Let's be honest for a moment, music fans: when you think of a place to release your inner child, a classical concert hall isn't usually the first place that springs to mind. Doug Fitch, however, the founder of "Giants are small", evidently doesn't see it that way. Joining forces with Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic, Fitch has started with Stravinsky's Petrushka, added large meaures of technical wizardry in puppetry and video production, and then thrown in any number of ideas to drag us from our seats into a Russian Shrovetide and bring Petrushka to life.
There are two basic ideas, which are staggeringly obvious when you see them. The first is that Petrushka is about puppets, which makes a good idea to have puppetry on the stage – but since puppets are a bit small, they're filmed live and projected onto a giant screen above the orchestra. The second is that since a lot of the orchestra isn't doing anything for a lot of the time, you might as well have them doing Shrovetide Fair-like things (i.e. eating, getting drunk, dancing, getting into fights and generally misbehaving) in the bits where they're not playing. And, occasionally, in the bits where they are. And since the three puppets in the story (Petrushka, the Ballerina and the Moor) are in thrall to a Great Magician, who better to fulfil that function than Alan Gilbert, resplendent in a long silk jacket.
Fitch lets loose a sustained barrage of visual ideas. There are sleds sliding in the snow. There's a peep show into which you peer, to be roundly told off by a priest. One of the orchestra's violists comes to the front to do a juggling act (with the aid of the four puppeteers). As we hear the Moor's faux-Turkish music, the screen displays a large "#orientalism". The pièce de résistance, for me, was a close-up shot of a row of fur-lined boots which are being made to stamp up and down in time to create a heavy-footed peasant dance. It was like watching an animated film being made in real time in front of you: one could choose to look either at the finished film or at the process by which it was being made.
My own inner child was utterly carried away by it all, to the point that I wouldn't be able to tell you whether or not, from a purely musical point of view, this was the greatest orchestral performance of Petrushka I've ever heard. All I can say is that the playing was certainly up to a high enough standard to play its part in a wonderful spectacle, and Gilbert certainly kept everything running with precision and created abundant joie de vivre in the music. The variety of the orchestration really stood out, as did the virtuosity of Stravinsky's polyrhythmic writing: the fact that he can paint a crowd bustling at the same time as a roundabout whirling and puppets dancing, all in different rhythms, is something really special.