Gavin Bryars, beautiful through-composed score weaves together eight of Shakespeare’s sonnets on the subjects of time, memory and music. It features five sonnet settings by guest composers including Antony Heggarty (Antony and the Johnsons) and Mira Calix. With Anna Maria Friman, John Potter and Gavin Friday.

Tickets:
£15.50, £13 (£13, £10.50 concessions) £7 Young person
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“Well, Suzanne Vega did a really sexy slow orchestral version of Cruella de Ville,” says Gavin Friday as he tries to remember the night before.

“Lou Reed did ‘Zippidy Doo Da’. Steve Buscemi sang ‘High Ho, High Ho It’s Off To Work We Go’. David Byrne did a version of ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’ and Eric Mingus, who’s Charlie Mingus’s son, said: ‘I’m going to do the most racist song ever written,’ and sang ‘Ooh Ooh Ooh I Wanna Be Like You.’ Garth Hudson and his wife Maud… now I don’t want to be heavy but she’s twenty-something stone and in a wheelchair. She couldn’t get on stage so she sang from the audience while people were coming in. They did a 25-minute version of ‘Feed The Birds’. I sang ‘Chim-Chiminey’, the Dick Van Dyke song from Mary Poppins and the Siamese Cat song from Lady And The Tramp.”

Sure you did, Gavin. I shake my head as if chastising a child. You crazy pop stars and your drugs.

What? It’s real?! Yes, Gavin Friday has just taken part in Hal Willner’s Stay Awake show in New York. In 1988, Willner brought out a much celebrated album of tributes to Disney classics and this year the great, the good and the kind-of-leftfield are celebrating the anniversary in concerts spread across the year. This particular show was a benefit for St. Anne’s Warehouse – a much celebrated New York art centre.

“You know what’s so weird about the shows is that in their subconscious everybody knows these songs,” he proffers. “And you love them because they’re from your childhood. In those days Disney was all about great songwriters. It was before they got people like Elton John to perform songs. The only thing that was weird was that because it was a benefit, and because it cost about ten grand a table, there were a lot of corporate types there who didn’t know what hit them.”

Gavin Friday is not someone who would be hugely well-known to the corporate types. He’s had an idiosyncratic career. From frontman with Ireland’s post-punk avant-gardists the Virgin Prunes, to solo artist and soundtrack composer, Friday has never stayed on the straight and narrow. Over the past year, he’s teamed up with the composer Gavin Bryars and the Royal Shakespeare Society to tour new interpretations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (as part of the 2007 Complete Works Festival), and his next performance will be in collaboration with Irish composer Ian Wilson at the Brighton Arts Festival on May 19. The day after speaking to Hot Press, he shuffled off to the set of Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea On The Rocks to possibly make an appearance in that movie.

“He just said to show up and see what happens,” says Friday. “In America, if things go badly, they extradite you or mug you in the street. And if they go well you get asked to come down to an Abel Ferrara film shoot.”

Friday also has a new album in the works, but his oeuvre isn’t exactly that of the straight-forward indie rocker. Not that he’d have it any other way.

“For the last twenty years you’ve had to like football and Oasis,” he sighs before asking the question lots of people asked during those dismal days of laddish conformity: “What the fuck is wrong with liking art and reading a book?”

Good question Gavin. Thank flip it’s Friday, I say.

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Gavin Friday with the Gavin Bryars ensemble, performing Friday’s setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 40 at Purcell Rooms, London on July 4, 2009. Audience shot video.

Sonnet 40 – Lyrics

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all;
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.
Then if for my love thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But yet be blamed, if thou thyself deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
And yet, love knows, it is a greater grief
To bear love’s wrong than hate’s known injury.
Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes.

Text by William Shakespeare, music by Gavin Friday and Herb Macken

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Gavin Friday will rejoin Gavin Bryars and Opera North to perform Shakespeare’s sonnets and Bryars’ original composition ‘Nothing like the sun’ in Belgium. The show is booked for December 12 and December 13 at the Handelsbeurs in Ghent.
Tickets (22/19 €) are available from the Handelsbeurs website.

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“But the most charismatic moment occurs when Friday stalks on in gold jewellery and inch-high brothel-creepers to intone Sonnet 40 like a diabolical lounge entertainer.”

Lynne Walker for The Independent:

“The most extraordinary setting, however, is Gavin Friday’s take on No 40, which he intones in a kind of strangulated speech-song. While his words are often inaudible, as a piece of performance theatre it is astonishing. He swerves between Caliban and Puck and several characters in between so compellingly…”

Terry Grimley reviews Nothing like the Sun for the Birmingham Post:

Gavin Friday, who sang his own setting, scored a point by dragging Shakespeare into a pop idiom, turning the final couplet into a classic fade-out.

Read the full review.

