The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 47

48 OBSERVER SUNDAY 19 JANUARY 1992 1 That string driven thing Taxing but not lyrical 1 OTITMM5 I Gillian Darley looks at six designs for the Inland Revenue HQ. Second Viennese School has been assumed to legitimise his music. Alban Berg was closely influenced by him: the second act of Wozzeck clearly derives much from the inspiration of Schreker's similar outdoor act. But how taut, cogent and musically coherent Wozzeck (the fine English National Opera production was televised last Sunday) seems beside Schreker's ramblings! One can appreciate the stir that Der feme klang made at the time its sheer adventurousness, its anticipation of so many trends which came to fruition after the Great War without finding that it still hangs together today. Its approach to collage, its schizophrenic veering between extrovert bombast and intense introversion now seems less than happy.

Vocally, one's approach to the piece was somewhat undermined by Opera North's less than commanding cast. Kim Begley's Fritz was appropriately tortured and usually audible, but Virginia Kerr's Grete, on whom so much of the action depends, was unhelpfully introduced by Fassbaender as far away as possible from the front of the stage, and had problems of audibility even when she came nearer. Grete, with her Lulu-like decline into prostitution and sudden final realisation of the power of love, is a com-pellingly intense figure, but too little of this could be perceived in the performance. The gift of Schreker's opera is the second act, complete with Fledermaus-Uke party in the high-class brothel, which introduces various party pieces including the Count's story of the Burning Crown. William Dazeley did his best to be unfazed by Ultz's humiliatingly silly costumes, and by Fass-baender's determination to be Teutonically unfunny in sending up the decaying atmosphere of the music.

Admirably, the cast double up in several parts of the chronologically complicated story Fiona, Kimm is outstanding in all three acts, while Peter Sid-hom brings a much-needed touch of forcefulness to the final act as Dr Vigelius. Among all the participants, the orchestra is the real hero, and makes the most of the sumptuous effects under Paul Daniel's scrupulously clear conducting. (He has also made the translation.) One's heart goes out to the chorus at the inanities they are forced to endure, down to the illuminated earrings and bracelets of the final act. Throughout, the brooding presence behind the opera is Fritz's own piece, The Harp, which is no doubt meant to be the opera we are in fact seeing. When Act Three (finally) comes, the piece is receiving its first performance, and we watch the reactions of those emerging from the theatre.

But there is one vital difference, for whereas Fritz's own work ends without his locating the distant sound, the opera rewrites that ending with tragic results. Nicholas Payne, the outgoing general director of Opera North, has an uncomfortable way of putting his finger on any problematic situation. Writing in the programme of Der feme klang, he says: 'It is our responsibility to find visual metaphors and a truthful action which will enable the. distant sound to be heard across the That is exactly what the company has not quite succeeded in doing. There are less complicated and less compromised pleasures to be had at English National Opera, where Nicholas Hyt-ner's supremely inventive and musical production of Handel's Xerxes, first seen in 1985, has returned fresh as a daisy.

Perfectly framed in David Nicholas Kenyon searches in vain for the elusive spark. ANYONE heard a distant harp recently? Watch out, it can damage your health. Such at least seems to be its dire effect in Der ferae klang, Franz Schreker's morbidly expressionist opera from 1912, which last week received its long delayed British premiere from the ever-enterprising Opera North. The hapless Fritz, the tragic hero of the tale, searches everywhere for the distantly perceived sound that provides his artistic inspiration. When he is finally united with Grete, the lover he abandoned to search for the sound, his mind wanders from his beloved as he unwraps a white parcel containing a wooden harp.

