Reviews
Jenny Gilbert
At the arthouse end of contemporary dance no one expects a packed house, still less serial packed houses for more than a week. Yet Sadler’s Wells was fully confident when it invited the dancer-choreographer Jules Cunningham – one of its New Wave Associates – to premiere a new work on its main stage.The special draw was that Cunningham’s company of three included the artist formerly known as Mel C, extending her Sporty Spice credentials to a bid to be seen as a serious exponent of pared-down, glacially cool art-dance. Happy to report, she acquits herself extremely well in a work that pays no Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The 1997 release of Time Out of Mind was the resurrection of an artist who appeared to have wandered off the reservation some years before, lost in transit on his Never Ending Tour, trailed by an army of "Bobcats" who followed him for show after grinding show. “How can you stand it?” he once asked of a woman who told him she’d seen dozens of NET gigs.While set lists shifted like tidal sands from night to night, the performances ranged from the ragged and wildly unfamiliar to the singular and revelatory. After attending one of 1991’s woeful run of shows at Hammersmith Odeon during a bitter Read more ...
peter.quinn
Recorded in 2019, released in 2020, and winner of Album of the Year at the 2021 Parliamentary Jazz Awards, it was a delight to finally witness the launch of Callum Au and Claire Martin’s spectacular album of jazz standards and American Songbook classics, Songs and Stories, albeit three years later than planned.Written by Au especially for this concert, the swirling, shape-shifting counterpoint of orchestral opener “Murmurations” featured the first of a number of towering solos from saxist Nadim Teimoori (playing soprano here), with string harmonics and a tintinnabulating celeste emerging out Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
I can’t help enjoying the continuing elevation of the jazz pianist Oscar Peterson (1925-2007) to national monument status in Canada. A park or a square here (Montreal), a boulevard there (Mississauga), a school, a concert hall, a statue, a commemorative one-dollar coin. Now Barry Avrich’s 2021 documentary Oscar Peterson: Black + White, which is being released on DVD.It tells Peterson's story well. A wide range of archival footage, notably several interviews with the pianist, has been trawled, carefully assembled, and juxtaposed with new interviews and specially commissioned Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I am proud – if surprised – to continue to be pretty much a lone voice in the wilderness singing the praises of the composer Guillaume Connesson (b.1970), whose substantial new string quartet “Les instants retrouvés” was heard at the Wigmore Hall on Saturday.Probably the most widely programmed French composer of his generation across mainland Europe and the USA, he continues to be almost completely ignored in the UK. And this is where the surprise comes in. Connesson’s music is at once more accessible than a lot of contemporary music – he is unafraid of heart-on-sleeve melodic outpourings – Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A lot has been happening in Lucy Porter’s life since she last toured. The pandemic we all know about, so she doesn’t detain us to recount her lockdown woes; they get merely tangential mentions in Wake Up Call as she talks about more recent events which included a health scare leading to something of a midlife crisis.But middle age isn’t all doom and gloom, she explains. Even when bad things happen they can lead to good outcomes (such as the vaue of good neighbours), and it’s the thrust of a show that will lift your spirits – a state of affairs helped greatly by Porter’s positivity and her Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At some point in 1979 a duo called The Door and the Window are playing a London Musician’s Collective show in a large brick building along the road from Cecil Sharp House in Camden. One of them has a synthesiser, probably a WASP. The other has tape recorders and a guitar. The inscrutable noise made features clanks, grinding and drones.On a Saturday night in either 1979 or 1980 a band called Exhibit “A” are playing Covent Garden youth club The Central London Youth Project. It’s in a basement along Shelton Street, so is usually called “The Basement.” They’re young, and deal in a jagged yet Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Babylon is sensational, a manic, pounding assault on the senses meant to convey Hollywood’s chaotic birth. Damien Chazelle’s return to La La Land’s showbiz dreams forsakes ineffable intimacy for hysterical thunder, and for much of the time that’s enough.It’s 1926, with Hollywood growing in LA’s backwater at America’s wild western edge. We start with an elephant shitting in a truck, en route to a party where that will count as decorous subtlety. Inside the party’s mansion doors, frenetic camerawork explores packed, deep-focus frames, embodying a seething, orgiastic crowd. Chinese-American Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The distinctive silvery tones of the viola da gamba were eclipsed in the 18th century as music moved from intimate settings to the brasher acoustic demands of the concert hall. Yet for Liam Byrne, discovering the viola da gamba at Indiana University was a way both of channelling his own musical voice and of connecting to the influential early music movement dating back to figures like Arnold Dolmetsch in the early 20th century.A collaboration with the Icelandic composer and audio engineer Valgeir Sigurõsson in 2013 introduced him to a form of electronic music making that he realised, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
At one point in this brilliantly constructed and performed set, Alex Edelman ponders on the catchment area for his comedy and figures it might be the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Nah: this is comedy that can talk to anybody with a brain. Edelman is not from New York, though he studied English at NYU and lives a bicoastal life there and in LA. He grew up in Brookline, Boston, the son of a leading heart specialist; his brother AJ represented Israel at the Winter Olympics in South Korea. (There’s a hilarious section on that unlikely event — how could there not be?) They are a successful Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Ryan Wigglesworth is a man of many talents. He has recently been appointed Chief Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony, but he is also a versatile opera conductor, and an operatic sensibility is clear in the musical personality he projects.Last night, that came in two forms, as the first work was by Wigglesworth himself. The song cycle, Till Dawning, was written for the conductor’s wife, Sophie Bevan, who gave the premiere in Austria in 2018. Serious illness has since interrupted her performing activities (not permanently, we hope), and so this UK premiere was given by soprano Elizabeth Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
We all have that friend. The person you met on holiday and couldn’t shake off. You added each other on Facebook, but they posted so much you’ve quietly unfollowed them. You can’t quite bring yourself to unfriend them, though. In The Unfriend, a new play at the Criterion Theatre after a Chichester premiere, Sherlock writer Steven Moffat asks: what if that friend was a murderer? And what if you had invited them to stay in your house?This is a true story – so true, in fact, that Moffat didn’t even change the name of the actual friend, Peter, to whom it happened. The play's Peter (Reece Read more ...