MUSIC / Beware the pitfalls of sincerity: Composer Robin Holloway considers the difficulties of assessing a new piece of music.
By ROBIN HOLLOWAY
How to ensure a sympathetic reception for a new piece of music?
Ideally the subject should combine Ecology (with special reference to tropical rain-forests) with Protest (preferably shrill and futile).
It should climax with an ecumenical prayer (in every known language simultaneously) for intergalactic peace.
The musical material should include at least three of the following: Jewish cantillation, Catholic plainsong, Tibetan chanting, Aboriginal drumming, whalesong.
The idiom should be middle-of-the-road, artfully diguised with mod cons (clusters, glissandi, electronics): there should be a strong pop-music element, plenty of repetition a la Philip Glass.
When inspiration fails, fill the gaps with ritual gong-strokes, prolonged and amplified to the threshold of pain.
But such cynicism will not do; this is a serious matter.
A recent first visit to the USSR brought into focus for me the large question of evaluating music whose basis of appeal is grounded in extra-musical circumstances.
The first problem is the dispassionate judgement of compositions that emerge from, and in some cases directly express, political oppression.
The wide current appeal of such music seems to touch a nerve of communal masochism.
Audiences yearn to groan under the yoke of suffering they may never have experienced.
There is even a kind of envy for the depth of vision which this fate is thought to produce.
The conspicuous case is Shostakovich, a composer of enormous gifts and awesome copiousness, the only one to satisfy, if intermittently, both his masters and the West.
Ever since the ' just criticism ' meted out to his early excesses, then the gigantic success of the Leningrad Symphony in the 1940s, he has symbolized the artist caught in the net of public events.
As we now know something of the appalling story of his hounding by cultural officialdom, the raucous irony of the middle works and the bitter blackness of the last become entirely comprehensible.
His is the only post-war body of symphonic and chamber music to achieve genuine popularity.
Yet it is drastically imperfect.
Impressive inspirations mix with the coarsest triteness; there is an inordinate amount of padding and bombast; the reliance on formulae is the most shameless since Telemann.
Nor did things improve as he grew beyond subjection to state reproof.
Some late works, notably the Fourteenth Symphony and the songs on Michaelangelo texts are among his greatest.
But in the succession of late string quartets, poverty of substance and spiritual exhaustion are exemplified rather than expressed.
Shostakovich, obviously pre-eminent among Soviet composers, had to bear the cruellest treatment.
Bold spirits in the satellite countries were able to take liberties at home (Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Kurtag) when they didn't get away in person (Panufnik, Ligeti).
The recent change of policy has unfrozen a flood of music by younger figures who have not undergone similar cultural repression, though the conditions of their work remain poignant and precarious.
Recently it has been well-aired in this country through broadcasts and festivals; enough to form an initial overall view.
I believe that music-lovers are deluded when they claim to find artistic pleasure in any but a fraction of this music.
Here, as with most of Shostakovich, the content they locate is a projection of what they know of its circumstances - by which only a heart of stone would not be moved.
Take away this knowledge and the appeal would vanish, for the music is rarely able to stand on its own merits.
The second problem is the evaluation of new music that ' deals' with religious subject-matter, however vague.
A nostalgia has become apparent, after an era of aggressive atheism, either for the great organized beliefs or for substitutes chiming better with the would-be freer spirit of the times.
In the Sixties Gurus and pop music were the thing; the present mood is sombre and apocalyptic.
In both, the identification with music that attempts to express any part of this vast area tends to be one of self-deceiving empathy.
A spiritual void needs to be satisfied, so what is offered as serious and sacrosanct must be as good as it pretends.
Instances would include the St Luke Passion by Penderecki and the St John by Arvo Part, Messiaen's Transfiguration, Britten's War Requiem.
Tippett's Mask of Time and Birtwistle's Mask of Orpheus, Steve Reich's Desert Music, much of the output of John Tavener and Jonathan Harvey; above all, Stockhausen's seven-day wonder, Licht.
