While Liza Minnelli belted out hits from the 1972 film Cabaret next door at the Festival Hall, we in the Queen Elizabeth Hall were meant to be getting the real deal - echt 1920s Berliner Kabarett performed by Germans in German. German actors had been flown in. As had members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Awaiting us was an enticing line-up of Weill, Eisler, Hollaender, Heymann, Hindemith and Schoenberg. The raw, rambunctious Berliner night life beckoned. It was not to be.
For some curious reason, the Southbank Centre thought that stuffing a programme full of dull monologues would help elucidate this high-spirited world. So, for every five minutes of music, there was 10 minutes of turgid recitation. One song, one lecture. Now I don’t know much about the cabaret scene in Berlin in the 1920s but, judging by the talk of gay sex, trannies and brothels in the songs, I suspect sober historical oration at a lectern by a professor type wasn’t part of this wide-ranging art form’s remit. Needless to say, it killed the atmosphere.
It felt like a rained-in summer party at an old people’s home in Ilford
Not that the rest of the programme had any kind of atmosphere worth saving. Framed by a 1920s suburban living room with frilly lamps and marshmallow sofas (a weird decision, considering suburbia was the satirical butt of much cabaret), the members of the Berlin Phil and their friends dilligently delivered a series of Lieder, lullabies, tangos and swing jazz sets. Their heads buried in their scores, their bodies as stiff as corpses, it felt like a rained-in summer party at an old people’s home in Ilford.
Had they done nothing to recreate the period, had they played their music under neon strip lighting wearing trackie bums, the effect would have been immeasurably better. As it was, with the forlorn attempt to recreate the cabaret spirit laid out before us with as much conviction as a festive display at Poundland, one couldn’t help but note how far it all was from the intended destination, how wide the gulf was between the ersatz and the echt. This wasn’t simply not-a-cabaret atmosphere. This was - aesthetically, kinetically, artistically, morally and musically - as far from a cabaret atmosphere as you could get outside of having the evening in a coffin.
It's not the first misstep from the Rest is Noise festival. A few weeks back, we witnessed the suffocation of a nice little programme of Satie and Stravinsky, at the hands of a buttock-clenchingly embarrassing bit of contextual framing, most of which was again delivered by an actor at a lectern. I’d give last night zero stars, were it not for some slick playing from the viola (Martin Stegner) and piano (Cordelia Hofer) and some understated and affecting Sprechgesang from Dagmar Manzel. In fact I’d give the whole of the Rest is Noise festival so far zero stars for the way in which it has squandered the intellectual capital of Alex Ross’s brilliant book on such a patronising, unimaginative, poorly produced and ill-conceived series of concerts. And there's ten months more of this.