The television critic and the news avoider in me are currently fighting tenaciously for space. Usually duty wins, so I do watch the talk shows. Every presenter always has his own phrases to switch between light fare to – ‘now about something completely different’ – heavier topics. But that light-heavy-quickly-something-light formula is sometimes getting to be too much for me these days. The easy way to draw attention to the conflict between Israel and Gaza is to bring the director of Unicef/War Child/Red Cross to the table to “just” explain how dire the situation there is. It is always a good idea to have a military expert, preferably in full uniform, who will give his opinion on the movements at the front. Next to it a journalist who is not there but here, and often finds something instead of knowing it. And of course we always show a few fragments…
Bee Khalid & Sophie on Tuesday evening, a piece of speech by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, in which he details the horrors committed by Hamas on October 7. Image of the Israeli UN ambassador pinning a yellow star on his suit. Followed by part of the News hour-report by Ties Brock, in which a French colonist with a weapon in her pink handbag defends her square meters of occupied territory and takes it for granted. Blanks usually do little damage, but if there are a lot of them you will still feel weak. If only because you consume them so casually. Between nose and lips, coffee and biscuit.
A special battle
The news avoider turned to Gillis family: Mass is cash register, although there is of course quite a bit of news attached to it. The man is a suspect in various tax fraud cases and his ex-girlfriend is still in a case against him for assault. SBS6 decided to continue the reality series about the owner of holiday parks. He has a new wife and a new house, everything else has stayed the same. I didn’t set the bar high, but seeing Peter Gillis cover a toilet seat with toilet paper plus “a slide” against the skid marks was more than I could handle.
So I’m going to tell you about the documentary that I watched not around talk show time on Tuesday, but earlier in the day. The original theatrical version of The Royal Republic is 95 minutes, for television it was almost halved and that seems long enough to me for this portrait of “the island within the orchestra”. The permanent timpanists (2) and percussionists (3) of the Concertgebouw Orchestra are a special breed. No composer prescribes which drums or cymbals they should use, so the men figure that out themselves. These musicians do not have their own instrument – all their percussion is in one room in the Concertgebouw. Drums as big as wine barrels, sticks the size of a cotton swab or wrecking ball, a triangle that could easily be 130 years old. They call their cage a ‘safe space’.
It’s nice how these men communicate. One person hums out loud ‘ta tú ta ting, ta ta’, the other understands exactly which piece of music he is talking about. Their arms and hands play air drums with every rhythm they hear. For them, sound is feeling. Hear Mark Braafhart talk about the percussion part in Dmitri Shostakovich’s Eleventh, a symphony dedicated to the Russian Revolution of 1905. He plays a small drum with two sticks. It sounds “raw and violent,” he says. “Citizens march here to the Tsar’s Winter Palace.” The sound becomes “harsh, unpleasant.” The army is coming. The orchestra joins in. “You hear shots, weapons being reloaded, explosions, grenades.” Meanwhile, Braafhart drums on relentlessly. “In fact, I am in the process of an execution.”
You don’t have to see bloodshed to hear it.