Such religious/humanitarian subject-matter  even the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Aids have not escaped  makes a fortress as unassailable by criticism as the art produced under tyranny.
The worth of individual pieces is, obviously, very various; consistent is the appeal to piety, ensuring that the elevated theme produces a warm-hearted response.
These composers are not coldly exploiting their audiences' kindness; they are all equally the victims of the going ideology.
And sincerity is not in question.
But the hard truth, nailed with all-time accuracy by the other great composer from Leningrad (the one who got out) is that sincerity does not guarantee quality.
' Most art is sincere, ' Stravinsky added, ' and most art is bad '.
Ersatz emotion replaces musical content.
The genuine difficulty of understanding intricate artistic designs is evaded by the factitious difficulty of being exalted or troubled by important messages which have nothing to do with musical worth.
Artistic value is not an ' extra ' even in a threnody for Chernobyl.
Without it, message or vision are wishful thinking.
Audiences' large capacities for ersatz-importance show how eager they are to be deeply stirred; how easily gulled; how low the threshold of enjoyment must be set for music of our time.
What little appeal it has seems to depend heavily on these impurities.
No one would deny that music can embody great humane and religious themes.
That it does so, so profoundly, is a vital part of what it is for.
There is spiritual value in the very handling of its primary elements to write a little song or dance, even an exercise; even, as Bruckner used to show his classes, in a fifth or octave struck at a piano.
The essence of music's higher flights is transcendental in the highest degree imaginable, in ways that are manifestly intelligible and effectual, and quite insusceptible to verbal accounting.
Debussy's answer to a journalist who asked if he was familiar with heaven  ' yes, but I don't natter about it with strangers' - is not so silly as it sounds.
Evasive certainly, but only to acknowledge what can not be uttered.
The good composer expresses what he feels and makes what he is making, from an essentially musical motivation, by essentially musical means, with all the skill and experience he can command.
The ends are various: here a visionary oratorio, there an opera buffa; here a craggy piano etude, there a melting morceau de salon.
The degree of craft, the degree of inspiration, are the measure whereby they can be valued; through these are achieved, consciously or inadvertently, the heights and depths of spiritual expression whereby they are ' a joy for ever '.
Music can only be judged on the basis of an attentiveness to its musical essence as sensitive and discriminating as possible.
Above all, as specific -an undogmatic reaction to the details in style and technique of the particular composer, piece, or passage.
Naturally this will include transcendental subject-matter if it's there, and recognize the moments where this sweeps all before it.
All the rest is emotional blackmail.
RECORD REVIEWS / Violent measure: Shostakovich: Piano Concerto No 1, Chamber Symphony, Seven Preludes Op 34.
Evgeny Kissin (piano), Moscow Virtuosi.
Vladimir Spivakov.
RCA Victor RD87947 Rachmaninov: Preludes Op 32.
Shostakovich: Piano Sonata No 1.
Lilya Zilberstein (piano).
DG427766-2
By SIMON MUNDY
IT IS 14 years since Shostakovich died.
Nonetheless his reputation as at once the most searching and accessible of contemporary composers has not diminished.
If anything, fashion is moving closer to the context of his style with the passage of time.
In the 1970s his language did indeed seem a little old-fashioned.
Now, as composers grope towards a language that satisfies audiences and yet manages to be sufficiently modern, Shostakovich's music sounds at the front once again.
There has been a welcome pile of new recordings issued recently; not just of the symphonies, but of the concertos and chamber music as well.
Two of them mark the start of international recording careers for extraordinary young Soviet pianists, Evgeny Kissin and Lilya Zilberstein, who were only children when Shostakovich died.
Kissin, aged 18, came to prominence a couple of years ago when he appeared to great acclaim at the Berlin Festival.
His recording of the First Piano Concerto is sparklingly assured  crisply articulated but with enough sensitivity to convey the inevitable bitter-sweet character of the slow movement.
