folk music
Liz Thomson
What adjectives best describe a performance of The Ballads of Child Migration? None of those you’d normally expect to see applied to an evening of superlative music-making, for the song cycle chronicles the deprivations suffered by child migrants sent from Britain over the course of one hundred years. Mostly they were sent to Australia, poor children in need of a loving home and an education who were used as slave farm labour. Some were also sent to New Zealand, others to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and a smaller number to Canada, where they fared somewhat better. More than 100,000 Read more ...
Liz Thomson
What to make of The Simon & Garfunkel Story, which began a week-long residency at London’s Vaudeville Theatre last night and which tours in the new year? A success “from Sydney to Seattle” apparently, with Elaine Paige having called it “amazing” and various regional newspapers offering superlatives. The programme proclaims it (with idiosyncratic use of upper case), "The World's biggest and most successful Simon & Garfunkel Theatre Show". Is there competition?The singing is pretty classy, Sam O’Hanlon as Simon and Charles Blyth as Garfunkel producing evocative close harmony, though Read more ...
graham.rickson
Josquin: Missa Gaudeamus, Missa L’ami Baudichon The Tallis Scholars/Peter Phillips (Gimell)That music composed in the 14th and 15th centuries can be enjoyed and performed today is mind-boggling. As is looking at one of Josquin des Préz’s manuscripts, close enough to conventional modern notation for even a hick like me to get an inkling of what the music might sound like. This latest Tallis Scholars release features two contrasting Masses, the mature Missa Gaudemas’s intensity set against the earlier, breezier Missa L’ami Baudichon. Peter Phillips has his three tenors sing the plainchant Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The young Dublin folk trio fuse vocal harmonies with superb acoustic musicianship, primarily on cello, fiddle and Nyckelharpa. They bring together Irish and Nordic – specifically Finnish – folk traditions, building them to dizzying heights on a foundation of acoustic drones and group interplay. The trio brought their second album, Starfall, to the Southbank for the last date of a UK tour on Wednesday night. Fresh from touring their original score for Swan Lake with Teac Damsa dance troupe, they’ve also performed with The National and headlined The Gloaming fiddler Martin Hayes’ Masters Read more ...
theartsdesk
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why. Baxter Dury, Etienne de Crécy and Delilah Holliday - B.E.D. ★★★★★ A small but perfectly sleazy work of sweary, cynical brillianceBob Dylan - More Blood, More Tracks ★★★★★ The fourteenth volume in the Bootleg Series is a keeperBrad Mehldau Trio - Seymour Reads the Constitution! ★★★★★ Prolific improvising pianist creates the apotheosis of the piano trioThe Breeders - All Nerve ★★★★★ Kim and Kelly Deal - plus Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Karine Polwart has a stellar track record as a pop and folk songwriter and interpreter of traditional songs, from Malinky through a solo career that has garnered six BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, including Folk Singer Of The Year 2018. Her new album follows one of the most ambitious projects of her career so far, Wind Resistance, a critically acclaimed debut work for theatre exploring midwifery, ecology, sanctuary and solidarity and recently shortlisted for Scottish Album of the Year.Laws of Motion proves more than a match, opening with the beguiling and beautiful "Ophelia", and the title track Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's a little hard to compliment KT Tunstall without seeming a little snitty. Her music is familiar, it's grown-up, it's Radio 2, it's full of lashings of Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, The Pretenders, Springsteen, Nashville, Laurel Canyon. The closest this album really comes to modernity of sound is a little dose of Goldfrapp's glam-pop-synth-rock in the odd track like “Human Being”, and even that of course is heavily indebted to the 1980s and a very classicist songwriting style. Her voice sounds older than her years, husky and lived-in, and always has done; lyrically she can touch on bitterness Read more ...
Barney Harsent
2017 was a year in which Paul Weller reminded us all why he’s a force to be reckoned with. An impressive foray into the world of soundtracks (the score to Johnny Harris’s Jawbone) was followed by A Kind Revolution, which was, for the most part, a very impressive collection. This year sees yet another album from an artist who is clearly mining a rich seam of form. True Meanings is a surprising album. Let’s get one thing out of the way at the start: it’s very, very good – that’s not the surprise. Given his recent run, you’d expect this to be the case. No, the surprise is in the timbre Read more ...
David Nice
It's Britten outside-in time for English National Opera. Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, which played host earlier this year to an only partially convincing production of his 1950s masterpiece The Turn of the Screw, would have been the perfect choice for the prelapsarian American forests of his pre-Grimes operetta/musical Paul Bunyan. Instead, Wilton's Music Hall and Jamie Manton's sometimes hazy office-clutter production between them defuse the wild-woods magic as well as much of the fun and sharpness of this often miraculous collaboration with W H Auden, furnishing the best libretto Britten Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Paul Simon is currently traversing the globe on his Farewell Tour. His new album clearly accompanies that. It’s a thoughtful look backwards wherein Simon has plucked numbers from his catalogue he feels deserve another go-round, recording them with guest artists, often from the world of jazz (notably Wynton Marsalis). It is, by its nature, somewhat self-indulgent, for there are none of his most famous songs here. These are numbers he wants to bring out of the shadows; that he reckons are worth further attention. On occasion, he’s absolutely right.The album opens with "One Man’s Ceiling is Read more ...
Prom 55, Lisztes, Lendvai, Lendvay, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer review - unity and strength
Jessica Duchen
There seems no limit to the sheer creativity that fizzes from Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra. For their second night at the Proms, packed out this time, the theme was the meeting of classical and Gypsy musical traditions. And though Fischer, talking to the audience from the podium, kindly explained that the Gypsy tradition is distinct from both Hungarian folk music and classical conservatoires, what emerged was a sense that they have far more in common than might be admitted.Nothing asserts “Hungarian Gypsy music” quite strongly as a cimbalom centre stage. In case you haven’ Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Birth and death are nowhere more entwined than in folk music, and the seventh album by Radio 2 Young Folk Award-winner Jackie Oates poignantly honours both her father and her daughter, his unexpected death just five days before the birth of Rosie. Inevitably, her life went into free-fall, “intense emotion at the joy and sadness that had struck me all at once”.The album, dedicated to her father, whose love of music inspired Oates, and to her daughter, is very English. Its title comes, of course, from Ewan MacColl’s great song, written as his life drew to a close “to turn grief and loss into Read more ...