Southbank Centre
Jessica Duchen
The Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski, chief conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, heads its major new series devoted to the music of Sergei Rachmaninov, in context with his forerunners and successors. This is to be the largest celebration of Rachmaninov ever undertaken in a single season, with 11 concerts to include all the composer’s key works for orchestra, including some in rarely heard early versions, placed in context with music by his inspirations, contemporaries and successors including Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Szymanowski, Scriabin and Vaughan Williams.Here Jurowski tells Read more ...
Heidi Goldsmith
The next revolution of civil disobedience is unlikely to be a ticketed event, with a sedentary congregation of grey-haired, nostalgic former hippies. And the Royal Festival Hall (even at full capacity) is a mere campfire compared to Joan Baez's public of 30,000 protesters of Washington DC in 1967. But politics, where the drum stick is eschewed for the brush, were still the unspoken substance of her first London performance of four.“The tour before this was in Latin America,” she began in between songs while slowly changing guitars, “…and it was an honour to play in all those countries I was Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
It was Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers that first really got Mulatu Astatke major Western attention – in same way that Angelo Badalementi’s music for Twin Peaks gave a rich and strange dimension to David Lynch’s TV epic, there was an even greater sense of wonderful disorientation, or as Brian Eno put it “jazz from another planet,” with Astatke’s music.While Astatke values the back catalogue (he played on the same bill as Duke Ellington in front of Haile Selassie in the early 1970s) he has really seized the opportunity that opened up for him to create some genuinely terrific new music.This Read more ...
fisun.guner
The voice no longer soars with easeful power, nor does it possess that tingling, honey-coated purity that gave hits such as “Bridge Over Troubled Water” such emotional force. This should hardly come as a surprise, since Art Garfunkel is now 72. Away from Paul Simon, from whom he split in 1970, Garfunkel has had a long, stop-and-start solo career, occasionally writing and recording his own songs but mainly singing other people’s, including those unforgettable Simon hits.But it’s not just age that has affected his vocal cords. The last three and a half years saw Garfunkel suffering vocal cord Read more ...
Jo Verrent
The audience comment I most want to hear during next week's Unlimited Festival is: this show has transformed my perception of disability. We got that over and over and over during the first Unlimited Festival, which ran as part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2012. And I want that again. It’s all about making people understand that disability isn’t a negative, awful experience, just a facet of life that can give you as much as it apparently appears to take away. In fact, it just gives you more.I’m senior producer for the Unlimited commissions programme, which has worked with nine disabled Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In her book How To Be a Woman, Times columnist Caitlin Moran explains the difference between strip clubs and burlesque shows, and why the latter are perfectly acceptable to feminism. “In burlesque, the power rests with the person taking their clothes off, as it always should do in polite society.” My Stories, Your Emails, which opened last night in the Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre, is cabaret artist Ursula Martinez’s way of making exactly the same point. Martinez was subjected to an unwanted level of exposure (sorry...) some years ago, when a video of her clever little striptease Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s statement of intent to open your first British headlining show with a 15-minute version of an album track which lasts a minute and three-quarters – from an album which itself lasts barely more than 30 minutes. And then to riff on it, incorporating elements from a debut album which barely anyone beyond your native country has heard. In taking her current album No Deal’s “I Feel You” and merging it with A Stomach Is Burning’s “A Stomach”, Belgium’s Melanie De Biasio could have alienated an audience who had never seen her before. Instead, the sold-out Purcell Room gave her standing ovation. Read more ...
geoff brown
Of all the epithets you could pin on that roast beef of Old England, William Boyce, “gamechanger” is one of the more unlikely. Like any good 18th-century Englishman, this composer followed the widespread Italianate model of the late Baroque, infused it with Handel, and a swig or two of Purcell, and just got to work. Latterly he spent far too much time setting toadying odes for Britain’s Hanoverian kings; no chance for revolution there. But “Gifted Conservatives”, unlike “Gamechangers”, wouldn’t today be an enticing name for a concert season’s thematic link. So there he was, Boyce the Read more ...
David Nice
A voluptuous dream in sequined silver, the nearly-27-year-old Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili sat down at the keyboard and instantly transcendentalised her mermaid look as Ravel’s Ondine. Even Brahms took to the life aquatic of her recital’s first half. For the second, though, there should have been a costume change into a clown suit with a tatty tutu pulled over it. Never have I witnessed a crazier trip through the distorting mirror – and if even Stravinsky’s mad puppet Petrushka couldn’t take the relentless onslaught, what about the poor old Chopin Second Scherzo and the Ravel La Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Antonio Pappano addressed the audience before the start of the concert to explain the thinking behind this rather unusual programme, first performed in the early nineties and now a perfect fit for the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia orchestra and chorus, where he has been music director since 2005.Having spent a period of time "exploring works themed around conflict", he had wanted to take on Luigi Dallapiccola’s one-act opera Il prigioniero ("The Prisoner") but needed companion pieces to make a concert’s worth. In figuring out how to create a programme that would function Read more ...
David Nice
Am I alone in a readiness to sacrifice all four Rachmaninov piano concertos – though maybe not the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini – in favour of the second sets of Preludes and Études-Tableaux? Probably not, after last night, when Nikolay Lugansky unfurled the 13 Op. 32 Preludes as one discombobulating symphonic cosmos. This is probably as close as we can come today to being in the presence of Rachmaninov himself, the greatest recorded pianist I know.Some find Lugansky cold. Let’s just say that he favours Apollonian control and poise over Dionysian abandon, though not always. And if Apollo Read more ...
David Nice
Vladimir Jurowski is a master of the through-composed programme. Yet at first this looked like a more standard format: explosive contemporary work (if 1966 can still be called “contemporary”) followed by popular concerto and symphony. On reflection, though - and there was space enough for that - it turned out to be a back-to-front journey through German musical history, from Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s atom bomb of light to classical-romantic Beethoven and late-romantic Brahms ending in a homage to Bach The sequence of works was executed with the sometimes blinding clarity we’ve come to expect Read more ...