This is anyway a stunning disc, thanks to the playing of the Moscow Virtuosi with Spivakov.
Their performances of the orchestral arrangements  the Chamber Symphony (arranged by Rudolph Barshai from the Eighth Quartet) and the Opus 34 Preludes (arranged by Victor Poltoratsky from the piano original) are superbly polished.
Lilya Zilberstein, at 24, is also an impressive discovery.
Her first record shows her to be as musical as she is technically accomplished.
The pithy violence of Shostakovich's First Sonata does not come naturally to her, but she is at home in the limpid impressionism of Rachmaninov's G major Prelude, which on its own makes this disc worth having.
The lyrical and passionate aspects of Shostakovich, rather than the bitterly satirical, also bring out the best in Julian Lloyd Webber's playing.
His elegiac tempo for the largo of the Cello Sonata allows him a sustained outpouring of feeling.
John McCabe's accompanying, too, is wonderfully supportive.
The Sonata is imaginatively coupled with Britten 's, written after his first meeting with Shostakovich in 1961.
The usual characters of the two composers are reversed here; there is little of the English scene-painter in Britten's Sonata, and it stands as one of his most nervous and angry works.
Lloyd Webber and McCabe, both amiable men, sense the unease and respond to it deftly.
Itzhak Perlman's account of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto is a more rough-hewn affair.
Perlman is usually the slickest of violinists, but here he seems to cultivate a rasping sound that emphasises the work's macabre portrait of Stalin's Russia in the late 1940s.
This, along with the concerto by Shostakovich's teacher Glazunov, was recorded live in Tel Aviv in July 1988 so there is a spate of clapping at the end.
But the acoustic captured by the engineers is reasonably spacious.
I have reservations about Perlman and Mehta's treatment of the Glazunov, though, which seems neither as richly romantic as Oscar Shumsky's on Chandos, nor as glittering as Anne-Sophie Mutter's on Erato: the other two versions to appear in the last year.
In this silkiest of works there needs to be an elegant bonhomie, mixed with a hint of gentle sadness, which quite eludes the Israel PO and the soloist, who seem intent on squeezing out each last drip of sentiment  surely a misunderstanding of the composer's style and aspirations.
MUSIC / Enlightened views: OAE / Mackerras  Queen Elizabeth Hall
By TESS KNIGHTON
HAYDN-LOVERS are in for a good time this autumn: coming up are the Haydn at Esterhaza concerts at the Wigmore Hall (part of the Magyarok Britain Salutes Hungary Festival); already on display is the Haydn and England exhibition at the British Library; and just started is the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment's QEH Haydn series concentrating on his late choral works.
The opening concert  a performance of The Creation, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras  sets a high standard for the remaining seven concerts in the series.
The ingredients were just right: three highly intelligent soloists (Lynne Dawson, Anthony Rolfe Johnson and David Wilson-Johnson); a small but alert choir (excellently trained by Julian Clarkson); a top-name period-instrument orchestra; and a conductor not afraid to cherish every aspect of Haydn's extraordinary score.
This was music-making of a high order.
Mackerras's account was compassionate but redblooded, direct but full of charm.
It did not set out to be radically different, though Haydn's colourful scoring was certainly enhanced by the use of period instruments (including a fortepiano in the recitatives and a bass line reinforced more consistently by bass trombone and contra bassoon), but it succeeded in being unforced and unfettered.
He made the most of his superb wind section, used the extra clarity of the strings to underline the richness of the harmony, and encouraged the brass to cut through the texture and pin down the rhythm as, for example, in the exhilarating chorus' Achieved is the Glorious Work '.
The audiences at the first performances of The Creation in Vienna in the late 1790s were entranced by Haydn's musical depictions of every living creature from the mighty eagle to the lowly worm.
Only a short while later these were accused (by Schiller amongst others) of being not worthy of him - ' Fit only for the nursery, to use in connection with Noah's Ark '  but the truth is they are irresistible.