Even the apostrophes which Schreker's own libretto directs towards Grete are sung to the instrument. Does our hero die, or just go mad and wander off disconsolately into the dark, leaving his Grete in despair? The latter is the choice of Brigitte Fassbaender, the singer who makes her British directorial debut in this challenging and tricky work. In the final moments of the opera, she manages to create a genuine sense of tragedy and waste, as the illusions of the artist overwhelm even the most Amorous contender: Ann Power of love: Virginia Kerr and Kim Begley in 'Der feme klang' Photograph: Frank Herrman. Mitridate at Covent Garden, now in amorous contention here with the gloriously strident counter-tenor of Christopher Robson, and Norman Bailey adding his cheerfully brain-hurting bass to the crew of bowls-playing generals. In the pit, Ivor Bolton conducts more suavely and expressively than Mackerras did originally: less gutsy, but beautifully supple and stylish.

distant ruined views of the opera's real place of action, Hytner's staging provides a marvellously surreal background against which the passions of Handel's score can appear vital and vivid. And how wonderfully characterised those passions are in the top-level cast which the Coliseum has now assembled: Ann Murray and Yvonne Kenny, recently duetting in jBfjffe, mmmmmmm precious personal contact. But it has been a long haul to this point. Schreker's extraordinary score drips atmosphere, and demands a production responsive both to the particular style of its turn-of-the-century idiom and to the fevered intensity of its exploration of the artist's condition. Fassbaender signally fails to provide either, and takes refuge in a static, jokey, unconvincing portrayal of the extremely precise expressionist world of Schreker's fevered imagination.

She is doubtless hampered by the restricted space available in the Grand Theatre, Leeds, where the huge orchestra sprawls outwards from the pit on to the stage (making the actual on-stage orchestra in Act Two rather less impressive than it is meant to be), and where Ultz's designs provide her with only a tilting platform to serve for a house, a bordello, a garden bar. One can understand Opera North's interest in this score. The opera has been twice recorded and successfully revived in Europe in several different productions, most recently in Vienna. Why has Schreker's score had such an famous allure for so long? He is one of those shadowy figures known to us by just a couple of works the Chamber Symphony has become a fairly regular repertory piece of new music groups in recent years whose association with the Murray in the ENO's 'Xerxes'. same screenwriter, Sooni Tara-porevala, follow another group of transplanted Indians, in this case from Uganda to the rural Deep South of the United States.

Sadly, the ambience is less densely Faulknerian than one had hoped. The film's central character appears to be Jay (Roshan Seth), a prosperous Indian barrister expelled from Idi Amin's Uganda in 1972 with his wife and six-year-old daughter Mina. Like the liberal intellectual Seth played in My Beautiful Laundrette, Jay cannot adjust to Western life and 18 years later he's living off hard-working, entrepreneurial fellow exiles in a small Mississippi township where his wife manages a liquor 0 tJKQ (bum TTfty WaTntti'it ft urn si Hurled from a to hell liquor store IT ISN'T often that the tax office asks us humble taxpayers for advice, but in its search for a new headquarters in Nottingham the Inland Revenue has mounted a discreet public participation exercise. Following the embarrassment of haying the original scheme excoriated by every blue-chip advisory body in the country, a competition for the design of offices to house 1,800 employees was announced in the summer. Now six practices have been chosen from the 130 entrants and their schemes have been, fleetingly, on show in' Nottingham and London, where they can be seen (today only) at the Architectural Foundation in the lobby of the Economist Building, 25 St James's Street, SW1.

The schemes are unsigned but the contestants are Arup Associates, Evans and Shalev, Nicholas Hare, Michael Hopkins, Richard Rogers and Demetri Porphyrios, among whom the latter is easily identified as the designer of a curious traditional collegiate scheme, lying somewhere between Oxford and Aston. Porphyrios's proposals are from another world and era. The rest are remarkably like-minded, as might be expected in a group who, with the exception of Rogers, can be classed as pragmatic modernists. They concur on formality, modern materials, lavish glazing and generous landscaping. But a no-frills brief, together with a rigid budget of 50 million, seems to have dulled the competitors' spirits.

