It was a night of slightly embarrassing personal revelation -
both shows involve too much talk- and a lot of hair gel... Apart
from that, though, the double bill at the Soho theatre was
amazingly impressive and the two approaches on display to virtuoso
performance and things you have never quite seen before went
together better than you might express.
After a brief and slightly odd turn as a German performance
artist called Pillow Vomit, who blunders blindfold around the stage
for a while before turning on a variety of Casios, and
philosophising about disgust, Geo Wyeth puts his clothes back on
and starts showing off his skills with the Casios, a guitar, a
grand piano and an accordion. His songs have intense, if slightly
noodling, instrumental backing - think jazz greats like Archie
Shepp - and meander through beat poetry and self mythologizing,
like a trans queer Harry Chapin who takes his time getting to the
point. Along the way some hippy-dippy audience participation -
making us share a floating piece of cloth and telling us that it is
a tent in which we are all one, making us put our hands up and
down, exhaustingly- and a show which at times seems heading to
pretentiousness ends up being moving and full of odd inventiveness.
Geo Wyeth has the voice, face and tousled hair of a bruised hipster
angel.
And then Hahn-Bin (pictured), who announced his own death and
rebirth as Amadeus Leopold, both the playful genius Mozart and the
hard taskmaster father whose skills underly all that talent. There
is an interesting question implicit in the staggering display on
offer, a cabaret of encores which almost spoils us with treats of
genius; is there room in the mainstream classical music world for a
genius so very camp, so very gender-queer, so subversively
staggeringly gifted? Along with the quiet brooding of his piano
accompanist John Blacklow, the violinist gives us a performance
that is a whirlwind of genius we haven't seen since famous
violinists like Kreisler and Paganini, along with some pretty
accomplished mime work, solidly good in itself but amazing combined
with the fiddling.
The first half, broadly speaking, explores the demonic side of the
classical violin repertoire and, closely allied with it, the gypsy
tradition and - what often goes hand in hand with that - the Jewish
tradition - the Danse Macabre, Bartok's Rumanian Dances, the weird
solo from Young Frankenstein. The second lighter half explores the
violin as voice - bits of Carmen, bits of Porgy and Bess and an
amazingly moving performance of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
Hahn-Bin's tone sings like a rich human voice and yet they also
do things that no voice could ever manage - at one point, in the
Sabre Dance, their fingers move faster than the eye can quite
grasp, bowing and plucking the strings and striking the side of the
violin with the bow. It's at once a display of dexterity and
musicality which at one point left this reviewer just going 'bloody
hell' at the end of a piece and a piece of OTT camp music theatre
that invigorates and breaks the heart. The idea of camp as the lie
that tells the truth has never been quite so relevant - this show
is an amazing talent devoting themself to entertainment as a way of
breaking through the paradox of their position as beautiful fashion
icon and great musician.
For more information, visit:
geoxxxwyeth.tumblr.com
hahn-bin.com
