The Manchester Guardian wrote, "This quartet, with its tremendous climaxes, curious refinements of dance-rhythms, and its perfect symmetry, and the quintet, more lyrical and passionate, are as perfect examples of chamber music as the great oratorios were of their type".
Clearly, the practice has tried to give the building a sense of articulation, rhythm and material refinement, but it is the sheer scale and manner of the building, in its Victorian-Edwardian context, that make it so debatable.
Each dancer in the troupe, like a member of a family, will bring something intrinsic: Parker, energy and drama; Magill, stage presence and joy; Farrell, rhythm and attack; Eva Burton, classical refinement; and Jennifer Christie, the soaring hang time of Michael Jordan.
In performance everything is related to the refinement of the melodic line and the complexity of rhythm.
But the jungle is an urban one (as Les Tambours du Bronx's score makes clear) and the remote, almost Zen-like refinement of certain passages, the urgent play of cross rhythms concentrated into others transcend any crude pastiche of tribal dance.
With one of them swinging a guitar around while not producing a single chord and two more banging the drums with much dedication but little rhythm, it is evident that their musical skills lack refinement.
There's a heavy, over-deliberate feeling to the playing, a thickness to the sound (despite the refinement of the recording), and a lack of athleticism in the rhythms that seems as if Schumann's symphonic writing is being approached from the perspective of the composers who came after him, especially Brahms, rather than from those of his own time, such as Mendelssohn.
He made the gesture when he wasn't singing in his dry, commanding baritone, and when this new version of his band Swans was doing what it does best, a refinement of an old strategy: launching loud, sliding chords on the waves of slowed-down rhythms that threaten to become arrhythmic.
The musicians took turns accompanying Mr. Nourbakhsh's evocative singing, and played solo and as an ensemble, with the earthy timbre of the ney, the gentle rhythms of the tombak and the bright jangly sound of the setar intertwining with poetic refinement.
Reinvention or refinement?