Lynne Dawson's clear voice soared and trilled through ' The Birds' number, while Wilson-Johnson's worm was creepily sinuous.
This was an uplifting experience  as Haydn intended it should be.
Days Like These
By IAN IRVINE
10 October, 1903 RAYMOND ASQUITH writes to Lady Manners from Aberdeenshire: ' We had a storm yesterday and went out to watch the waves: I ventured too far out onto a rock and was knocked flat on my face against a granite floor by one of the biggest rollers ever seen on this coast: I never felt such a blow; luckily I fell in a crevice and wasn't washed away; but I was stunned for a few seconds, and when I got up my face and knee were streaming with blood.
Margot is always splendid on these occasions; she took me back to the house and covered me with ice and raw beef: but in spite of all I am a most revolting sight today and shall be for a week or more  lame in one leg, blind in one eye, and with a nose like Cyrano...
I 'm glad you can't see me: you would never speak to me again. '
10 October, 1979 STEPHEN SPENDER, teaching in Lynchburg, Virginia, writes in his journal: ' My class, which I took last night, seems irremediable.
I have really almost given up trying to discuss their poems, and just talk about poetry.
In one of the poems were the following lines: I seem as though from a polished ship Torn Between the anchors at the dock And the currents of the sea.
' This doesn't work.
You can't think of a ship as having an emotional life divided between the attachment to its anchors and the call of the tides, ' I said.
' She personalizes the ship, ' a friend of the poetess said, in a just audible squeak.
' Well, even if the ship was you  I mean  if you were the ship  it would be absurd, ' I argued, beginning to feel dizzy.
However I could see that the class was against me.
Crushed ambitions and women's lib feelings had rallied to the author's right to identify herself with a polished ship.
' When I got back to my apartment I ate some ham and beans, and opened a bottle of rather rust-coloured claret.
I ate too much and drank nearly three-quarters of the bottle.
I felt disgusted with myself, repelled by my heavy, unlovable weight of flesh. '
14 October, 1969 TONY BENN records in his diary: ' In the evening Caroline and I went to Number 10 for a dinner for the American astronauts, the first three men to have been on the moon.
Neil Armstrong and Buz Aldrin and their wives were there and Harold had laid on the evening in grand style with lots of television coverage.
I sat next to Pat Collins who is a very intelligent and delightful woman.
I felt sorry that she had George Brown, completely pickled, on the other side of her. '
TELEVISION / He knew what he liked
By THOMAS SUTCLIFFE
AN OBJECT lesson for all those who bemoan the artistic indifference of government, last night's Omnibus (BBC 1) looked at a political leader who took the closest interest in art, a mediocre and embittered water-colourist who eventually turned to another medium  mass emotion and warfare.
' The Fuhrer loves art because he is himself an artist, ' Goebbels announced in a contemporary newsreel, at which, no doubt, all genuine artists looked uneasily towards the border.
This is still not an easy subject-matter  when the Royal Academy put together its recent retrospective of ' German Art in the Twentieth-Century ' it dealt with the Nazi years by ignoring them altogether  a decision that put it in line with the orthodox view of the work's quality and conveniently avoided the embarrassing possibility that these works  kitsch, sunlit expressions of heroic physical vigour and serene landscape  might still prove more popular than German expressionism.
Omnibus's simplistic script favoured show-and-tell over analysis but that dangerous moral  that these years were a triumph of popular taste in art, not a suppression of it  could be glimpsed now and then.
' The Nazis didn't invent styles', the narration pointed out, ' they occupied those that already existed '.
In some cases this was rather literally the case  the syrupy domestic interiors beloved of German nineteenth-century painters began to reappear with pictures of the Fuhrer on the wall and the Volkischer Beobachter lying folded on the table.
Elsewhere the co-option was more subtle; the addition of the word ' German ' to a landscape painting would usually guarantee its success.
