2000s
David Nice
Questions of interpretation apart, Simon Rattle has yet again proved the great connecter, this time in concerts separated by just over a month. Having set his seal on his new, galvanizing partnership with the London Symphony Orchestra by asserting, as he has since the late 1970s, that Mahler's Tenth Symphony in Deryck Cooke's performing version is the true end of that composer's quest, he returned to London on his farewell tour with the Berlin Philharmonic to test the waters of a completion from fragments, the finale of Bruckner's Ninth.Unless you buy into Robert Simpson's assertion that Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ryuichi Sakamoto has conquered underground and mainstream with seeming ease over four decades, never dropping off in the quality of his releases. Indeed his most recent projects, following his return to public life after treatment for throat cancer in 2014-15, are among his best. The async album was rightly listed by many, including theartsdesk, as one of 2017's best; the async remodels remixes showed him absolutely keyed in to the electronica zeitgeist, and Glass, his live collaboration album with Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto is a worthy addition to the duo's extensive Read more ...
David Nice
Depression, with or without psychotic episodes, is a rare subject for drama or music theatre - and with good reason: the sheer unrelenting monotony of anguish and self-absorption is hard to reproduce within a concentrated time-span. So we still stand in awe of Sarah Kane for the way she managed, months before her suicide, to wring from the depths and write in blood such a kaleidoscopic range of despair and black vision in 4.48 Psychosis; in awe, too, of composer Philip Venables, for finding an equal variety, and an even greater eclecticism, in the musical voices to tell a drama of pain that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Manchester trio The Longcut’s latest album, their third, comes nearly a decade after their last one, but is rife with ideas and energy as if it's still riding the crest of their initial success. Their M.O. is twofold, either shoegaze-ish, jangle-tinted numbers with wispy indie vocals in a singing style not a million miles from Ian Brown of The Stone Roses, or mantric post-Krautrock jams that pulse with building energy. The cuts in the former style are not dramatically special but the ones in the latter tend to be vividly realised and truly dynamic.The best of Arrows boasts imaginative Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The last we heard of US duo Daphne & Celeste was 18 years ago, when they made their name with three hits, notably the nursery-rhyme playground chant bitch-offs “U.G.L.Y.” and “Ohh Stick You”. They famously performed under a hail of bottles at Reading Festival in 2000, then disappeared, going on to peripheral film-acting careers. Max Tundra, an alt-tronic artist who is released on vanguard labels such as Warp and Domino, now engineers a comeback for this millennial, tween-pop pairing. On paper, this is a great, original idea. Upon listening, it’s partly successful.Mostly gone is Daphne Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan. The final third consists of a transcript of Ezra’s Desert Island Discs recorded some years later.The book focusses on how power imbalances inflect relationships. This is quite clear when Alice’s giddy Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Greta Gerwig, in her hugely acclaimed, semi-autobiographical directing debut (a Golden Globe for best director, five Academy Award nominations) opens Lady Bird with a Joan Didion quote: “Anyone who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.”Brits may well think the place doesn’t look that bad, what with all the sunshine, big houses and swimming-pools, but 17-year-old Lady Bird (a delicate, acne-scarred Saoirse Ronan in a brilliant performance), who describes it as the mid-west of California, is keen to get the hell out of there. She longs to go college in New Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
STIMMUNG is always an event. Stockhausen’s score calls for a ritual as much as a performance, with six singers sitting around a spherical light on a low table, the audience voyeurs at some intimate but unexplained rite. Singcircle has been performing the work for over 40 years, and its director, Gregory Rose, clearly has an innate sense of its pace, structure and aura. This performance commemorated the 10th anniversary of Stockhausen’s death, but also marked the last ever appearance by Singcircle, a fitting end for a group associated above all else with this work.As with most of Stockhausen’s Read more ...
David Nice
Such introspective subtlety might be mistaken for reticence. But from the rare instances when the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes lets rip - and they're never forced - you know he's wielding his palette with both skill and intuition, waiting for the big moment to make its proper mark. Flyaway passages in Chopin which in other hands bubble like pure champagne flow like pure spring water; the source is everything. And such is the concentration that the wider spaces of the Royal Festival Hall melted away and a sizeable audience was drawn, intensely silent, into the spell.The only aspects of Read more ...
David Nice
Bomb-dropping is the new black again in Trump's dysfunctional America. Awareness of that contributed to the crackling cloud of dynamic dread hanging over last night's concert staging of John Adams's opera-oratorio - my description, not his - about the July 1945 desert testing of the plutonium bomb under the supervision of self-divided Robert Oppenheimer, an American Faust. But then the music's insistent stepwise descents towards the centre of the earth, in various modes and illuminated colours, the claustrophobic volume of much of the variegated score in the no-escape close-ups of the Read more ...
David Nice
Second and third times lucky: after the migraine-inducing multimedia overload of Peter Sellars's premiere production of El Niño, first seen in London in 2003 and subsequently excoriated in eloquent prose by the composer himself, John Adams's layered masterpiece has had two further performances here proving that the drama is all in the music. Vladimir Jurowski's 2013 Festival Hall interpretation literally had the edge, in its razor-sharp focus, on last night. But it's always good to see the composer as conductor make light of his rhythmic complexity as he nears his 70th birthday, and we also Read more ...
David Nice
So many words, starting with the title - we're told we can call it iHo - and so many lines spoken by anything up to nine characters at once. But as this is the unique world of Tony Kushner, it's all matter from the heart, balancing big ideas and complex characters and leading them beyond the realms of any safe and simply effective new play, in this case towards a father-and-daughter scene as great as anything you'll see in the theatre today.This is a different sort of epic style to the freewheeling mastery of Angels in America. It's unusual to find a Kushner play where you can nominally Read more ...