London
Tim Cumming
The Barbican, a week before Christmas, and it’s British folk-rock legends Steeleye Span’s last gig of the year, a year in which its vigorous seven-strong line-up – featuring a new recruit in the shape of former Bellowheader Benji Kirkpatrick – celebrated a half century of Span by releasing a strong new album in Est’d 69. One of the highlights of that new set was blockbuster ballad “Old Matron”, featuring Tull's Ian Anderson on flute.No Anderson tonight, but it nevertheless came with some very special guests too – Martin Carthy, coming to the stage with the mighty fiddler Peter Knight and Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Why does music suddenly disappear? It is all the more heartening when a work as excellent and enjoyable as Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No 3 takes wing once more, but you do have to wonder how in the world such a terrific orchestral piece was permitted to sink and vanish in its day under a morass of dubious opera. The symphony formed the second half of the Aurora Orchestra’s latest concert in its Pioneers series, for Kings Place's "Venus Unwrapped" focus on music by female composers, and very welcome it was. Farrenc (1804-1875) was a highly successful and well-regarded musician in her Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
At this time of year the musical world – and particularly the choral world – is full of festive concerts, and the challenge can be to find programmes venturing off the well-worn path of traditional favourites. But at Kings Place on Saturday I found one: the choirs of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge presenting, as part of the "Venus Unwrapped" season, a fresh take on the “lessons and carols” format, focusing largely on women composers.St Catharine’s staked its claim to this territory by being the college that, in 2008, broke centuries of practice among Oxbridge chapels by starting a girls’ Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 10 years this month since Kate McGarrigle gave her last concert, the annual Christmas concert that meant so much to her, at the Royal Albert Hall. Next month, 18 January, marks the first decade since her passing at the tragically early age of 63. So this year’s seasonal celebration was always going to be poignant and extra-special, as Rufus Wainwright, the elder of her two children with Loudon Wainwright III, noted at the outset.The concert was billed as "Rufus and Martha Wainwright – A Not So Silent Night", and the siblings ran the show with musical director Dan Gillespie Sells, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Happily, Joe Barton’s tinglingly original thriller (BBC Two) finished as smartly as it began, not by any humdrum tying-up of loose ends but by giving free rein to the story’s ambiguities and impossible choices. If indeed they really were choices. Earlier in the series, Kelly Macdonald’s Sarah delivered a philosophical manifesto which suggested that we exist in an infinite time-loop – “Everything is controlled by a mad conductor… everything we do is an echo of what we’ve done before.”The question might be, if we keep doing it, do we do it better? One of Giri/Haji’s underlying themes was the Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Given the number of audience members playing air-piano along with parts of Pictures at an Exhibition, Behzod Abduraimov should perhaps be described as a pianist’s pianist. He is nevertheless a great deal more than that. Ten years ago this young musician from Uzbekistan, via Kansas City, emerged victorious from the last-ever London International Piano Competition; he was 18 then and if his artistic growth thus far is anything to go by, we are dealing here with a rare and enchanting musician.Having chosen what appeared to be a programme of miniatures, he made each set of pieces a cohesive Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s always good to be among friends and it’s safe to say that everyone gathered at Islington Assembly Hall on Saturday for the third and final North London gig of Billy Bragg’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back Tour was left of centre. The tour began in July on the south coast, planned long before Borrissey, as Bragg calls the PM, conned the country in going to the polls but events have certainly given it a new urgency.The gigs have been organised in groups of three – the first night ranging across Bragg’s 35-year career; the second songs from his first three albums; and the third from his Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The four young men who comprise Darlingside met at Williams College, in the Berkshires which, each October, declares a “Mountain Day” when students hike up Stony Ledge and celebrate with donuts, cider and a cappella singing. Perhaps on one such hike was born the idea of a band and perhaps one day in the future the names of Don Mitchell, Auyon Mukharji, Harris Paseltiner, and David Senft will be added to the roster of notable Williams alumnae that includes Elia Kazan, Stephen Sondheim and Michael Beschloss.Take a bow, Darlingside, who returned to Britain this week for just two dates. Named in Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There aren’t many musicians who could appear as composer, singer and violist on a single programme but that was Caroline Shaw’s lot last night. As part of Kings Place’s Venus Unwrapped season, the first half comprised entirely her music, played by the Attacca Quartet and featuring Shaw as vocalist, and she then re-appeared with viola in hand after the interval for Mendelssohn’s second string quintet.Shaw was the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 for her stunning vocal work Partita, written for the ensemble Roomful of Teeth, which I was really disappointed not to Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It’s been 15 years since Cameron Mackintosh’s stage musical version of P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins made its West End debut. Now, the magical nanny returns to the Prince Edward Theatre, with Zizi Strallen (who also headlined the UK tour) succeeding her sister Scarlett in the title role – all set to capitalise on the recent Emily Blunt-starring film sequel renewing our interest in the adventures of the Banks family.“I fear what’s to happen all happened before,” muses Charlie Stemp’s Bert at the start of the show. Well, yes and no. Fans of the original movie should be warned that the Disney Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ian McKellen, his Mr Holmes director Bill Condon and Helen Mirren play clever, nasty games with conman clichés and presumptions about the elderly in this sometimes absurdly twisty thriller.McKellen’s Roy Courtnay is an irascible, whiskery cad, Mirren’s Betty McLeish the trusting, rich widow he entraps. His slow courting of her in her genteel, suburban estate home is only part of a wide portfolio of dishonesty, aided by his avuncular partner in crime Vincent (Jim Carter), a fake lawyer ever ready with dummy investment papers, whether enticing a widow over cream teas, or luring a businessman Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The Chineke! Orchestra, founded by double-bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku as the first majority BME orchestra in the UK, is heading off this week on a substantial European tour, which began last night at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Since the organisation has a strong track record in promoting rare music by composers of colour, this looked at first like a relatively conservative programme, topped and tailed with Weber’s Oberon Overture and Brahms’s Second Symphony. But the gem of the evening was the Violin Concerto by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor - and if you have heard it and puzzled over why it, too, is Read more ...