21st century
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bristol Old VicSaturday, 16 March 2013
The thing about puppets, as those who have handled them know all too well, is that they take over. They have a life of their own. This is all fine and good as long as the puppet-masters don’t get swamped by the magical power of supposedly inanimate... Read more... |
Pereira, LA Phil New Music Group, Dudamel, Adams, Barbican HallFriday, 15 March 2013
For finding new popes as much as for hunting down new music, looking to the ends of the earth seems a fruitful route to take. Last night saw the start of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Barbican residency with their principal conductor, Gustavo... Read more... |
David Bowie: The Next Day reviewedWednesday, 27 February 2013
“Stars are never sleeping, dead ones and the living” sings David Bowie on the “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)”, The Next Day’s third track. He could have been singing about himself. Having apparently hibernated for a decade after heart surgery, his... Read more... |
CD: Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer - Child BalladsSunday, 17 February 2013
Anaïs Mitchell is one of America’s leading new folk singers, a protégée of Ani di Franco. She is a poet steeped in the archetypes of Greek mythology, old stories that she has evoked in a contemporary setting, not least in her re-telling of the... Read more... |
Interview: Artist Richard WentworthThursday, 14 February 2013
Richard Wentworth is the eminence not-so-grise of British contemporary art. The perpetually youthful sculptor’s activities span an extraordinary range of eras and ideas: serving as a teenage assistant to Henry Moore in the Sixties; building sets for... Read more... |
Meow Meow's Little Match Girl, Queen Elizabeth HallThursday, 20 December 2012
“How I do love a steely sting in my fairytale ending,” croons Meow Meow, eyes glinting even more brilliantly than her eyeshadow. When she says “sting” a whole army of scorpions couldn’t equal her venom. As the title of this veteran “kamikaze cabaret... Read more... |
CD: The Hot 8 Brass Band - The Life & Times Of...Tuesday, 06 November 2012
It's sad, isn't it, that we still live in a world where the more something sounds like a great party, the less “serious” it is considered? Think about how much deep meaning is attached by how many to, say, the portentous mitherings of Thom Yorke,... Read more... |
En Atendant, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas, Sadler’s WellsTuesday, 06 November 2012
No one ever accused of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker of thinking small. Or not thinking, for that matter. Her international career began with a bang, when with only her second work she created Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. And Reich... Read more... |
Weltethos: CBSO, Gardner, Royal Festival HallMonday, 08 October 2012
The quest for the spiritual in the musical has been the dominant preoccupation of Jonathan Harvey’s since his earliest works. Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy has been an acknowledged influence on the composer, who has made a career of exploring what... Read more... |
CircumstanceFriday, 24 August 2012
Recent Iranian cinema has seen the best of times - and the worst of times. From the 1990s onwards the phenomenon of the "Iranian New Wave" has captured worldwide festival attention, with directors like Abbas Kiarostami, and father and daughter pair... Read more... |
CD: Cut the World - Antony & the JohnsonsSunday, 05 August 2012
Antony & the Johnsons’ melancholy songs of love and loss, steeped in a contemporary classical aesthetic, lend themselves to the full orchestral treatment. There is also something theatrical about the singer’s delivery, not so much high opera... Read more... |
CD: Pavel Novák - 24 Preludes and FuguesSunday, 11 September 2011
Pavel Novák is a composer I know something about because he has been much played by the Schubert Ensemble, who were for a time resident at Cardiff University, where I teach. But broadly speaking his music is virtually unknown in the UK. When William... Read more... |
