Spank's Edinburgh Diary, Tuesday 20/08/2024

Reviewed today: And Mrs, Jenny Tian: Chinese Australian, Kleio Quartet, Wu Man.

Alarmingly, I appear to have reached an age where I get to complain about what they've done to Radio 3. Which is a bit odd considering I never listen to it. However, I do try to attend one Queen's Hall morning concert each time I go to the Festival, and one of the things I've always enjoyed about them is the way they're broadcast live on Radio 3, meaning I can include a link to BBC Sounds to let you listen to them for yourselves. But not this year, apparently. The Beeb are definitely there recording the Queen's Hall shows, but they're dripfeeding the recordings through their afternoon Classical Live slot, with no indication currently as to when today's gig will be broadcast. Sort it out, BBC! I need to know when I'll be able to hear that very distinctive cough I made between the second and third movements of the Haydn.

Today's gig features the Kleio Quartet, a young female nice-looking string quartet that would feel like the sort of group that a cynical marketing department would put together, if it wasn't for the fact that they're spectacularly good at what they do. Their opening stab at Britten's Three Divertimenti feels like an actual stabbing, with wildly aggressive yet tightly controlled bursts of sound. By comparison, the Haydn string quartet that follows is a bit more traditional and a bit less interesting, apart from that weird coughing noise halfway through.

But after the 20 minute interval (during which I use the Queen's Hall wifi to post up yesterday's diary from my seat), we get to the most intriguing piece in the programme. At the Octoroon Balls is the first string quartet written by jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, and just from his involvement you can probably imagine what it'll be like - very 20th century American, a bit Copeland, a bit Gershwin, with elements of jazz sprinkled throughout for flavouring. It turns out to be all that and more: the first movement is an extended solo for violinist Yume Fujise, a fractured country  hoedown that's spectacular enough to get a round of applause on its own. Again, the control and synchronisation of the four players together is second to none, as they cope with sudden lurches in tempo, wild glissandi, and even a couple of movements that end in a fadeout (which brings back memories of a gag Ray O'Leary did on the topic yesterday). It's even more impressive when they casually announce that their usual viola player Jenny Lewisohn can't be there today, and they're working with a sub. If the Beeb could have been arsed to have the concert available online by now, I could have told you her name. Sorry about that.

Back at 50 George Square for another Film Festival screening, and we're happy to report that if you get there nice and early and grab a seat on the front row, the sightlines are perfectly acceptable as long as you don't think about how your head is ruining the view for everyone else. The odd thing is, the room has a perfectly adequate screen already, but for the festival they've built another temporary screen in front of it. Granted, the original screen is smaller, but it's smaller so that everyone has an unobstructed view of it.

Anyhoo, it's our last session in this room for the year, and we're here for Daniel Reisinger's And Mrs, which he says is his attempt at creating a romcom with a similar unexpected mix of comedy and tragedy to, say, Muriel’s Wedding, which is thirty years old this year. When the film starts, Gemma (Aisling Bea) and Nathan (Colin Hanks) are engaged and eagerly awaiting the big day. By the time the opening credits are over, though, Nathan is dead. But why should that stop Gemma going ahead with the wedding?

You could argue that taken along with yesterday's Timestalker and Sunlight, our first three films in this year's EIFF are a loose trilogy about emotionally damaged women. This one wants to be a study of the grieving process, as made explicit by its end title sequence. But at its heart, it's a really traditionally structured romcom. It’s another film about a couple hitting multiple contrived obstacles on the way to matrimony, and the death of the groom is merely one of those obstacles. There are some nice performances (particularly from Aisling Bea and
Billie Lourd), but the overall tone is just too slippery to ever get a hold on, and makes you appreciate the emotional juggling act of Muriel's Wedding even more. It's also worth noting that the east London locations are both atmospheric and (unusually) geographically accurate.

Elsewhere in George Square, back in that underground cluster of lecture rooms bagsied by Assembly, we're continuing our run of Antipodean Taskmaster contestants with Jenny Tian, who recently completed a stint on season 2 of the Australian version. Her show Chinese Australian is a retelling of the last ten years of her life, a journey from marketing student to management consultant to TikTok star to standup comedian. It's the online content that's made her famous in Oz over the last couple of years, and she gradually realises that she's back in marketing again, only the client is herself.

It's reminiscent of when Olaf Falafel was starting out in standup after making his name with Vine videos, and spent a chunk of his set just projecting them on screen. Tian mostly resists that urge - the audience is expecting a couple of her hits - and instead makes the show a PowerPoint presentation, to give plenty of opportunities for visual gags. Importantly, she doesn't use them as a substitute for verbal gags: the narrative is the key thing, focussing on it through the lens of being female and Chinese while simultaneously having a full-on Aussie accent coming out of that face. It's a show that's currently largely playing to an audience of people who know her already, but that'll probably change in the future.

We keep up the Chinese theme over at the Edinburgh International Festival Hub, and I keep forgetting what an utterly lovely venue it is, marred only by the tiny amount of legroom you get in the cheap balcony seats. Tonight's concert there is presented in association with the Aga Khan Music Programme: apparently these days he's stopped giving people racehorses for Christmas, and instead finances international collaborations featuring some of the best musicians in the world. One of those is Wu Man, one of the world's leading players of the pipa, the four-string banjo-like affair that everyone stereotypically thinks of when they think about Chinese music.

The representative for the Aga Khan Master Musicians who introduces the show makes an interesting point: typically, the approach would be to deploy Wu Man in some sort of East-West fusion arrangement. But that's frankly been done to death: how about trying an East-East fusion instead? So Wu is joined on stage by Takik lute player Sirojiddin Juraev and Uzbek percussionist Abbos Kosimov, and the three of them collaborate on a series of pieces inspired by their native lands, with plenty of room for improvisation along the way. (Particularly from Kosimov: it always seems like in small ethnic ensembles like this one, it's always the percussionist that's the wild card.) It's a joy watching the three of them bouncing musical ideas off each other in real time, particularly when the results have such an infectious groove to them.

It's an early finish, so on a whim we head over to Hoot The Redeemer, Edinburgh's best bar, for just one drink. While we're in there we learn the sad news that Hoot is about to close down for good in a week and a half, and our 'just one drink' turns into a beer, a cocktail, and a booze-infused ice cream. (If And Mrs has taught us anything - apart from 'Nish Kumar can't act for shit' - it's that how you say goodbye is important.) We subsequently find out from the staff that the bar's been granted a stay of execution till Christmas, but that still means this is the last time we'll ever drink there, or eat whisky and dark chocolate flavoured ice cream to the sound of Straight Outta Compton.

Having read the article about its closure, The BBG suggests it’s probably preferable that it was brought down by unscrupulous landlords rather than incompetent business practices. I'd say different, rather than preferable. After all, there's no chance in the future that incompetent business practices will be lined up against a wall and shot.