The Bardathon blog writes:

The fourth sonnet was set by one of the chief attractions (for me) of the event- Gavin Friday, who performed the sonnet himself. Friday is an old-school friend of Bono and the rest of U2, and has performed with them on and off over the last 25 years, as well as producing his own work including a spectacular reinterpretation of ‘Peter and the Wolf’. He turned Sonnet 40 into a moody lounge number, half-singing, half-speaking the words until he reached the final couplet, for which he transferred to a falsetto as he sung over and over “Kill me with spites, kill me with spites” as he walked off the stage and the music faded away. Writing about music is something I find nearly impossible, but it made everything in me tingle.

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Thirteen sonnets scarcely represent Shakespeare’s 154 poems in a Complete Works season but Nothing Like the Sun is at least a nod in the right direction. Opera North and the Royal Shakespeare Company invited Gavin Bryars to curate an evening of musical settings, the centrepiece of which is his own sequence of eight sonnets for soprano, tenor, speaker and ensemble. The first half is made up of music by five musicians, each preceded by a slightly self-conscious and not always convincing reading of their sonnet. With the intrepid James Holmes as keyboard player/conductor, however, the music hangs together better than the words.

Five diverse musical voices and a lack of narrative focus prevents any sense of flow in the first half, though not without some original expression of Shakespeare’s words. Natalie Merchant makes an evocative stab at Sonnet 73, while Mira Calix adds rustling leaves and other scrunchy natural sounds to the quirky No 130. No one chooses the sonnets allied to political events or the ones that speak about sex (No 20) or introduce an explicit erotic element (No 151), and even Nico Muhly and Antony Hegarty avoid playing with gender roles by plumping for “Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed”, conjuring an image of elusive sleep with wandering cello and tinkling piano.

Alexander Balanescu’sNyman-like textures, almost Bachian at times, wrap themselves seductively around No 43, “When most I wink”, Anna Maria Friman’s ethereal soprano tones circling above the instrumental world like a halo. Cruelly written for tenor, it leaves John Potter sounding a little vulnerable.

The most extraordinary setting, however, is Gavin Friday’s take on No 40, which he intones in a kind of strangulated speech-song. While his words are often inaudible, as a piece of performance theatre it is astonishing. He swerves between Caliban and Puck and several characters in between so compellingly that Bryars’ music pales into an atmospheric blur. Piano and cimbalom evoke the antique sound of the virginals mentioned in No 128, while the nightingale of No 102 sings high on bright clarinet. His last setting, No 64, finally brings all the performers together, but it’s a long time coming.

By Lynne Walker

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“This weekend, the RSC’s Complete Works of Shakespeare will present the first performances of a unique programme of new settings entitled Nothing like the Sun, co-commissioned and produced with Opera North.

Six composers contribute, all of them left-field.

In the first half, you can hear music by Alex Balanescu (“When most I wink”), Gavin Friday (“Take all my loves”), Mira Calix (“My mistress’ eyes”), Natalie Merchant (“That time of year”) and Nico Muhly and Antony Hegarty (“Weary with toil”) – the latter three being best-known for their work in the alternative rock world with 10,000 Maniacs and Antony and the Johnsons.

They won’t be performing live, however: soprano Anne Maria Friman and tenor John Potter will sing throughout, with Gavin Friday as a speaker -(some of the Sonnets will also be recited).”

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In the first half of the concerts, individual sonnets are set to music by guest composers, including Gavin, Liz Fraser, violinist Alexander Balanescu, Antony Hegarty and Natalie Merchant.

The second half of the concert will see the premiere of Gavin Bryars’s own new work ‘Nothing Like the Sun’, composed for the Sonnets Project. In this new work Gavin Bryars’s music flows through and around a personal selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It will be narrated and sung by Gavin Friday.

Performances
FEB 24 – STRATFORD The Courtyard Theatre
FEB 25 – STRATFORD The Courtyard Theatre
March 3 – NOTTINGHAM Djanogly Theatre (tickets)
March 13 – SAGE GATESHEAD Newcastle (tickets)
March 15 – RNCM Manchester (tickets)
March 17 – THE VENUE Leeds (tickets)

All performances are evenings 7.30pm or 8pm. With the exception of Stratford all of the venues are chamber sized (250-300 seats)

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A chamber orchestra of eight musicians will share the stage with Gavin and RSC actors, to present the selected sonnets in speech and song. The second half of the performance will see the premiere of Gavin Bryar’s Nothing Like The Sun, a through-composed musical setting of a series of sonnets, accompanied by a specially commissioned film projection.

The Sonnet Project will be performed live at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon as part of the RSC’s Complete Works festival, on February 24 and 25.

Tickets (£5.00 – 20.00) are available from www.rsc.org.uk.

Gavin Bryars and Gavin Friday previously collaborated with Crash Ensemble in 2005.

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