Southbank Centre
Tim Cumming
K-Music has become one of the highlights of the autumn cultural calender since it launched in 2014, bringing an eclectic range of Korean artists and bands, from pop and rock to jazz and folk, and all the gradations between. Next Sunday Korean Pansori opera comes to Kings Place, while Park Jiha’s beguiling looped soundscapes come to Rich Mix on 17th October, and Kyungso Park returns to the Southbank with her zither-like gayageum and new band, SB Circle on 29 October.Launching this year’s edition at the Purcell Room was the penetrating wall of sound that is Jambinai, more sheet metal than heavy Read more ...
David Nice
You can't expect a full house when the only work approaching a repertoire staple on your programme is Berg's Lulu Suite. Yet Esa-Pekka Salonen was able to serve up what must count as one of the most enthralling Philharmonia programmes ever at the Southbank Centre simply by spotlighting four different styles surfacing in the anything-goes musical world of Weimar Germany. It's just a pity there weren't more people, indeed more young people, there to hear it, and that BBC Radio 3 wasn't on hand to broadcast it.You could even see it as part of a mini-festival within the series, that superb total Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Charles Hazlewood's 2018 two-parter for BBC Four, Tones, Drones and Arpeggios: The Magic of Minimalism explored work by some of the great composers of the genre Hazlewood dubs as “last big idea in classical music”, which emerged from the experiments of John Cage in the 1950s, with offshoots spearheaded by the likes of La Monte Young and Terry Riley, and later Steve Reich and Philip Glass.Now the British conductor’s passion for the last revolution in 20th century classical music, one that seeped through to other genres via the likes of Mike Oldfield and Brian Eno, comes to the stage of the Read more ...
David Nice
Throughout his 11 years as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra to date, Vladimir Jurowski has focused on two elements, programme-wise: tellingly-linked concerts of the rich and rare, and fine-tuned interpretations of the repertoire's cornerstones over the seasons. Next month he'll be reprising his meticulously calibrated view of Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony; last night it was again the turn of Tchaikovsky's "Pathétique" - an absolute pinnacle of depth and discipline, building on the sound which stunned us when the team unfolded Russian rarities at the Proms, but also Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The mid-1930s, when the Nazi government replaced the Weimar republic, was a bleak time for the composers featured in last night’s Philharmonia concert. Arnold Schoenberg was the first to leave for the US, followed by Paul Hindemith in 1938. Alban Berg avoided emigration only by the extreme measure of dying, suddenly, in 1935. But the music they were writing was not bleak, even when marking the death of a teenage "angel".The three composers shared something else apart from the disfavour of the Nazis: a veneration of J.S. Bach, and this was the thread that bound together the first half. Read more ...
Katherine Waters
“Thank you for making us so fucking special!” It’s the end the set and both adjectives are appropriate. “Yes I had to say fucking special,” Peaches yells, combative and loved. The audience howls back. The Royal Festival Hall is hardly a natural environment for anarchic art-punk scuzz but Peaches knows how to work her crowd. She’s played here before and saw Grace Jones perform live, after all.When she crashed into the mainstream with The Teaches of Peaches, she was already a few records off obscurity. Years on and she’s still offering up obscenity, snark and attitude with abandon. Up Read more ...
Ellie Porter
Nile Rodgers, the beaming, beret-sporting curator of this year’s splendidly eclectic Meltdown, strolls on to the Royal Festival Hall stage tonight to introduce his “dearest friend in the world”. The appearance of the CHIC maestro is not entirely unexpected given that he was, earlier this evening, at an event across the way in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, but it’s still a delight. And when Johnny Marr makes his entrance, he greets Rodgers with a powerful hug that shows the feeling’s mutual (he did name his son Nile in Rodgers’ honour, after all).A compact, tanned figure in black bomber jacket, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There is every reason to celebrate Nile Rodgers. For his contribution to music as arranger, producer and performer over more than four decades. And also not least because he’s still around and still performing: he has, after all, pulled through after two bouts of serious cancer in 2010 and 2017. The twenty-sixth annual Meltdown Festival on the Southbank, which he is curating, seems a very good way to do him justice.The festival started on Saturday night with him doing a fascinating talk/Q&A, followed by a 90-minute set from the current Chic line-up. These were both sessions which put the Read more ...
Kitty Finstad
What does one wear to watch a Fashion Freak Show, FFS? On the eve of London’s hottest day probably ever, the fashion faithful still turned out in sequins, PVC jackets, knee-high lace-up boots, turbans, wigs and floral headpieces, a skin-tight silver jumpsuit, full drag and even a white beret courtesy of Mr Nile Rodgers, who must have been blushing every time his disco anthem “Le Freak C’est Chic" erupted from the speakers. Such is the influence of fashion’s favourite bad boy (don’t make me say enfant terrible…) that not to make an effort for the UK premiere at the Southbank Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The publicity said it would be dark. But who would have guessed The Mother would be this dark? With its tally of dead and dying babies, gouged eye sockets and flayed skin, Arthur Pita’s latest dance-drama vehicle for the phenomenal Natalia Osipova, loosely based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen, gives HBO’s Chernobyl a run for its money.Even Yann Seabra’s set – a revolving suite of poorly furnished rooms, all dingy wallpaper and stained sanitary ware – seems to have come from the same job lot. Russian folk memory seeps from every blood-smeared pore of this grisly tale with its cast of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A Broadway show as melodically haunting and sophisticated as it is niche, The Light in the Piazza has taken its own bittersweet time getting to London. A separate European premiere in 2009 at Leicester's Curve Theatre whetted the local appetite for a show that won six Tony Awards in 2005 but is far from standard musical fare. And here it finally is in the capital, albeit for 20 performances only in a full production, directed by Daniel Evans within the unexpected confines of the Royal Festival Hall. The concert setting grants pole position to Adam Guettel's score and to the distinguished, if Read more ...
David Nice
With two German giants roaring - Brahms in leonine mode, Richard Strauss more with tongue in armour-plated cheek - it could have all been too much. Not in the eloquent hands of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's Music Director Designate, Vasily Petrenko, or pianist Denis Kozhukhin, the most musically disciplined of Russians.Indeed, you felt this team could have gone on to give us from Brahms's First Piano Concerto to give us the equally titanic Second. I've heard that pairing work in concert with the magisterial Elisabeth Leonskaja, and there's no doubt that when Yefim Bronfman played the Read more ...