Nottingham Castle and the canal lie to the north, while the railway line hogs the southern aspect, so the amorphous site is the wrong way round. The Inland Revenue is departmentalised, suggesting that the different offices be designed as separate, or at least semi-detached buildings, while to preserve the sight lines to the castle, the offices have to be lowish and densely packed. Accommodating this enormous volume f.rfiice.: space. neignt, is a neaaacne. iwo versions tighten it all up by making a horseshoe-shaped courtyard the focus (and the most prominent feature seen from the castle mount).

Behind, the blocks either fan out, stepped and broken by green terraces and internal courtyards (scheme one), or reach great wings out tb either side and the rear (scheme five). Scheme two, the most rigorously formal, with a grand allie leading to the castle, is studded with glazed circular corner towers. While giving an initial impression of barrack-like blocks, scheme six makes effective use of the idea of a self-contained office village, complete with a glazed 'high street' running diagonally across the site. Scheme four is the most lively. A sweep of curving, separate buildings rimmed by cascading glazing is linked by bridges and intersected by open green passages.

At the end of January, three of these schemes will be shortlisted. The assessors, chaired by Colin Stansfield Smith, should have little trouble winkling out the frontrunners. Then the gauntlet will be down for the Inland Revenue to pick its future home. I put my money on scheme one, which has an assurance none of the others quite match. SI AN PHILLIPS in Philip French follows a family from Uganda to the Deep South.

IN HER impressive feature film debut. Salaam Mira Nair observed some village children thrust into a turbulent, Dickensian subcontinental city. Its cult following was such that in Paul Mazursky's Scenes From a Mall, Bette Midler and Woody Allen revisit the movie as a way of gaining perspective on their comfortable, consumer ist world. In its successor, Mississippi Masala (Curzon West End, 15), Nair and the Xerxes is a classic show, a highlight of ENO's work, which makes nonsense of Hytner's own recent complaints about the frailties and trendiness of. modern opera production.

It should encourage a rash of new Handel stagings: there are enough great operas of his left to go round. Nicholas Kenyon has boon appointed Controller of Radio 3. See news section. night and then through life. youngest son made some years ago as we walked past the Hackney Empire.

Had I heard that a benefit concert was to be staged there to raise money for the widows of tree surgeons killed in the war against Dutch Elm Disease? No, I hadn't. Well, he said, they're calling it 'Elm Night on Mare Street'. LESLIE PHILLIPS Fielding's sets within an ironic mixture of Handel's Vauxhall Gardens, antiquarian old fogeys studying trees and eggs, and of Eden Meeting cute at the diner: order cook. It's a predictable romantic comedy of two lonely, bruised people getting together to make it first through the night and then through life. He's a divorced ex-convict, eventually admitting to 46.

She's 32 going on 36, and has been beaten and humiliated. Garry Marshall, director of Pretty Woman, turns the movie into a cross between Marty and a blue-collar Cheers, signalling his understanding of traditional Hollywood realism by introducing Pfeiffer in close-up chewing gum. As if the central duo do not provide sufficient in the way of cliche, Terrence McNally has opened up his Broadway two-hander by adding a wise-cracking waitress (Kate Nelligan), a kindly immigrant cafe owner (Hector Elizondo), a black cook with literary aspirations and Photograph by SueAdler. garden store and the 24-year-old Mina (Sarita Choudhury) works in a motel. What has brought them there via London is not adequately explained and Jay is more a cipher than a mystery.

The movie's focus switches to the outgoing Mina who falls in love with Demetrius (Denzel Washington), a handsome black entrepreneur running his own carpet-cleaning business. Both have foregone higher education to help their ailing fathers. But their tryst in a Biloxi motel is clumsily discovered by Mina's outraged kinsmen and they become pariahs in a community that insists on everybody sticking with their own. Salaam Bombay! successfully wedded documentary and drama. Mississippi Masala falls between the stools.

