Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Although Windflowers showcases Efterklang at their most direct, its sixth track “Living Other Lives” is its most instant, most straightforward composition. However, the Danish art-poppers’ sixth studio album does not instantly makes its case as a full-bore adoption of up-front dynamics. Windflowers opens with “Alien Arms”, an understated reflection where vocalist Casper Clausen ponders whether the highpoints of the past can be reproduced in the present. Despite the restraint – and an intimate, Blue Nile-esque atmosphere – the flow is linear, the melody precise. “We’re moving through the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“There should be some kind of spirit there which is outside whoever is in the band. The spirit of the band, wanting still to play songs, real songs, wanting to play complicated music to a certain extent. Fairly dense arrangements, also difficult pieces of music, not to be difficult but just because that’s a challenge. To do all that and then also play with a degree of anarchy, chaos, and fire and spirit. That’s the spirit of Van der Graaf.”So said a drawn-looking, jumpy Peter Hammill on 17 June 1978. He’s on Austrian TV, sitting on an unmade bed in a hotel room, with a cigarette in his hand Read more ...
Simon Thompson
This concert almost had me in tears before a single note was played because it marked (joy!) the first classical concert to take place in the Usher Hall since it was shut in March 2020. She has been closed for eighteen long months, but she hasn’t aged a day.The final piece of music I heard in the Usher Hall before lockdown was Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, so there’s a pleasing symmetry to the fact that it’s also the first I heard when it reopened. And it’s played here by a crack musical team, one that is still glowing from its magnificent Mozart at this summer’s Proms. That concert, Read more ...
David Nice
Two suns, two moons, two Philharmonia leaders sharing a front desk, two aspirational giants among Richard Strauss's symphonic poems bringing the number of players, in the second half, to 134. Who’d have thought we’d be witnessing such phenomena when, contrary to what the orchestra’s CEO claimed at the start and the unmasked half of a packed audience seemed to think, we haven’t even reached the “post-Covid era”.Never mind the long-term implications; by the time we reached the huge arc of Strauss’s one-movement Alpine Symphony, everyone in the audience must surely have been feeling the physical Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Isamu Noguchi may not be a household name, yet one strand of his work is incredibly familiar. In 1951 he visited a lamp factory in Gifu, a Japanese city famous for its paper lanterns. This prompted him to design the lampshades that, for decades, have adorned nearly every student’s bedsit.Strips of fine white paper made from mulberry tree bark are glued onto bamboo ribs to create a design that is amazingly versatile and comes in all shapes and sizes. Spheres are the most popular, but Noguchi also designed rectangles, cubes, pyramids, ellipses and columns alongside forms resembling pumpkins, Read more ...
Heather Neill
Lucy Bailey's production of Christie's Witness for the Prosecution, first staged at County Hall in 2017, has a few years to make up on The Mousetrap's near 70, but it has already proved its staying power, despite the hiatus of the lockdown months.The venue is inevitably a significant part of its attraction. The courtroom at County Hall - once the chamber which saw the political debates of the Greater London Council - is a magnificent, atmospheric space, standing in for the Old Bailey. A statue of Justice, scales in hand, presides over the action and 12 members of the audience are co-opted as Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Whatever the upsets and uncertainties of this musical season, the return of choral works at full scale and full power has been an unalloyed joy. And sheer, exhilarated, heaven-storming joy branded the Academy of Ancient Music’s reading of Haydn’s The Creation in the Barbican Hall on Tuesday night. The AAM’s incoming music director Laurence Cummings commanded his substantial orchestra, a 26-strong chorus, five soloists and even Alastair Ross’s striking, historically-informed continuo – an 1801 Broadwood fortepiano. They endowed Haydn’s Enlightenment-era vision of a sin-free universe with Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In order to preserve its impact for the millions lining up to see it, it won’t be possible to truly dissect the boldness and significance of No Time to Die until the dust has settled on the box office, and moves to find Daniel Craig’s successor as James Bond go up a gear. For review purposes, the most astounding aspects of the script may as well be redacted. And that’s not such a bad thing. The long-awaited finale of the Craig era is every bit as slippery, emotionally-charged and spectacular as we’d been led to expect; but most striking is the bravado and surprise involved in Read more ...
David Nice
At the heart of Janáček’s searing music-drama, and the pioneering play by another remarkable Czech, Gabriela Preissová, on which it is based, are two strong women trapped in a conventional community whose intelligence goes to waste and whose lives take tragic turns.These are roles for great singing actors, who need space and nurturing from an insightful director and conductor. In Asmik Grigorian as the clever, serious, truthful girl and Karita Mattila, once a leading interpreter of the eponymous heroine, as her stepmother, the village sacristan or Kostelnička who makes an indefensible Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In 2015, an abstract painting by Gerhard Richter broke the world record for contemporary art by selling at auction for £30.4m, and the octogenarian is often described as the most important living artist. But I’ve always found the prices fetched by his work baffling and the claims made about him exaggerated, since his paintings leave me cold.The Hayward Gallery exhibition includes a group of drawings in which Richter employs tactics similar to those used in many of his paintings. A photograph of woodland is partially obscured by areas of grey overpainting. To me, this contrast between abstract Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Christian Gerhaher and a string ensemble led by Isabelle Faust presented here a programme of works with a nocturnal theme. Gerhaher’s voice is an instrument of husky shadings and dark hues, so the night theme seemed wholly appropriate. The impetus for the programme, which the group is touring to several countries, was a new arrangement by David Matthews of the Berlioz Les nuits d’éte, with string sextet accompaniment, but the most interesting work was the first, Othmar Schoeck’s Notturno, op. 47.Schoeck composed the cycle, for baritone and string quartet, in 1931-3. The composer himself was Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s easy enough to see the difficulty Madam Butterfly places your thinking director in. I share her pain. What the whirring brain will quickly see as a penetrating, or at least surface scratching, study of a whole repertoire of modern obsessions – cultural appropriation, colonialisation, child abuse, sexual predation – turns out to be merely Puccini’s latest bout of sublimated girl-bashing, accompanied by some of his most sadistically beautiful music.For Lindy Hume, the director of WNO’s new production, Butterfly is no longer the fragile, accidental victim of a horrid American Read more ...