Review – Classical vs Jazz: The Ultimate Harp Battle
Strangely for a show that is in its second year, the one prevailing impression of Classical vs Jazz: The Ultimate Harp Battle is that it is not yet ready. The concept is not a bad one; a jazz harpist and a classical harpist perform a series of musical duels on stage. The arrangements are good, and the quality of musicianship and acting is no weakness either.
The main problems lie in the execution. When the show begins, the two musicians ascend the stage, take to their instruments and, with some unvocalised trash-talk and oh-no-you-don’t pouting, they begin their musical battle. The first problem is that there is too little preamble; if you weren’t familiar with the program, you would be at something of a loss as to what was taking place. Secondly, though it might seem felicitous (even obvious) to arrange the harps facing-off perpendicular to the audience, this setup has the distinct disadvantage of blocking the face of one of our protagonists, a good deal of her side of the interplay (more pouting, more silent badmouthing) being concealed behind the harp’s “knee”. These things and the fact that the show was being held in a tent pitched in the middle of a noisy fairground (Gluttony), made it difficult for the audience to connect with the performances.
There were some clever and entertaining ideas in the orchestration, such as a blending of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five with the Mission: Impossible theme, so the fact that more attention wasn’t paid to winning over the audience early on meant that the show couldn’t capitalise on its best features. The conclusion of the performance involved a not-too-bad rendition of “Tear Drop” by Massive Attack, and this was accompanied by awkward unpunctuated quotes from musical luminaries thrown onto a black screen mounted between the two harpists. This show needs an artistic director. The overall impression is that too little attention has been paid to the staging and lighting (the actor-musicians faces were illuminated only by tinted ambient lights while they attempted to play out the dramatic scenes), and the whole effect of the piece needs to be re-imagined and reworked with the audience firmly in mind.
