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The whole affair could have done with lightening up, but even the comedian Rob Brydon elected to forsake jokes and sing a Billy Joel ballad, which was brave considering the musical talent on offer elsewhere. “I want you to panic / I want you to act as you would in a crisis / I want you to act as if your house is on fire, because it is,” sang choral group London Voices, in a persistently gloomy work by composer Rachel Portman and words by Greta Thunberg and Nick Drake. In general, all the newly commissioned musical pieces featured sentiments that would put Radiohead to shame. Mainly backed by the English National Opera orchestra and choir, bass baritone Gerald Finley delivered an aria from The Cunning Little Vixen, a company of musical actors assumed stagey fixed grins to sing a bit of Stephen Sondheim, Olivier Award-winning actress Michelle Terry recited some Shakespeare in a stairwell, and Royal Ballet principal Marcelino Sambé threw his rippling body about in flesh-coloured underwear to an exquisite song titled The Lost Words Blessing by a folk collective led by Karine Polwart.īrian May was the only bona fide rock ’n’ roll superstar lending support, shaking his white ringlets and playing Amazing Grace on what looked like a souped-up mandolin while the West End star Kerry Ellis threw in startling new lyrics about the Earth dissolving.
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Instead, what was served up were short selections of ballet, choral pieces, opera highlights, folk songs and brief poetic monologues, interspersed with disturbing news reports of burning rainforests and insistent yet dreadfully polite pleas from charitable activists to wake up to impending apocalypse.ĭirected by acclaimed theatrical figures Dominic Dromgoole and Bill Buckhurst, it was a star-studded affair, if your idea of a star is limited to someone who might cause a stir wandering about the Southbank Centre.
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It was bravely reconstituted as a two-hour TV event, filmed and broadcast by Sky Arts on Earth Day, featuring specially commissioned pieces that would presumably have made more sense with space to unfold in front of live audiences attracted to the particular disciplines. The London Climate Change festival was originally intended as an eight-week, multi-venue and multi-disciplinary affair, but the pandemic put paid to that. It was an experience akin to watching grim talking heads proclaim “we’re doomed, we’re doomed, we’re all doomed! – but, before we go, here’s a modern dance interpretation of the extinction of the skylark set to a choral rearrangement of an ancient Scottish folk song.”
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But then the Song for Nature concert was no laughing matter, attempting a difficult blend of bad news and highbrow artistic entertainment, mixing urgent calls for environmental activism in the face of climate disaster with the musical exaltation of the natural world. In the vast space of an otherwise empty London Coliseum, Sir David Suchet took to the stage to announce “Our Royal Variety Performance for Her Majesty the Earth”, with a thespian reverence that suggested he wasn’t even joking.