Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
Paris, Vienna, Rome – all have their operatic homages. But London (and I mean real London, not the slightly-grey Italy of Donizetti’s Tudor Queens) only rarely makes it into the opera house. Curiously, on the rare occasions it does, it’s the seedy side of things that’s very much at the fore in The Beggar’s Opera and, of course, the Hogarth-inspired The Rake’s Progress.The city is the touchstone for any staging of the Stravinsky, telling the audience where on the dial between fairytale and morality play we’re going to fall. In Frederic Wake-Walker’s new production for the Royal Academy of Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
On April Fool’s Day, in 1978, the godmother of American punk, Patti Smith, jumped offstage at the Rainbow Theatre in London halfway through a version of “The Kids Are Alright” and started dancing in the crowd. Her vertiginous feat was also a leap of the imagination, a typical punk act that seemed to collapse the distance between performer and audience.The kids were definitely all right with this sudden unexpected proximity to their idol – and I can say that because I was one of them. Indeed I remember being struck by the way her guitarist and collaborator Lenny Kaye seamlessly picked up the Read more ...
joe.muggs
I had high hopes for this show. After all, Eska Mtungwazi is pretty much the only singer on earth I’d go out of my way to hear sing Joni Mitchell songs.Not only does she have the necessary vocal range and control, but her own sole solo album sits exactly in the right intersection of folk, jazz and experimental songwriting to suggest she’s got the stylistic fluidity to carry it off. And she’s an amazing performer. She may have only made that one album in 2015, but her work with everyone from Grace Jones and UNKLE to Tony Allen and Matthew Herbert over many years has demonstrated that she’s one Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Leif Ove Andsnes has a distinctive voice at the piano; clear, controlled and powerful. He sits upright; his body barely moves, and his head sways gently to the melodies. But he never loses himself in the music, he is always in control.Andsnes is a player of considerable power, especially as it all comes from the forearms, and he really engages with the mechanics of the instrument, exploiting all its physical properties, from the richness of quiet bass lines to the fiery fervour of top-register ostinatos. It is a sound that requires rhythm and focus, and the five composers he presented at the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There are moments when a very great jazz musician makes her or his ideas flow naturally, unstoppably and with complete conviction. And when one is in a tiny venue and can feel the joyous intensity with which every single person in the room is listening… there are few if any musical experiences that can match it.Yes, improvisation is by its nature that most unpredictable of crafts. Charles Mingus said that “trying to play the truth of what I am” was difficult because he was changing all the time. Pianist Keith Jarrett would complain about the pressure of having to be simultaneously both the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The Nash Ensemble’s concerts dedicated to “Beethoven and the Romantics” not only trace the flowering of the Romantic spirit in music from the Vienna of the 1800s through a continent and across the century. They also give a place at the top table for works by once-sidelined helpmeets of the movement’s giants: Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler.On Saturday night at the Wigmore Hall, Roderick Williams sang Lieder by both Mahlers as a fin-de-siècle intermission between two chamber pieces that showcased the cheerfully ebullient side of the Romantic revolution: Beethoven’s E flat Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Merrell Fankhauser's first outing on record was with Californian instrumental surf band The Impacts, who issued their sole album in 1963. Thereafter, he was the prime mover in an unbroken succession of pop, psychedelic and freak-rock bands. His first solo album arrived in 1976.Commercial success? None that was measurable. The Impacts had a track titled “Wipe Out” but The Surfaris scored a hit with a different instro with the same name. His top-notch psychedelic-era band Fapardokly were only heard as part of an album with random other Fankhauser-related tracks which was issued in early 1968. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What a fascinating work Mahler's Ninth Symphony is! Marvellous and astonishing as well, of course. But these qualities are, so to speak, written into the score (did Mahler ever compose anything not designed to astonish?).Yet the fascination comes from outside, from the music’s time and place. And for various reasons Markus Stenz's performance, in front of a surprising number of unoccupied seats in Cardiff’s St.David’s Hall, hinted strongly at this aspect while by no means downplaying the others.Powerful and profoundly engaged though it was, this was not a performance that bled visibly, as so Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Life is full of coincidences and contradictions. As I was walking to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was on his feet in the House of Commons delivering yet another rebalancing of individual and collective resources. On reading a couple of fine essays in the excellent programme, I saw the acknowledgement of the production’s sponsor, Pragnell.The first item that appears on the jeweller’s website is a pair of earrings retailing at an eye-watering £71,500. Which is to say that the inequalities that fired Charles Dickens’ anger in the 1840s are still with us in the Read more ...
David Nice
David Hill, long-term driving force of the Bach Choir which Vaughan Williams sang in for 18 years before becoming its music director in 1921, claims VW as “a quintessentially English composer”.That was rather less the case in Thursday night's choice of works gilded by the Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall. The Overture to The Wasps is influenced by French and Russian examples, the early Swinburne setting The Garden of Proserpine offers a kind of late-romantic lingua franca, and, sea shanties apart, A Sea Symphony unfurls what its chosen genius Walt Whitman calls “a pennant universal”. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
First off, I must confess that fibre or textile art makes me queasy. I don’t know why, but all that threading, knotting, twisting, coiling and winding gives me the creeps. So it’s all the more extraordinary that I was blown away by Magdalena Abakanowicz’s huge woven sculptures.Scale is the key; the Polish artist did nothing by halves. Dominating the central space of her exhibition are ten magnificent forms (main picture) that hang from the ceiling to create a forest of darkly intriguing presences. Made from rope, sisal and horsehair died black or rich brown, they are reminiscent of hollowed Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Was it lockdown that did it? Forcing filmmakers to sit at home, contemplate their lives, and conclude that just as soon as the masks came off, it was time to shine a light on their youth?Since Covid struck, we’ve seen Kenneth Branagh’s growing-up-in-the-Troubles memoir Belfast, Richard Linklater’s nostalgic animation Apollo 10 1/2 : A Space Age Childhood, and The Souvenir Part II, in which Joanna Hogg mines her film student days yet again.There's also Charlotte Wells’s superb debut Aftersun that looks back from a grown daughter's perspective on a Turkish package Read more ...