Reviews
David Nice
Even in a big orchestral concert, you’re bound to note Berlin Philharmonic principals as among the best instrumentalists in the world. I cited five in the central instalment of Simon Rattle’s Sibelius cycle on Wednesday. Of those, only viola-player Amihai Grosz figured in the Octet, joined by seven more players of peerless sophistication. Rattle may have been taking the evening off – unless he was brainstorming plans for a new concert hall elsewhere in London – and the keynote here was freed-up enjoyment. But there was no self-satisfied coasting: chamber music takes supreme concentration and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Sotto Voce is a collection of white paintings, sculptures and reliefs made by European, British and North and South American artists from the 1930s to 1970s. An accompanying book explains why this non-colour has appealed to so many artists in so many countries over such a long period of time.At first, everything looks much the same – a collection of rather featureless white abstracts. But stick around and your eye quickly becomes attuned to the nuances in the work. Take Günther Uecker. Like many in the exhibition, the German artist chose to work in white as both an aesthetic choice and a Read more ...
geoff brown
Teetering on the edge of a Steve Reich weekend, Friday’s concert in the Minimalism Unwrapped series at Kings Place gave us a very mixed grill called “Pulses: Steve Reich and his Influences”. In the process it didn’t offer all that much of the concert’s organisers, the Aurora Orchestra – two flutes, two clarinets, two vibraphones, two pianos, two violins and cellos, and we were done. Still, Reich has never been at his best writing for conventional orchestral forces. And besides, Nicholas Collon, Aurora’s boss, is currently engaged with the Ulster Orchestra. Can’t be in two places at the same Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
While there is, of course, safety in numbers, but five premieres on four continents is, perhaps, a little novel. Tan Dun’s new Concerto for Double-Bass, subtitled Wolf Totem, is a co-commission by five orchestras: the Royal Concertgebouw, St Louis Symphony, the Taiwan Philharmonic, the Tasmanian Symphony and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.The principal bass player in each orchestra is to be soloist and the piece received its world première last month in Amsterdam.So to Liverpool for its second outing, where the soloist was Marcel Becker. The composer, who has been commissioned by many of Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The title has it about right: no matter what it is they are busily acquiring, collectors seem to be an obsessive bunch, and their obsessions can achieve quite magnificent proportions. The stereotyped image of the collector as a socially challenged monomaniac doesn’t really fit with the popular understanding of the artistic temperament, though. All that beavering away, categorising and ordering things seems so regimented, blinkered and above all uncreative, and yet the two occupations are intimately linked, the Renaissance sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti the first in a long line of artist-collectors Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The Seventh Symphony was by some way the most scrappy and inaccurate of the performances in the Sibelius cycle given at the Barbican by, it must be said again, the world’s best orchestra. The oboes crunched a chord that fairly made you wince. A few bars later, the famous strings were all over the place. During that scherzo section, Sir Simon Rattle was willing the Berlin Philharmonic to move like The World’s Strongest Man with the bit between his teeth for a ten-ton truck.They did shift themselves, eventually, into an heroic drive towards the still-debated closure – or is it cliff-edge Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A Bloodhound Mark 2 surface-to-air missile points to the sky from the terrace outside the Hayward Gallery. From 1963–1990, the missiles were stationed along the east coast, from Humberside to the Thames, to intercept Soviet planes coming to drop atom bombs on Britain.It's a chilling reminder of the Cold War and the nagging undertow of fear it engendered; it is also a timely reminder that, in recent weeks, Russian fighter jets have been intruding on our air space to give us the jitters and ratchet up tensions.The title of the exhibition, History is Now could not be brought into sharper focus; Read more ...
Simon Munk
Four human players team up to take on a monster – also played by another player. That's the simple version of Evolve, a mainly multiplayer online game developed by the team that created the superlative squad horror series Left 4 Dead. It's a great idea – but is let down in execution, so far.The core of Evolve is its asymmetric play – with each side and each character requiring radically different approaches and skills even within one match. As the monster, you start each match in a weak position. You've got to move fast, but stealthily, through the industrial areas and jungles of the alien Read more ...
mark.kidel
Turning John Cleland’s 18th-century erotic classic Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure into a convincing stage play is a tall order. The book, a product of male fantasy, is a catalogue of sexual feats of every order, rich in euphemism and with a dash of poetry. April de Angelis’s adaptation – originally written for Red Shift in the early 1990s – is more of an appropriation, with a post-feminist reversal of roles, in which the stories we are told on stage are the product of women’s rather than men’s imaginations.A fictional Fanny Hill, middle-aged madam and whore, is commissioned by a Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A memorial concert to a busy man. Alexander Ivashkin, who died last January, was a cellist, a scholar, a teacher, an authority on Russian music, and much else besides. This evening’s concert faced up to the daunting challenge of commemorating the many diverse aspects of Ivashkin’s career. The results were predictably wide-ranging, yet always coherent, and an impressive focus was brought to this mixed but never eclectic programme.Credit, then, to Danny Driver. The concert was organised by the University of Goldsmiths, where Ivashkin was Professor of Music, and where Driver has succeeded him as Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Among contemporary British documentarists Kim Longinotto has surely travelled the furthest afield internationally – Iran, Japan, Africa – to find her subjects. Love Is All brings her resoundingly back home to Britain, across a timeline that stretches from the very end of the 19th century when the moving image was born, right up to the present day. It’s a fluid anthology about human relations in every form you can imagine, drawn from both more formal feature and documentary films and informal footage from the archives of the British Film Institute and Yorkshire Film. Black and white material Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
While the Berlin Philharmonic's progress through London with Simon Rattle has grabbed the column inches away from the rest of the capital's classical music offerings this week, a delightful mostly Ravel programme from the Philharmonia should not be passed over. It presented the G Major Piano Concerto with Mitsuko Uchida as exemplary soloist, and an imaginative semi-staging of the “lyrical fantasy” L'Enfant et Les Sortilèges, a work too rarely performed, and which is hard to beat for sheer magic.Both of these compositions are the result of long creative processes. They are lovingly crafted Read more ...