Birmingham
Kieron Tyler
Bloopy Seventies synths. Glitter Band drums. The fuzz guitar of Sweet’s “Blockbuster”. Eighties electro-robot-pop. New wave chug. The hot dog streets of West Bromwich. Morning TV. Bailiffs at the door, The secularisation of institutions and the decline of civic pride. Mickie Most and his plastic pop. These then, are amongst the contents of the new tablet handed down by former Felt leader, perennial underdog and über-cult figure Lawrence. Bizarre and enjoyable, it’s disquieting too. “Hello, I’m Lawrence and I’m taking over” he declares colourlessly.A series of close-typed, dense paragraphs Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Bob Dylan talked, after his 1966 motorcycle crash, about having to learn to do consciously what he once did instinctively. That quote kept popping into my head as I listened to One Day I’m Going to Soar, the fourth Dexys album and their first for 27 years. On the surface everything seems to be in its right place: the vigorous horns, the virile fiddles. Old hands “Big” Jim Paterson, Mick Talbot and Pete Williams are back on board, aiding and abetting Kevin Rowland’s eccentric yelp, rambling monologues, wry humour and lacerating self-doubt. But somehow it doesn't quite add up.The primary Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Ask any young composer in this country who is the most important figure in modern British music, and the answer is likely to come back quick and sharp: Oliver Knussen. Himself a composer of dazzling brilliance when he gets round to it, and a conductor who gets far too much work for the peace of mind of those who want him to write more music, Knussen has also for years been a kind of guru figure to generations of young and not-so-young composers, sacrificing his own creative time and energy in their interests, advising, promoting, performing.At 60, after a spell of poor health and visibly in Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It's hard to remember sometimes, as you hum along to the singalong refrains and soaring choruses of their relative hits such as "Trains to Brazil" or "Get Over It", that Guillemots have never been a pop band. Rather, the four-piece have always provided the musical manifestations of some of the more deranged ideas flitting through fabulously named frontman Fyfe Dangerfield's head at any given time. Songs that seem charming enough on the surface reveal more with every listen, whether it's the clever instrumentation or the lyrical flights of fancy or - as early as the band's debut - the 11- Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There was a lovely narrative to last night's CBSO concert. The muggy oppressiveness of Britten's Four Sea Interludes (and Passacaglia) appeared somehow explained by Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, then dissolved by the love letters that were the Strauss songs and then finally set free - psychologically and orchestrally - in Debussy's La Mer. Parallel to this, the great German tenor Jonas Kaufmann was being washed out to sea; his Mahler and Strauss songs were being lapped at from both directions by Debussy and Britten's portraits of the salty waters. Technically Kaufmann was anything but at Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There must be a protest movement going on in Birmingham’s ballet against London’s - if down south they insist on Kenneth MacMillan’s box-office blasters, so in the Midlands it’s Frederick Ashton’s more fragile work that reigns. BRB director David Bintley’s northern chip on the shoulder has its uses, and especially this spring. After his hugely entertaining Hobson’s Choice last week, here is a double bill of Antiques Roadshow Ashton that it's unlikely today's Royal Ballet (trying so consciously to be hip) would think of rediscovering.Its problem, soberly, is that both pieces are difficult to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's a rare ballet where the culmination you hope for is that the young guy gets to take over the business (an idea for a Murdoch ballet there, one day?). David Bintley's Hobson's Choice is surely his very best work, unmitigated pleasure for the spectator - an innocent, beautifully executed period comedy full of atmosphere, good characters, a perfect emotional arc and a perfectly brilliant musical score. None of this is simple to carry off.Made in 1989 for Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet - as Birmingham Royal Ballet used to be - it takes Harold Brighouse's 1915 play, and possibly more famously Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Birmingham Royal Ballet has outlined its 2012-13 season for its home base in Birmingham, indicating a shrunken repertoire due to subsidy cuts, but with a new full-length family ballet by David Bintley, Aladdin.The season will celebrate the art of storytelling, says the company, and some performances will have early starts to pitch at families. Only one mixed bill is announced, attesting to the damage done to the broader performance repertoire by the swingeing cuts in grant.Touring dates and venues will be added. Autumn-Winter 2012 19-22 September, Swan Lake, The Lowry, Salford. Sir Read more ...
judith.flanders
It may be that there is no sunnier place than Ashton’s La fille mal gardée. Certainly there is no sunnier ballet. It speaks not of great drama, nor ecstasy, but instead of gentle happiness, of quiet content and loving kindness. Not, one might think, the stuff of great art. But one would be – one is – wrong, and Ashton is happy to set us straight.The standard tale of a girl whose mother wants her to marry a rich simpleton, and how she instead gets her way and marries a simple farmer, is not the point. Ashton takes this and embroiders it with magic – a dash of music hall, a splash of folk Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Birmingham Royal Ballet’s star Robert Parker has been a ballet dancer and a trainee pilot - and is now to become artistic director of Elmhurst Ballet School in Birmingham, one of the two most important ballet schools in Britain.Known as “nuclear” Robert as a child, the tall, blond dancer has long been the major attraction of BRB for his combination of dynamic dancing and characterful dramatic acting, in an enormous range from classical leads such as Romeo and Prince Siegfried to contemporary ballets by Twyla Tharp and Kim Brandstrup and ballet-drama heros such as King Arthur and Cyrano., two Read more ...
Russ Coffey
This site has never acknowledged a distinction between high and popular culture. Nor, it seems, does the city of Birmingham. Currently bidding for UK City of Culture 2013, it is also promoting itself as the "Home of (Heavy) Metal". This summer, at various locations across the Black Country, a four-month festival looks at the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and celebrates the people who inspired him to “bark at the moon”. Surrounded by guitars, leather and fans' metalobilia in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, theartsdesk caught up with Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi to find out what it’s all Read more ...