Venezuela
Rachel Halliburton
Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela took the Barbican by storm last night with a thrilling account of Mahler’s Third Symphony, his great exploration of the cosmic order, ascending from raw paganism to sublime transcendence. It's technically the longest symphony ever composed, and here it swept the audience through an epic journey that tilted between passages of gossamer-like intimacy and outbursts of apocalyptic rage.The orchestra is renowned for its full-blooded performances, yet yesterday evening it felt that the stakes were higher than usual for the Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Queen’s Hall isn’t going to know what has hit it after the opening weekend of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. What’s usually the festival’s demure home of chamber music – string quartets, piano trios and so on – was still recovering from Jakub Józef Orliński’s theatrics from Saturday morning, when it encountered this scorching performance of choral music from the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela (★★★★★).The Schola Cantorum’s main reason for being in Edinburgh last weekend was to take part in Golijov's La Pasión según San Marcos in the Usher Hall on Saturday evening, but Read more ...
joe.muggs
Alejandra Ghersi – Arca – is one of the most influential musicians on the planet in the last decade. Even aside from working with huge names like Björk and Kanye West, her ultra-detailed, high drama, electronic abstractions have set the pace for a legion of artists from very underground to ultra-pop. And the combination of mind-bending textural shifting in her sound, outré performance and collaborations with visual artists like the master mutants Jesse Kanda has created an archetype (Arca-type?) for a generation of queer and gender non-conforming artists who find analogies for transformation Read more ...
Gabriela Montero, Kings Place review - improvising to a Chaplin classic is the icing on a zesty cake
David Nice
As the Statue of Liberty appears in Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant, our improvising pianist proclaims “The Star-Spangled Banner”, only for it to slide dangerously. The passengers on the ship taking them to a new life are brutally cordoned by the crew; enter the same fierce bass-register tritones which made us jump out of our seats as Gabriela Montero began her recital with Prokofiev’s Sarcasms, then a whiff of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Sonata, and later, as our hero finds himself dollarless in a New York restaurant, echoes of the other Second Sonata in the programme. Prokofiev and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A young film director writes a script based on his father’s life story and invites his dad to play the part. It’s an interesting gambit, given that the son, Jorge Thielen Armand left Venezuela with his mother at the age of 15 and has not returned since. His father stayed behind, so their relationship has stalled. Can it be reignited?Mo Scarpelli’s documentary follows Armand’s attempts to make the film and, in the process, rebuild his relationship with his father. Jorge Roque Thielen agrees to play himself despite not having seen the script; but the project is fraught with difficulty since, Read more ...
Gabriela Montero
For as long as I can remember, there has been a continuous loop of original music playing in my mind. My father used to joke about my “tuyuyo” – a little bump I have on the back of my head – that it was my personal repository for music. My husband, less versed in Venezuelan colloquialisms, simply refers to it as “the iPod”.However mysterious its source, music is a constant soundtrack to my life. Since my mother first placed a toy piano in my crib when I was just seven months old, I have been playing original pieces of music with the same abandon and freedom I experience when talking or Read more ...
David Nice
Insistence was the name of the LA Phil's first game in its short but ambitious three-day Barbican residency - insistence honed to a perfect sheen and focus, but wearing, for this listener at least, some way in to the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony played in the second half. The essence was a layered, ultimately blistering performance of Varèse's ever startling Amériques sculpted with the energetic rhythmic precision at which Gustavo Dudamel excels, and rich with sensuous perspectives not easy to achieve in this flattening, amplifying hall. That would have been enough to send us home bouncing and Read more ...
David Nice
Former Royal Philharmonic Orchestra principal conductor Charles Dutoit has been exposed, to little surprise from musicians, as something of a roué whose apparent refusal to take "no" for an answer has rubbed up against the new #MeToo world. So his place in last night's concert was taken by Venezuelan Rafael Payare, not yet 40. Unfortunately it seems certain Dutoit would have captured the élan vital of Richard Strauss's Don Juan better than Payare - an accomplished soundsmith, on this evidence, but fatally uninterested in the operatic drama of Strauss's tone poems, or for that matter the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico decomposes, brine and methane are produced, and where these saline pockets collect, nothing grows. Dead creatures drop into it; live creatures that linger in it die. In this lifeless zone their bodies float preserved, a rich and dangerous larder for scavengers such as the giant mussels fringing its edges and Read more ...
David Nice
Gone, it seems, is the era of epic three-part Proms. Sunday afternoon's programme, partly billed as a children's hour, might have pleased pianist and pundit Stephen Hough, whose recent broadsheet plea for shorter concerts somewhat overdid the need (lunchtime events already cater to concertgoers in a hurry very well, and the Proms has its late-nighters too). But it left many of us wanting more, not just of Ravel in the second half but also of the distinctive Simón Bolívar earthiness, which was given free rein only in one spirited encore. Subtlety, for the most part, was the real name of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Before this concert I had never seen Gustavo Dudamel conduct, and after it I still haven’t. Because of the alignment of my seat and the piano lid, all I saw of the Venezuelan maestro was the occasional glimpse of baton or dark curly hair. So this review will not take account of any podium flamboyance there may or may not have been: my response is purely to the end result. And that end result was good, but short of great.This was the middle concert of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra’s residency at the Royal Festival Hall, which started on Thursday with an all-Stravinsky programme. The Read more ...
David Nice
So much black and red ink has been spilled about the infamous 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring that it’s easy to underestimate how radical the orchestration, at least, of its predecessor Petrushka must have sounded. It still usually comes up as fresh as poster paint. The chance to hear both scores in a single concert is rare indeed, but one thing we certainly didn’t get from Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela at the start of their latest Southbank mini-residency was the shock of the new.Now a mostly middle-aged band, the Simón Bolívars have for the Read more ...