Welcome to London 2012 where, due to the arrival of the Olympics in town, they are claiming everything they can to brand as their own, so it is no wonder bearing in mind The Southbank Centre is a government and lottery-funded arts centre that Meltdown would be claimed as part of the Cultural Olympiad.
This means that tonight we are seeing Greece's entrant in said Olympiad.Greece have Persuaded tonight's curator and doyen Anthony Hegarty to choose DIAMANDA GALAS to go for gold in the following events; Vocal Gymnastics, Multilingual singing and Best re-imagining of a well worn tune. Greece also claim that Diamanda qualified for this role as cultural Olympian in 1994 thanks to her album The Sporting Life with Noted British legends John Paul Jones and Pete Thomas, although tonight she is performing solo with only a Steinway piano and 5 microphones.
Unlike the rest of London, which has a ghost town feel to it, South Bank Centre was busy and The Royal Festival Hall was very close to sold out with an audience all wanting to hear Diamanda Galas' new show The Hour Will Come.
As ever, Diamanda makes a dramatic entrance and sits down at the Steinway to play a very quiet and gentle intro into Verra La Morte E Avra I tuoi Occhi. It's her interpretaion of a poem by Cessare Pavese which the programme for the show handily translates as Death Will Come And Will Wear Your Eyes which as Diamanda starts singing in Italian (if you haven't heard Diamanda you need to know she is the Goth queen and her range is amazing) she begins to incant the words. The feelings are all in the sounds she creates; her voice almost becoming an orchestra in itself.
Now I'm pretty sure she followed the program and a second Cesare Pavese poem I Gatti Lo Sapranno (or The Cats Will Know) from 1946 is next. At this point, the only sound that can be heard in the hall other than Diamanda and the piano is the clicking of camera shutters from the press. In this hush, they were a distraction and some of the people even closer to them than I was actually had a go about the noise they were making. Everyone was rapt and spellbound by the way Diamanda's almost dischordant piano playing melds with her vocals as they soar and pound and rework the words into this aural dystopia of the ever-nearing event of our own deaths.
Having said "Hello", she adopted a more chatty mood than she has sometimes been in over the years, before switching to Spanish to sing Sierra De Armenia: a traditional Cante Jondo that bewitches and draws us into this other dark world of pain and distortion as we near the end once again.
Anoixe Petra is her first song of the evening in Greek and has some shattering shards of noise coming across at us as words become weapons of noise and despair. They need to be replied to in German on Die Stunde Kommt: a poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath which had some deep bass notes clattering out of the Steinway as all the emotions in the words spilled out of Diamanda and poured all over us in turn.
En Apognisei (In Despair), a Constantine Cavafis poem (an Egyptian who wrote in Greek, apparently) was a full-on assault of the senses as Diamanda bellowed for the Stigmatized to letting the dying depart.
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Diamanda gave us a very poignant explanation of her next German song Mann Und Frau Gehn Durch Die Krebsbaracke (the Gottfried Benn Poem that translates as Man and Woman Go Through The Cancer Ward). Gottfried was a cancer specialist working in Germany up to and including World War 2 as he wasn't prepared to leave his patients to escape and save his own skin and so was accused of being a Nazi. The song itself was a harrowing wander through the cancer ward as all around are decaying and dying in torturous pain. What could be done to help these poor souls? Diamanda's singing and playing on this tune really did bring the memories of sitting in this dreadful situation, visiting the afflicted and seeing some of the even more afflicted. A painful vision of a song.
The first song of the evening I actually recognised was O Death, but then it was only the second English song of the night after William Epsom's Missing Dates. Her version of O Death was astonishing; at times very poignant and at others howling as death encompasses once more and every now and then the Gospel flourishes poke through the edges at us.
Diamanda ended with a couple of Jacques Brel classics sung in the original French. There are of course English versions of both Fernand and Amsterdam, but Diamanda gives us the French and switches from sultry to harrowed and back on Fernand before she totally retools Amsterdam to bring out the life and death of that old port the sailors and the whores and total sleaze in ways that say David Bowie's version could never even approach. The way Diamanda sings it is venal and carnal and pulls no punches in exposing the darker side of the famous old port city.
She soon came back out for an encore that is of course well deserved and she performed one more song that I think was in Italian. It had bags of intensity and drew a quite stunning performance to a close as she left the stage. Anthony Hegarty came out and presented her with a bouquet that should have contained her 3 gold Medals for this brilliant show.
On our way out we paid a visit to the aMAZEme art and literature installation in the Clore Ballroom (a maze made out of walls of second hand books piled about 3 feet high in walls). We had to work very hard not to pilfer several titles and I'm sure some of this art will go missing while on display. It will be sold in oxfam bookshops later anyway, but it's a very cool installation and we did play the game of spotting how many of the books we already own and came up with a satisfyingly high count.
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