Southbank Centre
Peter Culshaw
Like a piece of conceptual art, it may be the idea rather than the actual music that is the most significant thing about the world premiere last night of Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite. There will be a hundred times more people discussing the fact that Reich has taken on Radiohead than actually listening to it. Rather than variations, it's a 16-minute piece performed by the London Sinfonietta in which elements of a couple of Radiohead songs are referred to, often obliquely. Chords are shuffled around, but snatches of melody survive. It was a bit peek-a-boo and Spot That Tune.The first Read more ...
David Nice
Who’d have guessed a full house for the third of The Rest is Noise festival’s Berlin nights? This time there were no obvious superstars, unless you follow singer-songwriter Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond and you know the impeccable track-record so far of young conductor André de Ridder. The programme of three very different composing voices from the Berlin of the early 1930s was not a crowd-puller either; yet the audience of mostly twenty- and thirty-somethings even stayed and cheered for Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony, perhaps enticed by the promise of an after-interval encore Read more ...
David Nice
Given a fair few strange and languishing Brecht-Weill pieces that The Rest is Noise Festival’s Berlin strand might have explored, Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO had a tough time of it by piecing together a performing edition of the most familiar one. Stagings of Die Dreigroschenoper with singing actors and a deft director can knit this celebrated hybrid together. But a concert performance that tries to be true to the 1928 premiere’s mixture of balladeers and fairly hefty opera singers to fill out the updated, jazz-meets-Bach riff on John Gay’s thieves-den Beggar’s Opera will be very lucky to Read more ...
David Nice
It’s Weimar Berlin time as the Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival moves through the 20th-century music scene – so it must be Liza Minnelli time too. Or must it? Though she’s immortalised through her Americanisation of Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse’s film of Cabaret, the Kander and Ebb torchsong for which she is most famous, “Maybe This Time”, belongs very decidedly to the 1960s (it was written for Kaye Ballard, not for the 1972 movie). Well, we heard that, and how - a number in itself worth the top ticket price of £100. We also had Liza singing Cole Porter and a starry-eyed Read more ...
David Nice
You’d not expect Einstein to have daubed Amadeus’s Ninth Piano Concerto with the label “Mozart’s Eroica”. The really famous one didn’t : that piece of punditry came not from Albert the Great but Alfred the (musicologist) Lesser. Embarrassingly, the OAE’s publicity didn’t seem to know the difference. Anyway, by advertising this concert with Alfred’s tag at its head, the intention was surely to highlight the shock of the new in all three works played and/or conducted by András Schiff.As it happened, Schiff made it all sound unshockingly natural on one level within the charmed circle of equally Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise Festival has reached the American leg of its year-long tour through 20th century music, and with it safe musical ground. In the second of three concerts with the LPO, American conductor Marin Alsop showcased the two equally appealing sides of America’s musical history: its cleanly-scrubbed, western classical face in Copland and Ives, and the grubbier, jazz-infused gestures of Joplin and Gershwin.Alsop (pictured below) is the real deal - a no-nonsense musician with a flair for texture and a real affinity for this generous, rhythmic repertoire. Her Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Death comes in many guises but in this ingeniously devised Philharmonia concert he most definitely did not have the last laugh. That was for Shostakovich and a curiously ticking time bomb of percussion which first surfaced in his Fourth Symphony when Stalin branded him a renegade but which later became a kind of defiant titter trailing to eternity in his fifteenth and last symphony. That piece, oblique and puzzling but extraordinarily lucid too, might be regarded as the apotheosis of his most powerful weapon in life and death: irony. It begins in the nursery like a second childhood Read more ...
David Nice
You don’t have to live under a totalitarian regime to write music of profound anguish. I was driven to argue the point at a Shostakovich symposium when an audience quizzer took issue with my assertion that Britten could go just as deep as the Russian. Much as the works of the two composers in this programme, Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto and Britten’s Spring Symphony, revealed their lighter sides to varying degrees, it was our anniversary composer who scored highest with his darker undercurrents. Conductor Edward Gardner’s further touch of class was to avoid giving one of what will Read more ...
howard.male
The only time the great Malian singer spoke at any length to last night’s audience was when he said, “I don’t know my birthday. I don’t know the day or the year. So any day can be my birthday. So can you please stand up and dance for my birthday.” So either Wikipedia is wrong about it being 25 August 1949, or Keita has a strange sense of humour. Anyway, his presumably oft-repeated line gets a warm chuckle of appreciation and a third of the audience dutifully get to their feet.In other respects too this was an oddly dissatisfying gig. Keita’s new album Talé is a muscular pop/funk workout which Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Music is the food of dance - music as either an emotional language to speak back to, or an environment to set a mood or find associations in. The former is highly demanding, and Henri Oguike and Richard Alston are two who are clinging to the wreckage of British contemporary dance as art, not theatre. To see them on consecutive nights is to be reminded how ambitiously contemporary dance can aim, when the imagination reaches with a limited body language to try to link into a parallel world of utterly different definitions.I try to think what good dance feels like to watch - and I say, “feels Read more ...
geoff brown
The centenary bandwagon always passes some composers by: how many organisations in Britain will be celebrating George Lloyd or Tikhon Khrennikov? Other figures almost get steamrollered flat with attention; Britten, I’d say, is this year’s likely candidate. But who could throw any stones at the birthday cake and bunting created by the Philharmonia Orchestra for that mercurial Polish wizard Witold Lutoslawski? Born 100 years ago last Friday, he’s the subject of a straggling international strand of concerts called Woven Words, stretching from here until late May, with a final Berlin gig popping Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Aimee Mann must surely be one of the most unstarry of stars. While most of her fans were still in the bar thinking about what they might have as a pre-gig aperitif, she strolled onstage to join support act Ted Leo for a couple of new songs they have written together. No grand diva entrance here, she just strapped on a bass guitar and stood next to the Costello-ish Leo pulling at those strings. Moral? Never ignore the support act, it might feature the person you've paid to see.When Mann returned after the interval there was no costume change, no big fanfare to signal the start of her set, Read more ...