Manchester
Kieron Tyler
A 55-minute set without an encore. Songs bleeding into each other. No announcements, no talking from the stage. A constantly moving frontman seemingly channelling a yen to merge Merce Cunningham moves and tai-chi. A band who, barring the odd grin from one of the guitarists, focus on what they are doing without expression. An absence of “please-like-me” posturing.Then there’s the music. In high gear from the moment the stage is taken, it’s a motorik-bedded onslaught systematically augmented with crescendos and mounting power. Beyond the Krautrock influence, other nods are made: New Order when Read more ...
Eyck, BBC Philharmonic, Storgårds, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - theremin takes centre stage
Robert Beale
The theremin is still a relatively rare visitor to concert halls, particularly in a solo role, but Carolina Eyck is changing that. Her instrument, invented by Lev Termen just 100 years ago, is a relatively simple piece of kit – a tone generator controlled by the player’s hands, which never touch it but rather appear to be conjuring sound out of thin air.In many ways its most daunting characteristic is the sheer range of sounds it can create. The right hand controls pitch, and that can vary over a wide range of the normally audible spectrum, with the distinctive notes of conventional scales or Read more ...
Robert Beale
Everyone’s doing Weinberg now, or so it seems. The Polish-born composer who became a close friend of Shostakovich was born 100 years ago, and there’s plenty of his music to go round. Raphael Wallfisch gave the UK premiere of his Cello Concertino (Opus 43B), with the Northern Chamber Orchestra in Manchester last night. The “B” is not insignificant – it’s a reworked and shortened version of his Cello Concerto of 1948, scored for string orchestra accompaniment only, and wasn’t published until two years ago.At 16 minutes in length but still with four movements, the piece is certainly an Read more ...
Simon Stephens
Light Falls is the sixth play that I have written for the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester and the fourth that its outgoing Artistic Director, Sarah Frankcom, will direct.She directed On the Shore of the Wide World, Punk Rock and Blindsided. In many ways Light Falls marks a culmination of a collaboration that has informed my working life and a return to ideas I have been interrogating in that collaboration.I was born in Stockport and lived there until I went to university when I was 18. I live in London now and have done for 25 years. The relationship between the two places continues to Read more ...
Robert Beale
Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is a repertoire piece nowadays, probably as familiar to as many listeners as to orchestral players, which means you look for something distinctive in any performance to identify its essential quality against all the others.With Portuguese conductor Joana Carneiro in charge, concluding the BBC Philharmonic’s concert at the Bridgewater Hall last night, it was the soulful obbligato horn solo in the Scherzo (superbly played by guest principal Itamar Leshem) and the immediately following passage that became the emotional heart of the piece. The movement itself had been Read more ...
Robert Beale
Changes from the artists originally advertised can bring some happy discoveries. Sir Mark Elder, though present in the audience to hear last night’s Hallé performance at the Bridgewater Hall, was still recovering from surgery and so did not conduct it, as he’d planned to when the season was announced. Instead, the Hallé Youth Orchestra’s music director (and noted choral director) Ellie Slorach took the baton for the first work in the programme – Weinberg’s Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes. This is Weinberg’s centenary year, so relative rareties such as this pleasant concoction of folk themes are Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Prior to the UK dance music explosion of summer 1988, house and techno were American micro-scenes, geographically restricted to Chicago, Detroit and New York. Small coteries showed interest in the UK, but few thought of making the stuff. Mancunian producers 808 State, however, were early adopters, recording an album that year and later charting with iconic 1989 hit “Pacific State”, a futuristic, Balearic instrumental. 30 years on, their seventh album is both forward-looking and a tribute to old analogue technologies.808 State, once a four-piece, is now the duo of long-term members Graham Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata’s series of in-concert recordings featuring Mozart piano concertos with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is well under way now, and this programme, like others before it, included a couple of his opera overtures too. Why so? "Because all Mozart piano concertos are also mini-operas," to quote Camerata music director Gábor Takács-Nagy, who likes talking to his audiences about what he and his fellow-musicians are up to.Fair point – at least, it’s almost a truism that Mozart often introduces his themes as if they were full-fledged characters unveiling their personalities, that his Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Hallé Orchestra has a good track record when it comes to bringing in young talents with exciting prospects, and its 2019-20 season begins with the newly appointed Finnish chief conductor designate of the Oslo Philharmonic, Klaus Mäkelä, on the rostrum, and the young Icelander Víkungur Ólafsson as solo pianist. The bespectacled, besuited pair look almost as if they might have stepped off the set of The League of Gentlemen, but their music making was top-class and, in their shared Beethoven concerto in particular, impressive indeed.It opened with Beethoven’s Overture to The Creatures of Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Manchester International Piano Competition produced three outstanding performances over the two evenings of its finals: the winner of the first prize was Ilia Lomtatidze, from Georgia, with second prize awarded jointly to the Italian and French pianists Luca Grianti and Oscar Colliar.This was the sixth event of its kind, its full name the Manchester International Concerto Competition for Young Pianists. Note the words "Concerto" and "Young" there: it’s not just another piano solo tournament. The maximum age for entrants is 22, and they all have to be capable of playing a concerto – which Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In the late 1950s, a photo technician from Salford suddenly became “the most famous teenager in Britain”. Shelagh Delaney was 19 when she sent the script of A Taste of Honey to the radical director Joan Littlewood. Within a matter of weeks, in May 1958, Theatre Royal Stratford East had staged it – sensationally, to a welcome that mixed bouquets and brickbats. The fearless youngster from the cosmopolitan slum neighbourhood of Ordsall had already begun “to change the way working-class women are treated and represented in Britain”. With its two generations of single mothers, its relaxed Read more ...
David Nice
Berlioz's most intimate oratorio certainly isn't just for Christmas – but, given its scale, is it right for the Proms? Certainly in anniversary year we'd hoped for something bigger: the Requiem, turned to mush earlier this year in St Paul's Cathedral, could have been made for the Albert Hall, with brass bands placed at the four points of the compass. But this venue can do strangely moving things with the small scale, given caring interpreters, and that was equally true of the four late-night Bach cantatas from the eight voices and small ensemble of Solomon's Knot.What choirs and players we Read more ...