylvan, Dawn Upshaw, Boston Symphony Players Elektra Nonesuch 7559-79189-2 In an eloquent album note, the Boston critic Richard Dyer calls John Harbison 'composer-in-residence for our lives'. American lives, one's tempted to add; but in our global world he is one of the most distinguished representatives of his country. The Quintet, commissioned to honour Georgia O'Keeffe, is an excellent composition is ALGERI JL tated mother on the Spanish borders of Southern California, is as enchanting and beautiful as ever.

Derek Goldby's lax production (cleverly designed on a shoestring by Hayden Griffin) makes no great claims for the play, but allows Julia Swift and Roland Curram ample opportunity to camp it up down Mexico way. but not all that much hasta la vista. especially the Elegia finale. Words from Paterson, a William Carlos Williams cycle, is a work, Dyer says, that he loves to listen to 'because you can't get to the end of this music. completely honest music, music that helps us to keep honest too'.

Sylvan is an honest, eloquent soloist. But Upshaw is disappointing in Simple Daylight, you can't catch the words. QBRNARD HUSCHi Arias Preiser B9071 Stunningl Especially if one has a CD player with speed control, for it seems to me that the transfers have been sharpened and shrilled, and need correction. Has there been a greater baritone? One thrills to beauty and nobility of tone; to forwardness of utterance, with every word felt and audible; to definiteness and presence. The arias, recorded in the Thirties, range from Mozart, through Lortzing, Nicolai, Wagner, Humperdinck, Gounod, Verdi, Thomas, to Puccini and Giordano.

All in German, except for two previously unpublished Tosca sides ('Tre sbirri' and 'La povera mia cena'), in maybe imperfect but very vivid Italian. MEDTNER: Composers In Person EMI CDC 7 54839 2 Lovers of Oda Slobodskaya wonderful timbre, art, and personality will rejoice to discover three previously unpublished songs ('The Willow', 'Dawn in the Garden' and 'The Wagon of Life'), recorded in 1947, along with two of the four that appeared in the old Medtner Society albums. The composer accompanies her, and accompanies Schwarzkopf in Pushkin and Goethe settings (recorded in 1950). He was a distinguished, poetic pianist and a fluent composer; five, of his piano Tales and other works alternate with the song groups. Medtner's elaborate, late-romantic music begins to pall before the 80-minute recital is done; but, with pleasure, I've been returning to individual pieces and above all to Slobodskaya.

AP (ROYAL DPERA HOUSE Covent Harden 18 September at 7pm 22, 24, 27, 30 September, 4, 7 October at 7.30pm Crossley (Sinfonietta director since Vyner's death) and, in three movements, the trumpeter Hakan Hardenberger as chief celebrants. The Sinfonietta players have instrumen-tally 'speaking' roles. Oliver Knussen conducted the Requiem at a noonday Prom last Sunday; it was followed by a celebratory picnic across the road in Kensington Gardens. The Requiem, which lasts 72 minutes is a special-occasion work. The composer countenances the performance of individual numbers or groups of numbers, and probably in that way the piece, or parts of it, will most often be heard.

In entirety it is impressive and beautiful, filled with memorable ideas, but it demands not merely intent but also patient listening: there's a good deal in Henze's 'vaguely lyrical' manner seductive sonorities, musingly melodious lines, all very beautiful, but with little sense of getting anywhere. The movements are termed, after Schiitz, Geistliche Kon-zerte, spiritual concerted pieces, and, like those of Britten's Sin-fonia da Requiem, are titled from the Requiem (but not in liturgical sequence). In the Introitus, sad, beautiful music is from time to time harshly interrupted. In Dies irae, fierce music is interrupted by gentle episodes. Ave varum corpus, Henze has said, was inspired by thoughts reverent thoughts of beautiful bodies rather than transubstantiation; Brittenish handbells ring out.

Lux aeterna is gentle and radiant. The solo trumpet enters in Rex tremendae a Mahlerian march, possibly ironic, with a poignant trio. Agnus dei is a tender dialogue for piano and strings. Tuba mirum, for brasses (without the solo trumpet), woodwinds, and percussions, includes alarming outbreaks of cheap military music, again Mahlerian. Henze saves the best for last.

WHITECHAPEL 10 sep -21 nov '93 in association with iOOBSERVER mm fan ejhAtiomamtsmam 50 new iv Lucian Freud, leaMa ngurafie painters, THe Observer in hostwg two private views September 23 and November 4, from 6:30 fttWImm TU Ai 1 1 Lucian Freud's work at Vbserver's 'AttMrmp William Fe and the Whitechanel Art Catherine Lampert (Nov 4). Tickets 4.502.75 cones sf Tickets include an exhibitor guide and a glass of Muscat aMea4ta1lassic Via Doux MARILYN HORNE Naturel from the south Mease fill in the coupon Please send me tickets at I enclose a chequepostal order The Observer (address on back Thursday September 23 Either date Name Address Send to: Freud OfTer, Observer Road, London EC1R 3ER L'lTALIANA IN 4.50 2.75concs each. for payable to please). Thursday November 4 Postcode Press Office, 1 19 Farringdon GIOACHINO ROSSINI Sponsored (1988) by The Cluff Foundation.