We. learn little about the Asians' relations with either Southern whites (who apparently cannot distinguish them from Native Americans) or blacks (except that the newcomers consider themselves culturally superior and that Jay identifies African-Americans with the regime that expelled him from his homeland). An attractive cast, however, papers over the cracks and Ed Lach-man's photography provides a striking contrast between a lush, Edenic Uganda and the anonymous, neon-lit highway sprawl of the Indian diaspora. Mina and Demetrius 'meet cute' in a conventional Hollywood manner when she crashes a car into the back of his van. The eponymous Frankie Johnny (Trocadero, 15) meet cute over the writhing body of an epileptic on the floor of the New York diner where Frankie (Michelle Pfeiffer) is a waitress and Johnny (Al Pacino) a short- S6S069d QEfGD Michelle Pfeiffer andAl Pacino get that now ubiquitous figure, the heroine's gay confidant across the hallway.

As in all expensive boxes of crackers, the glittering kitsch is accompanied by smart one-liners. Jodie Foster's disappointing directorial debut, Little Man Tate (Odeon, Haymarket, PG) is a pseudo-problem picture scripted by Scott Frank with the same grasp of reality he demonstrated in Dead Again. A life-loving cocktail waitress (Foster) gives birth to a boy genius, Fred (Adam Hann-Byrd) and finds herself in a battle for his heart and mind when the rich, humourless Dr Jane Grierson (Dianne Wiest) plans to exploit the seven-year-old lad as part of her 'Odyssey of The Mind' travelling circus and to write a book about him. At Fred's eighth birthday party (surrounded by normal kids and fellow geniuses) everyone is reconciled, but not before Fred can say 'I love you mom', and mom reply 'I love you too kiddo'. Rather better than either Sponsored by Await OS IE LAWRENCE JS53j) 3 Hit si mm i together and make it first through the Frankie Johnny or Little Man Tate, though ultimately no less sentimental, Joe Roth's Cbupe de Ville (Cannon, Fulham Road, 12) stars Patrick Demp-sey, Arye Gross and Daniel Stern as warring, grown-up brothers driving a fin-tailed 1950s convertible from Detroit to Miami as a birthday present from their curmudgeonly father to their mother.

The time is the year nostalgia was born, that overworked summer of 1963, and it transpires that the trip is a brother-bonding exercise thought up by Dad (Alan Arkin) who's dying of cancer. Rachel Talalay's Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (Odeon West End, 18) is the third movie this week directed by a woman. More important it is the sixth and last Nightmare on Elm Street horror flick starring Robert Englund as the disfigured killer Freddy Kruger. The movie is well made, the final reel makes clever use of 3-D, but no one will be sorry to see the last of Englund. I cherish the series for a joke my British Petroleum Guardian 1 ii ifiyi Til fiM KM I Jf lift i flaw Open 10am-6pm daily, until 9 February 1992 Royal Academy of Arts Burlington House, Piccadilly, London Wl Scintillating Shorts, Dashing Directors mm Mk Tremendous Talks! CwwMJ frnMil awn DOS uQBE am i urn nr Tin nn difir TaiJJBPifiB mm uy.mmin ti by TINA HOWE ny.

in I The Fourth British I I International Festival of New Short Film Video 31 January 7 February 1992 riverside studios Box Office 8 1-748 3354, ee 081-S83 0331 Crisp Road Hammersmith London WB 9RL SEND S.A.E TO RIVERSIDE PRESS OFFICE FOR FULL DETAILS Following the festival, a touring package of film and video will be screened regionally at venues including: GMtfcr Film Thmmirw nth 12th Feb Light Hou Clmmo, Wolverhampton 14th 15th Feb Humana Film rtiaatra, Balfaat 19th 20th Feb For further information call 081- 741 2251 ex. 224 THE MI GROUP PLAYflCXJSE Northumberland Avenue, London. WC2 NOW PREVIEWING OPENS WED AT 7.00pm 071 839 4401071 379 9463 SPONSORHD BY Kdttutliilta lloUuiai rV.iiMjiu .1 fiUt.il) L-nl n- I'll Metropolitan Art. Tli Il I Iavmyor Bi'qucjt A Mr? II. O.

I laviMiicvt-r. EJEfO The BfilKsh Oiuncil.