Omnibus chronicled all this with exemplary thoroughness but finally elided the real aesthetic questions  of a battle between art that invites the viewer to think and art that passes through the mind leaving only a sugary trace of complacent pleasure.
' Aesthetic judgements are impossible ', the narration concluded, a denial which implied that paintings are only as good or bad as the political opinions of those that paint them.
Earlier we had been told that some ' lascivious' nudes were ' a sign of increasing decadence at the centre of an inflexible regime ', a phrase with some deeply troubling echoes of vocabulary.
That this film, of all films, was prepared to judge paintings merely as symptoms of moral decay, was a little startling.
MUSICALS / Bows of Holly: Mark Steyn reviews London's latest musical biography, Buddy, at The Victoria Palace
By MARK STEYN
THE TEXANS drawl ' Y'all ', blacks go ' Yo ', Hispanics leer ' Hey, ameeeeeeeego! '.
And towering above these stage cliches is, of course, the driven genius whose music can not be stemmed by the forces of reaction.
Who is it this time?
Wagner, Glenn Miller, Jason Donovan?
No matter; only the accents change  and the pants: here, the squares wear slacks, the good guys blue-jeans.
Warned not to sing rock'n'roll on a c&amp;w station, Buddy Holly insists, ' I got ta play ma music. '
Misunderstood by Decca Records, he maintains, ' I wan na play ma music ma way. '
Even when the hits start, he's not content.
' We got ta take our music more serious, ' he tells the Crickets, who remain unconvinced.
' You got money, you got fame, ' he pleads, ' what you want to booze for? '
Booze?
We're midway through Act II and a solitary six-pack has yet to hove into view.
But this is a plot development  the plot development  and, if it involves turning a couple of Aled Jones types into Oliver Reeds, why let logic get in the way?
As it happens, there is a kind of logic behind Buddy.
The most common reason for a biomusical is opportunism: take a star like Judy Garland or John Lennon, and you pick up a hit title and a hit score ready-made.
Now, Alan Janes's play matches the well-loved songs with equally well-loved dialogue in a K-Tel Golden Greats collection of Dramatists' Reliables.
Choke up at The Price Of Fame: ' I give ' em everything and they stick a knife in my back. '
Fight back those tears at The Inevitable Parting: ' You and me, boy, I reckon we've come to the end of our road. '
Marvel at The Little Woman Behind The Man: ' I'd like to sing a song fer a special girlfriend who's kinda important to me. '
The justification for this is authenticity.
' All that happens in the play is based on fact, ' Janes pledges solemnly in the programme notes.
' As we know, truth is often stranger than fiction. '
Often?
Most of us prefer to watch Dallas than our neighbours' home-movies, because, when it comes down to it, we know that truth is generally a lot duller than fiction.
Occasionally, though, a dramatist will uncover someone with an interesting story, regardless of how unknown or vaguely remembered the subject is.
How many of us can now recall the real Maria von Trapp or Fanny Brice?
They live only through The Sound Of Music and Funny Girl.
Buddy Holly comes somewhere between the subjects of those and more parasitic biographies.
His records are still played, but his personality, unexposed through movies or extensive TV interviews, is almost entirely unknown.
It is, in theory, the best of both worlds  except that Buddy Holly, by all accounts, was not terribly interesting.
He was born in Lubbock, married a nice Spanish girl and died young in a ' plane crash in 1959.
All that counts are the records, a rhythmically unusual Tex-Mex fusion of rock'n'roll and older western elements, pioneering what became the standard pop instrumentation of two guitars, bass and drums.
The lyrics are another matter.
Of the two prototype rock songwriters, it's the more worldly Chuck Berry you turn to for the authentic picture of teenage pleasures in Eisenhower's America: ' Gon na write a little letter, Gon na mail it to my local deejay. '
Or: ' Cruising and playing the radio With no particular place to go. '
Berry's songs are plausible emblems of rock'n'roll rebellion or, at any rate, youthful hedonism.
