Adelaide Festival. Festival Theatre. 9 Mar 2013
Instead of an opera as the leading production for the 2013 Adelaide Festival, theatregoers were expected to be similarly entertained with a movie accompanied by live orchestral and choral performance of the score. I hope I don’t need to introduce the film to you – it is acknowledged as one the greatest and most influential movies ever made. Even Quentin Tarantino must have liked the menace in it, although I would guess he thought it was too slow. Released in 1968 prior to the first moon voyages, it is interesting to compare the future in the film with the reality to this day. Firstly, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark were far too ambitious in projecting the pace of space travel development. And the artwork representing views of planet Earth were not as colourful and vibrant as the real vision brought back by the Apollo astronauts. However, the idea of an orbiting space station routinely visited by shuttle craft certainly did occur, and we are all still looking forward to talking computers, or are we?
The film is noted for its leisurely pace in its exploration of the evolution of humankind and our co-dependent relationship with technology.
There are two compelling reasons to mount this project: to hear Richard Strauss’s overture from ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’, used in opening the film, and the delightful combination of Johann Strauss II’s ‘On The Beautiful Blue Danube’ and the ballet dance inherent in the artistic scenery of the Pan Am shuttle docking with the rotating wagon wheel-shaped orbiting space station. An enormous ASO comprising 94 musicians conducted by Robert Ziegler got the clap for the overture, but unfortunately, that was the highpoint of the evening. Space is inherently silent, and the ASO twiddled their thumbs for much of the movie. The Adelaide Chamber Singers, numbering nearly sixty, were marvelous in their abstract choruses of rising babble.
However, it was simply indulgent to amass this amount of musical firepower for what seemed like infrequent short bursts. For me, 2001: A Space Odyssey has been the flop of the Festival.
David Grybowski
When: Closed
Where: Adelaide Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
