Southbank Centre
Bernard Hughes
The Clore Ballroom at the Southbank Centre is usually an open-plan space within the foyer, a little ambiguous in its extent and purpose. Last night, for the first time, I saw it enclosed and separated off, ambiently lit and full of smoke, for the Paraorchestra to evoke a 1970s New York loft happening, only with iPhones and the smoke coming from machines and not the audience’s wacky-baccy.The music was inspired by the drones of 1970s minimalism and performed by a mixture of disabled and able-bodied professional instrumentalists, all dressed in white, led by their ringmaster Charles Hazlewood. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As the panto season is in full swing, theatregoers will be expecting to hear some smut. For those who don't like the traditional artform but still like a bit of filth – with songs – then Reuben Kaye's The Butch Is Back will do nicely.It's a storytelling show in a cabaret format as the fabulously dressed Australian comic and singer performs with his six-piece band. He has an extraordinary voice and the songs (arranged by his musical director Shanon D Whitelock, who is on keyboards) – bombastic, full-throated affairs and camp-as-you-like rockers – recount his childhood or act as a soundtrack as Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There are probably two distinct audiences for the latest adaptation from Les Enfants Terribles, The House with Chicken Legs: the young teens who lapped up the fantasy novel by Sophie Anderson on which it is based, and the adults who came with them. The latter may not be as enraptured as fans of the book by the piece’s staging, not to mention its almost three-hour length. The piece made its debut at Manchester’s HOME venue, where it seems to have had a favourable reception. The QEH, though, is a different kind of space: quite steeply raked and with inadequate acoustics, which make it hard Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Intimacy isn’t everything, but there’s nothing like seeing dance live and up close. A good seat in a large theatre will give you the whole stage picture but lose the detail. Lost too will be that quasi-visceral connection with the movement.A fascinating academic study found that the brains of people watching dance, presuming they are paying attention and not checking their phones, transmit messages to the appropriate muscles as if to prompt a sympathetic mirror dance. We don’t generally act on these messages (imagine the scenes if we did) but subliminally they are there, urging our emotional Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
What a month, and what a day, for Michael Barenboim to bring the West-Eastern Divan Ensemble to London. Created in 1999 by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, the original West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has always impressed because it gathers Israeli, Arab and other regional musicians together not in some soppy, sentimental hope that music will miraculously heal the rifts and wounds of history – but in the belief that working in harmony on a great shared task can, potentially, open minds and hearts to others' lives and stories. The project aspires to build bridges not through pious rhetoric but, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Friday’s double-header at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the Southbank was not only one of the final gigs in this year’s K-Music Festival – entering its tenth year with an eclectic range of Korean artists and bands performing across London and beyond – but also one of the launch gigs for this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival, now entering its 31st year.Not that the word "jazz" fits all that well into either band’s soundscaping, whichevef way you stretch it. Jambinai’s sheet metal racket was paired with the angular, Pansori-inspired alt-K-Pop, (the narrative folk art of Pansori Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Underneath the abject willow/ Lover, sulk no more;/ Act from thought should quickly follow:/ What is thinking for?” In 1936, early in their tempestuous friendship, WH Auden wrote a poem for Benjamin Britten that urged the younger artist to pursue his passions – musical and erotic – and curb his fearful longing for comfort and safety.The poet’s hectoring insistence that the composer should embrace audacity and risk marked a partnership that began in hero-worship – the timid, tentative Britten’s for the bold and brilliant young bard – and ended in the composer’s violent rejection of his one- Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is a great deal of sense in transposing electronic music to a symphony orchestra. However beautifully crafted, imaginatively constructed, and creatively programmed, the sounds that come out of synthesisers and other digital tools lack the knife-edge fallibility of music that is produced with the hand or the human breath. Brian Eno’s concert with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic provides compelling evidence that his compositions reveal more of their essence when taken on a trip into the world of strings, brass and other wind instruments, and the chance-prone reality of human moods and Read more ...
David Nice
It’s a given that no finer Rachmaninov interpreter exists than Nikolai Lugansky – a few others may see the works differently, not better – and that Vasily Petrenko has an uncanny affinity with both the swagger and the introspection of Elgar. But just how clearly and deeply both made their understanding felt seemed like an harmonious miracle in the most famous of all Second Piano Concertos and a parallel journey of revitalisation from Petrenko in Elgar’s world-embracing First Symphony.So the theme of this season, “Icons Rediscovered”, was for once supremely apt. Petrenko, after an engaging Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Philharmonia’s current season, Let Freedom Ring, celebrates American music through some notably interesting programming. And although last night’s concert was very conventionally structured, with an overture, concerto and big symphony to finish, it was also the chance to hear some repertoire only quite rarely presented.Barber’s Violin Concerto is a personal favourite, a bit of a guilty pleasure as it is undoubtedly Romantically indulgent, and old-fashioned even when it was written. But I’m surprised it’s not heard more often – I’d take it over Bruch or Brahms or Elgar every time. Here Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Martin Scorsese walks onstage to a hero’s welcome, shoulders a little hunched, with a touch of sideways shuffle or hustle, taking acclaim in his stride at 80. He has sold out London’s 2,700-capacity Royal Festival Hall for the BFI’s biggest Screen Talk by far, and the queue for returns stretches into the street, to see a director as big as any star.Fellow director Edgar Wright is here to interview him for 60 minutes about his 27-film career, but barely gets beyond 1980’s Raging Bull in 90. The coked-up motormouth familiar in Scorsese cameos from his backseat rant at Travis Bickle to his Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Epic and intimate, philosophically anguished and rhapsodically transcendent, Mahler’s "Resurrection" Symphony remains one of the most mountainous challenges of the orchestral repertoire. For the opening of the Southbank’s new season Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra delivered an interpretation of superlative resonance and clarity, in which it felt that we explored every detail of the foothills as well as the earth-shaking views from the top.The vigorous attack of the LPO strings at the start of the Allegro maestoso made for a dynamic, athletically poised start, before the Read more ...