Buddy invites us to regard Holly in the same light, mocking (in a horribly nudging re-creation) Lubbock old-timers like The Hayriders, who sing: ' When the sun goes down on Blue Ridge Mountain It's the time to whistle in your ear. '
At least, this has a surreal daftness.
The voice of rock'n'roll, in contrast, is almost unrelievedly soupy.
If you didn't know the tunes, you'd assume Holly's lyrics decorated some innocent backporch spooners from the turn-of-the-century: ' Stars appear and the shadows are fallin' You can hear my honey callin'. '
Or: ' You give me all your lovin' And your turtle-dovin'. '
Or: ' When Cupid shot his dart He shot it at your heart. '
Not only are these songs impossible to use dramatically, they're also too vague to use as incidental music, to underline or punctuate aspects of Holly's life or the 1950s more generally.
' I wrote it for you, ' he assures his gal before the ballads, but how can you tell?
All you can do with these songs is sing them, and Buddy fails even to manage that with any subtlety.
The finales to both Acts are effectively concerts, the sort of agreeably naff rock'n'roll revival that might just about pass muster as a Capital Gold one-nighter down the Hammersmith Palais.
And, for all the appeal of his singing and playing, Paul Hipp comes out pretty dull between the numbers.
To camouflage the failures of the play, Andy Walmsley has created a set which resembles a pile-up of roadside hoardings: Oldsmobile, Van Heusen shirts, Texaco Premium Type.
Rob Bettinson, the director, has deduced that he ought to have these images plus disc-jockeys, radio commercials, midwestern hops, but he doesn't seem to know why.
Like most shows which are manufactured with an eye to commercial success (Winnie, High Society, to name only Buddy's predecessors at the Victoria Palace), this one will probably fail.
It's not as if there aren't aspects of his career that aren't worth exploring: how did he come to use drums, then almost unknown in Texan country line-ups?
Was it true, as the chart performance of ' Heartbeat ' (his last release) suggests, that his three-year career was already on the wane?
And surely any dramatist ought to be able to move us with that final night of Holly's life, when his musicians (including Waylon Jennings) gave their places on the ' plane to the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.
The author's job is not merely to offer an illustrated Who's Who entry, but to turn elements of a man's life into a dramatic entity.
And, if Holly's too boring for that, perhaps the best approach would be to write about his impact on others.
That, after all, is what Don McLean did so brilliantly in ' American Pie ', a personal reaction to ' the day the music died '.
THEATRE / More than their jobs are worth: Peter Kemp on Roger Hall's Roll On Friday at the Palace, Watford
By PETER KEMP
The play Roll On Friday is one that very soon has you echoing its title's wish that time would pass more rapidly.
In its attempt to satirise an institution supposedly dominated by tedium, repetition and pointlessness, it perversely contrives to consist of little but these things itself.
The setting is Room 133: the stores branch of a vast government department in Wellington, New Zealand.
Into this cluttered little office  on a wet and windswept Monday morning in 1974  burst five of its personnel.
In accordance with the procedures governing Roger Hall's comedy, they do so at regularly-spaced intervals, each entering with a gasp and clad in a ridiculous profusion of scarves, hats and rainwear, so that his droll point about the awfulness of the country's climate can be adequately appreciated.
It is usual in this office comedy, you quickly discover, for jokes to be transmitted at least in triplicate.
Often, the same bit of flimsy facetiousness gets disgorged with a frequency that suggests the whole thing is a product of some mechanically chortling Xerox machine.
Every 20 minutes or so, the play guffawingly alludes to the non-arrival of some long-ordered calculators.
When they finally appear, they turn out  in what for this play amounts to a considerable comic twist  to have been fitted with the wrong plug.
As a human variant on such running  or lumbering  gags, there is Wally, a farcically uncooperative caretaker who puts in a regulation grumpy appearance in each of the play's four scenes in order to enunciate his catchphrase, ' Nothing to do with me '.
Much of the play's humour comes straight from stock.
