Cocteau’s Circle – quick links
Some of the most magical moments in music and theatre occur before a show has even begun. The anticipatory flutter of a curtain, caught in a breeze, accidentally bumped or about to part? The telltale swell of the orchestra as they tune up, or that barely perceptible shift of light, just beginning to dim as the chattering audience falls silent.
All elicit a tingling thrill which the artists can only hope to sustain.
An exhilaration that British-Nigerian drag star, bawdy baritone and cabaret queen nonpareil, Le Gateau Chocolat, grasps onto with his glittering, extraordinarily long talons, never once letting go.
Our maître d’ for the evening of Cocteau’s Circle, the grand finale of the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s 50th anniversary year, Chocolat knows just how to keep us waiting, wanting. As does the ACO, led by Richard Tognetti, who has thrived in embracing a multidisciplinary approach that showcases the very best of classical music in inventively contemporary ways that are endlessly game-changing.
So we settle into our seats at the Melbourne Recital Centre as the sharp-suited ACO players drift onto the stage in dribs, though never drab, though a vast diaphanous curtain hovering somewhere between blue, green and gold. Smoke cascades over the stage’s edge through a field of fairy lights. This stripped-back staging by Yaron Lifschitz lets the performers shine.
As Intermission Music, a new work composed by Australian-based, Uzbekistan-born composer Elena Kats-Chernin lifts our spirits, it’s as if we are mid-libation in the smoky banquettes of infamous club Le Boeuf sur le Toit (The Ox on the Roof), 1921. A place oft-troubled by the likes of boozy author Ernest Hemingway, movie star and dancer Josephine Baker, plus poet, playwright, filmmaker and confirmed avant-gardist Jean Cocteau.
It’s also where Les Six would meet, the Left Bank coterie of neoclassicist composers comprising Germaine Tailleferre, Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud, Louis Durey, Francis Poulenc and Arthur Honegger, whose music will regale us marvellous evening.
Cocteau’s Circle: Les Cinq
Chocolat appears after an abridged tease of Auric’s Ouverture. Adopting a surrealist take on Cocteau’s persona to lead the show, his half-sung, part-narrated, all-magnificent introduction, again set to new work by Kats-Chernin, draws us deeper into this scene. We can practically smell fresh rain slicking now-treacherous cobblestones.
Donning a dazzling look, designed by costumer Libby McDonnell, the fit is as much indebted to the big shoulder suits of Talking Heads as the Les Enfants Terribles author’s admittedly sharp tailoring, Chocolat towers six foot six tall on six-inch heels. He also sports a fabulous wig that is both Années folles-adjacent and carries us forward in time, most notably to Elsa Lanchester’s iconic look in director James Whale’s cinematic triumph, Bride of Frankenstein.
Chocolat’s statuesque look shimmers chameleonically across the gender spectrum, as one look after another transmogrifies between tuxedo and ballgown, mostly somewhere over the rainbow in between in ways embraced by the likes of Baker, Romaine Brooks and Radclyffe Hall.
As guided by Tognetti and occasionally butt-bumped out of the way by true diva Chocolat – such is the fate of curly-headed guest pianist Stefan Cassomenos, who ably continues his ivory tinkling unbothered – the ACO adopts snippets of Les Six’s work.
Though Durey’s music is AWOL, we’ll swoop and soar through emotional peaks and troughs riven by the rest of Les Six, including Tailleferre’s effervescently lyrical String Quartet: I. Modéré in c sharp minor, and the more sombre lament of Honegger’s Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel: Marche funèbre.
Cocteau’s Circle: playfully cheeky
Chocolat, a gifted storyteller and sassy, saucy singer, is joined in lyrical duties by tux-flaunting soprano Chloë Lankshear, who brings puckish charm to their on-stage pairing, dancing do si do. Lankshear brings suitably heartbreaking heft to Lili Boulanger’s haunting final composition, Pie Jesu.
While Boulanger, sister of Milhaud’s mentor Nadia, was the first woman to win the Grand Prix de Rome, she was dead by 24 of tuberculosis, an all too common curse in 1920s Paris.
Time-travelling once more, Lankshear sees us out with a star-crossed rendition of Edith Piaf’s 1949 ballad L’Hymne à l’amour, recently performed from La Tour Eiffel by a triumphantly returning Céline Dion to close the 2024 Parisian Olympic Games.
Suitably, this playfully tongue in very cheeky night will also encompass music by the hoary old French composers Les Six sought to supplant, including Claude Debussy’s joyfully nimble String Quartet, Op.10: II. Assez vif et bien Rythmé and Maurice Ravel’s spritely String Quartet: IV. Vif et agité.
This, and a bevy of ebullient dance hall numbers including Henri Christiné’s comédie musicale, Phi-Phi, and the Gershwin brothers’ Broadway toe-tapper Oh, Lady Be Good!
Cocteau’s Circle: Tognetti triumphs
Tognetti is as much a dancer as conductor, gleefully leading the ACO in colour and movement with his violin bow, picking up the pace of many of these pieces until they sparkle all the brighter, as if caught in the dazzle of a tungsten streetlamp.
It’s a fitting celebration of 50 years with one of Australia’s most electrically ambitious companies, so adroitly connecting the old to the new. And what good taste to do so arm-in-arm with the mellifluous Lankshear and melt in his mouth Chocolat. Sublime stuff.
