contemporary classical
igor.toronyilalic
Gerald Barry's new operatic adaptation of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest delivers a number of firsts. The first opera score to contain an ostinato for smashed plates. The first orchestra to include a part for pistols and wellington boots. The first opera (that I know of) to offer the role of an aging mother to a male bass. And the first opera I've been to where I've cried with laughter.Granted: on paper it all sounds a bit Chuckle Brothers. Smashing plates, wellies, travesty roles aren't automatically funny at all. But like all the best jokes, these are not jokes. Barry doesn't Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
This has to be the only music festival I've ever been to where two vacuum cleaners were on standby in case the star performer conked out. But that's what happens when your star performer is a player piano - they seem to run on Hoover tubes. With 11 concerts and one film in two days, this celebration of American maverick Conlon Nancarrow was London's alternative marathon. One that was no less eccentric, exhausting or adrenalin-generating (though much less running-based).At the core of the weekend was a nine-concert cycle of the complete studies for player piano. As far as anyone knew, it was Read more ...
theartsdesk
Southbank Centre’s current season has included weekends devoted to three contemporary giants: Pierre Boulez, Conlon Nancarrow and George Benjamin. But it closes with a festival devoted to not to one contemporary composer but 20. The New Music 20x12 weekend, initiated by the PRS for Music Foundation, is a Olympic celebration of the range and diversity of new British composition. Indeed, the only thing all 20 pieces will have in common is that – you’ve guessed it - they will last 12 minutes.Performances will take place all over the Southbank Centre, and 14 of them will be freeSome of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I don't have many feelings about the Titanic (any more than I do about any tragedies of the distant past). I know few of the facts, I can remember nothing of the film and I have been left almost completely untouched by the centenary. Yet I am enormously grateful to have caught a Barbican performance of The Sinking of the Titanic, Gavin Bryars' beautiful musical meditation on the event. The reason why this hour-long rumination works so well is that it does not rely on the emotional power of the catastrophe to generate its own emotional power. The debris of sounds that Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I find it hard to square what I know about composer Judith Weir with what happened last night. In one corner lies her 30-year output of songs, choral pieces and operas - as engaging and beguiling an oeuvre as that of any living composer's. I think of her waggish song cycle King Harald's Saga or her playful opera A Night at the Chinese Opera. And then I think of the UK premiere of Miss Fortune at the Royal Opera last night - the inertness of the music, the superficiality of the story, the platitudes and, most bafflingly, the racism - and I wonder, what has happened to Judith Weir?If one Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you need music for a ceremonial occasion, Greek composer Vangelis is your man. He has, after all, even had a small planet named after him, and in 2001, NASA used his piece Mythodea as the theme for its Mars Odyssey mission. The following year, FIFA hired Vangelis to concoct the official anthem for the 2002 World Cup. In 2004, he draped aural grandiosity across Oliver Stone's implausible Alexander. Who better, then, to write a celebratory opus for the grand opening of the open-air Katara Amphitheatre in Doha, in the unfeasibly wealthy Gulf state of Qatar. "Vangelis to open Katara Read more ...
judith.flanders
It is unusual in art for collaborators to be of equal star-wattage. The pairing of Benjamin Britten and WH Auden was one such. Another, much longer-lasting, was Stravinsky and Balanchine, a partnership of equals that endured for nearly half a century. More recently, Antony Gormley has worked with both Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, to great effect. Can Turnage, McGregor and Wallinger replicate these? This has been the question.The answer is, unequivocally, yes. Wallinger took the lead, presenting a rich brew of possible starting points, which included the idea of the “window” created by Read more ...
mark.kidel
Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths), composed in 1956, is, in many ways, the mother of all electronic music. I can remember discovering it in the 1960s, before I had acquired my first pair of Koss headphones, lying on the floor, strategically placed between two speakers, my ears opened by the copious ingestion of some red Lebanese. The combination of electronically treated live voices with purely synthetic sounds, so much a commonplace today, was then strikingly new. Along with his later pieces Kontakte and Mikrophonie, the German pioneer blazed a trail which is till Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This weekend’s three-day Minimalism festival at Kings Place comes to an end tonight looking at the cross-over between rock and new music in New York in the Seventies. It seems to me that the collision between popular and high-art music produced some of the most dynamic movements of the 20th century, not only in New York.In the 1920s, Paris had wildly original performances like Parade, with jazzy music by Erik Satie, design by Jean Cocteau and costumes (including dressing people up as skyscrapers) by Pablo Picasso, commissioned by the great ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev. Then there was Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There are many ways of breathing new life into Beethoven. Carlos Kleiber used to do it through imagery. He once famously asked his Viennese double basses to play like monkeys during a rehearsal of Beethoven's Seventh. Riccardo Chailly's tactic for his Barbican Beethoven cycle with the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra appears to have been to become, if not monkeyish, then at least a bit of a mischievous teenager. Consequently, his first concert saw him throw out the Classical niceties and fill the hall with impish dash and boyish extremes.Beethoven's Second Symphony gained in stature. With a beefy Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
William Glock once claimed that Pierre Boulez could literally vomit at music he believed to be substandard. I wonder what he would have made of my friend, who fled at the interval of the opening concert of the Southbank festival on Friday blaming Boulez's Domaines for setting off a panic attack. Her physical response was certainly a welcome corrective to the nonchalance with which the critical world increasingly greets Boulez's language, many of whom still insist that the days of serialism provoking anger or revulsion are in the distant past. Boulez can still upset. He even upset me a Read more ...