There are jests about administrative gaffes ('overtrousers' mistyped as' overt rousers') or about the craziness of bureaucracy (the staff have no order forms because they have run out of order forms with which to order them).
Traditional sniggerings are amply catered for, too.
The office's tubby female employee is the constant butt of lines like: ' Of course you're not fat, Beryl... pull up a couple of chairs and sit down. '
'Mind my yoghurt', she squeals when a workmate squeezes her breasts.
A further dismal feature of the evening is Hall's penchant for the unsurprising surprise.
Predictably, a much-mentioned colleague absent on sick-leave gets the job two of the characters on stage are rivals for.
Lumps of pathos intermittently introduce a note of sentiment into all of this.
Two of the men turn out to have family problems.
Plump Beryl who talks to the office cactus is lovelorn, it is revealed.
The awkward changes of tone caused by these disclosures are managed with some skill by the Watford cast, all of whom also do their impressive best to polish up the lustreless comic lines they are lumbered with.
In particular, Simon Slater as the sarky office cad and Annette Badland as Beryl put in performances far above the level of the sitcom script.
Made up of four 30-minute scenes, in each of which the same people say and do the same things in the same setting, Roll On Friday, it is no surprise to learn, has been developed into a five-year television series in New Zealand and Australia.
The only way in which it even faintly stirs your brain cells is in causing you to wonder what on earth it's doing on the stage at Watford.
THEATRE / Dunsinane via Bali: Macbeth  Marlowe, Canterbury
By ALEX RENTON
ACTORS have researched Shakespeare in prisons, zoos, hospitals: David Garrick constructed his Lear in a lunatic asylum, studying an old man who had managed to drop his daughter out of a window.
Rather more fun and doubtless just as fruitful was the Odyssey Theatre Company's research for their Macbeth: six weeks spent with the support of the Scottish Arts Council on the Indonesian island of Bali.
The official justification is that in Bali the company could work with local performers and learn to ' shift our centres of gravity away from the head, down into the centres of our bodies'.
On stage this is translated into the uncomfortable standing squat familiar from karate movies: knees splayed and bottom out.
In Bali, we are also told, life can be spent among people who daily interact with the forces of good and evil in nature.
This is the only really objectionable thing about Odyssey's odyssey; a daily communion with good and evil is not in any way the experience of the characters in Macbeth.
The intervention is extraordinary, and to think of it otherwise risks ignoring how the interest of the play lies in the psychological, in the testing of our sympathy and understanding of the Macbeths.
We get little of that.
Instead there is a designer's travelogue: the production (no director is listed, but Nigel Jamieson heads the company) veers all over the Far East and indeed round to the Caribbean.
It sports an instructor in kabuki, and much seems Japanese: the costumes, the men's top-knots and a fair part of the staging seem to come from Kurosawa.
For the domestic scenes  and these include the most moving Slaughter of the Macduffs sequence I have seen  we come right back to European naturalism.
There are many other good things in the production, a passionate and gripping Lady Macbeth from Clare Benedict; witches dressed to look like maggots; and fight scenes that presumably use the Balinese experience in becoming savage death dances.
The music, using Gamelan instruments, is a pleasure, though it can occasionally obscure the text.
Focus is often concentrated on the young, and on Emma Bernard who plays both Fleance and Macbeth's son.
At the play's opening she stands centre stage, silent in a white shift, until a stab brings red cascading from her belly.
The point seems to be that Macbeth's greatest crime is in tampering with the future.
But, as so often when a design idea takes over a production, an awful lot gets missed.
The text has been cut quite wantonly and only for expediency, you feel.
Ian Halcrow's Macbeth looks great but never draws us close, and he and others swallow or truncate their lines as though they cared very little for them.
This, according to the programme, is Kechak, a Balinese vocal technique involving ' complex cross-rhythms and syncopations'.
The talents of this company are obvious: it will be interesting to see what they do next, especially if the research happens at home, in London.
