What I learned from Peter Cropper, the maestro of the Midlands
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Version 0 of 1. On 29 May Peter Cropper died suddenly, aged 69. He had been the leader of the Lindsay String Quartet, and set up Music in the Round in Sheffield (which was exactly that, music performed not on a stage, but “in the round” in the Crucible theatre, so that the audience was always a breath away from the musicians). For me, growing up in the Potteries, he was a hugely significant person. The Lindsays played regularly in the New Vic (also a theatre in the round), honouring a long and treasured connection with Stoke-on-Trent that began when they were resident at Keele University in the 1960s. There wasn’t exactly an avalanche of classical concerts in north Staffordshire in the 1980s. This was the only music that I got to hear performed locally. I was so lucky. Through the Lindsays I first heard the beacons of the canon: Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven and Shostakovich. And Cropper hosted workshops and gave talks way before it was standard. There was nothing distant or Olympian about the way the quartet played (or, indeed, dressed: Cropper was incapable of formality and wore open-toed sandals with socks and crumpled shirts). The playing was earthy, passionate, at times lacking a cool perfection but always utterly exhilarating. Related: Peter Cropper They were extraordinary to watch, too. Each player had his own physicality. Bernard Gregor-Smith, the cellist, was the most still, his face clouded in seriousness, but at important moments he could suddenly spring into movement as if he were about to explode out of his seat. Cropper presented a crazy spectacle, squirming and writhing, his eyes bulging alarmingly – sometimes resembling a fish on a hook, as his body expressed the extremity of the notes. Cropper and the Lindsays were hugely important internationally – but especially precious to us living in the Midlands and the north of England. Greek brilliance One of the perils and pleasures of my job is being asked for theatre recommendations. Often, my mind goes totally blank at these moments, especially since what I think of as the Rule of Higgins means that I will miss the one thing that everyone is still talking about years later (step forward Simon Stephens’s Three Kingdoms, Lyric Hammersmith, May 2012, inconveniently staged when I was writing a book). Also, taste is a funny thing, and mine has sent friends to what they have regarded as frankly horrific evenings at the opera. Still: I will now give you my recommendation, free of charge. It is Robert Icke’s production of the Oresteia at the Almeida in London, which he has also freely adapted from the Aeschylus. It’s just one of those nights where – for all the occasional roughness or unevenness in this three-and-a-half-hour evening – I was blown away by the sheer formal audacity, all-guns-blazing talent and poetic brilliance of it. And the performances: Lia Williams’s Clytemnestra is just off the scale. Related: Oresteia review – a terrifying immediacy This is the first in a season of Greek plays. Yet to come: Ben Whishaw as Dionysus in The Bacchae, and the brilliant prospect of Rachel Cusk sinking her teeth into Medea, which she is adapting for a production by Rupert Goold. A Krakow classic Talking of the Greeks, in my capacity as a writer of books about the ancient world I am a subscriber to an email newsletter for professional classicists. Favourite missives this week have concerned a conference on prostheses in antiquity (did you know there is evidence for prosthetic toes having been used in ancient Egypt?) – and an “International Workshop on Sacrifice” in Krakow, at which the mind fairly boggles. |