La Pietà

Today I’ve taken an impromptu day off. I woke up this morning and really couldn’t face the hike into the office so thought I’d take advantage of all those hours I accumulate and do some self-indulgent relaxing.

Anyway, after a pleasant dinner on the riverside, I spent yesterday evening in Covent Garden listening to a concert by an acquaintance of mine, Shane Cullinan. He is a composer whose work I enjoy (but whose weblinks seem to no longer function, so I can’t link you to him.) The first half of the show was a performance by his group Tonic Fold, which is a string orchestra along with piano, drums and a vocalist. I hadn’t heard them before and I fear they sounded just like his original group, The Cullinan Ensemble, which had more vocalists and I enjoyed more. Poor amplification didn’t help either – half of the time I couldn’t hear what was being sung!

The second half (the main attraction) was more enjoyable. La Pietà is a work inspired by Michelangelo's statue of the same name. It records the anguish of a modern mother seeing her son killed in a random street crime. Musically it was good I thought. It was stylistically different from his other works. I am in two minds about the lack of a happy ending though. There was no redemptive conclusion; the death was ‘the all’ of the piece. Normally I gag when I see a happy ending bolted onto an otherwise serious and realistic piece (although that’s usually because it’s Hollywood Saccharine!) but I feel that, because music has such a tremendous capacity to move people, there is more benefit to ending it on an inspiring note. I fear that, in my mind, La Pietà is now in the same box as Blood Brothers; musically delightful, but I leave the auditorium ready to slash my wrists!

EDIT: Apparantly Shane has a new website being developed at, would you believe, http://www.shanecullinan.com/ There's not much there now, but keep an eye on it for the future.