CDs/DVDs
theartsdesk
This month's epic collection has a somewhat retro feel, with CDs by Ray Davies, Neil Young, Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan. The CD of the Month is all-conquering Tennessee rock band Kings of Leon. The Box Set of the Month comes from the vaults of Apple records and there's an amazing compilation of music from Angola in the 1970s. The rest of the selection is bang up to the minute, with the latest electronica, jazz, grime and alt-country dissected by theartsdesk's team of critics, Adam Sweeting, Howard Male, Russ Coffey, Joe Muggs, David Cheal, Peter Quinn, Thomas H Green, Bruce Dessau, Kieron Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s releases include two contrasted crossover discs, one in tribute to Armenian Orthodox church music, the other by, er, Phil Collins-era Genesis. There’s an Elgar oratorio, and a disc of choral music inspired by the untimely death of a young royal. Orchestral fireworks can be found in a recording of a well-known British work and there’s some approachable Modernism from a modern Polish master. There’s a thrilling compilation of viola concertos, and a classic recent set of Rachmaninov piano concertos reappears at a lower price. Gershwin turns up on an interesting French disc Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the antidote to Martin Scorsese’s 2008 documentary Shine a Light, which, for all its technical excellence, depicted the increasingly senior rock band sounding pretty crap. Ladies & Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones was shot at four concerts in Texas on the Stones’s 1972 American tour, hot on the heels of the release of Exile on Main Street. While its pre-digital quality and all-round primitiveness is a little bit startling, that’s all part of the way that it transports us back to a time when rock’n’roll was still barely housetrained and vaguely lawless. It didn’t exist just to provide Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's extraordinary, rich and strange releases are led by Ninja Tune's 20th-anniversary album of new tunes and remixes ("hard to know when to stop throwing the compliments"), Robert Plant's new band ("puts most vintage rockers to shame") and the new one from fellow veteran and "louche Lothario" Bryan Ferry. There's electronica from Magnetic Man and theartsdesk writer Joe Muggs's new Dubstep Compilation, cyber-pop from Tinie Tempah and a terrific new project featuring musicians from Eritrea. Stinker of the Month is the Motown covers record from Phil Collins. Reviewers this month are Joe Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s selection includes a rare recording of a Danish masterpiece and a glorious late-Romantic Austrian symphony. There’s a thrilling set of Bartók piano concertos and music composed by Dvořák’s son-in-law. Going back further in time, we’ve two Mozart releases, one blowing the cobwebs from an operatic masterpiece, the other a period instrument version of a very dark symphony. There’s a vintage live recording of Verdi’s Requiem and a stunning box set of Bach’s keyboard music played on piano by a Canadian pianist who’s not Glenn Gould. Two scintillating live recordings from Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's top releases are headed up by a brilliant covers album by Brazilian singer Seu Jorge, and the Manic Street Preachers and Richard Thompson on peak form. Elsewhere there is South African pianist Kyle Shepherd, Argentinian "eccentric mystic" Axel Krygier and dance music from Underworld and Superpitcher and "like a Humberside Randy Newman" Paul Heaton. Reviewers are Sue Steward, Joe Muggs, Russ Coffey, Peter Culshaw, Kieron Tyler, Marcus O'Dair, Bruce Dessau and Howard Male.CD of the MonthSeu Jorge and Almaz Seu Jorge and Almaz (Now Again Records)by Sue Steward"Errare humanum est” is Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s new releases include a skilled orchestral re-imagining of Debussy piano music, some unfairly neglected late romanticism and a box of late Haydn symphonies. There’s a sublime Brahms chamber work, and three contrasting interpretations of Bach. A little-known Swiss contemporary composer gets an airing, a young cellist plays a nice set of transcriptions and a young Spanish group tackle three Hungarian string quartets. There’s also a timely reissue of a classic 20th-century opera. CD of the Month
Trio! Horn Trios by Brahms, Mozart and Duvernoy Sarah Willis, horn; Cordelia Höfer, Read more ...
theartsdesk
CD of the MonthTom Jones, Praise & Blame (Universal/Island) by Adam Sweeting Reinvention is all very well, and indeed indispensable for any career that aims to last longer than a series of X Factor, but you can have enough of seeing Tom Jones hamming it up with Robbie Williams or Cerys Matthews or Stereophonics. Jones seems to have reached the same conclusion. On his last outing, 2008’s 24 Hours, he circled back towards his traditional strengths, revisiting some of the musical styles he became associated with in the Sixties and Seventies but with the aid of a submerged iceberg of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Violet may be the most violent colour in the spectrum, but its emotional equivalent in the cinema of Michael Powell is red, which frequently symbolises overwhelming sexual and artistic desire. Powell fetishised redness - and redheads like Deborah Kerr and Moira Shearer. This isn’t news for fans and scholars of Powell and Emeric Pressburger, his producing-writing-directing partner in the Archers, but the reds that show up on the Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray editions of Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) seem to me to have a fresh lustrous intensity: call it Red-ray.In The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One of those deathless Sopranos moments is where Christopher Moltisanti turns up late at the Bada Bing club for a meeting with Silvio Dante and Tony Soprano, and they ask him what kept him. “The highway was jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive,” Christopher retorts, quoting Bruce Springsteen’s New Jersey anthem “Born to Run”. Nobody would know this better than Silvio, since he was played by Springsteen’s E Street Band sidekick Steve Van Zandt.No other rock act has ever quite matched Springsteen’s feat of bringing his home-town roots and his personal background into the lives Read more ...
graham.rickson
It’s the 150th anniversary of Mahler’s birth, so we investigate a 16-disc box containing his (almost) complete works, along with two other recordings of Mahler symphonies. There’s an impressive new set of Beethoven piano concertos, and there’s more quality keyboard playing in new discs of Schumann and Schubert, who’s also represented by a new Lieder recording. More vocal delights are found in two very different operas recordings and you could do worse than take a step back in time to celebrate the opening of St Paul’s Cathedral, or plunge into the perfumed, modernist sound-world of Olivier Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's most interesting new music CDs according to theartsdesk music team includes a dark take on sex and consumerism by The-Dream, which is CD of the Month, "morally ambiguous" South London gangsta rap from Giggs, disco pop from Sia, Scissor Sisters and Robyn, "indietronica" from Grasscut and Tobacco, heritage rock from Tom Petty, immaculate jazz from David Weiss and a compilation of old Colombian dance music. Stinker of the Month is Eminem who is cordially advised to take up religion, get fat or do charity work. Reviewers this month are Joe Muggs, Thomas H Green, Bruce Dessau, Howard Read more ...