Kings Place
Rachel Halliburton
To hear Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason speaking live is to hear a woman who very much recognises that her lifelong mission to challenge the perception of who should play classical music is ongoing. Though she has given birth to seven children who have gone on to be stand out classical musicians, she knows that there are still those who deny them the recognition they deserve because of the colour of their skin.The complete failure of certain individuals to understand Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s statement last year that "Rule, Britannia!" at the Proms – with its references to slavery – might make people Read more ...
David Nice
Never mind the permutations (anything up to eight hands on the two pianos); feel the unwavering quality of the eight pianists and the 13 works, each perfect in their proper place across two and a half hours of more or less continuous music. Above all, applaud the artistic directors of the London Piano Festival, Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen, for choosing so unerringly how and with whom to celebrate this spectacular 10th anniversary. Given the even distribution of superb pianism and compelling repertoire, it will merely be a matter of personal preference what came out tops for various Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night’s concert at Kings Place was a programme of contemporary pieces – including several premieres – by horn superstar Ben Goldscheider and string quartet Brother Tree Sound, “curated”, as the current lingo has it, by young composer Ben Nobuto, whose high-spirited and invigorating music finished things on a high.There were some pieces for horn plus quartet – first violinist Anna de Bruin’s intricately-textured Aurea, John Croft’s beguiling Voi sete la mia stella and Nobuto’s finale Hope Spiral – alongside others for strings along, some garlanded with Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Songlines Encounters is your round-the-world ticket to great world music and performances, a chance to travel widely in music and culture without the burden of check-ins, passport control, flight delays, or transfers. All you need do is get to Kings Place over this weekend for a festival of world music that encompasses Mali in West Africa, with Rokia Kone from the striking and sensational Amazones d’Afrique on Friday night’s menu, paired in Hall 2 with Kurdish-Anatolian singer Olcay Bahir, who mixes her own songs with Anatolian folk songs.To open on Thursday, audiences had a pairing of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Memorably described by Gramophone magazine as the “new kids on the classical block…with lavish pocket money”, Apple’s London-based label Platoon is busy cementing its street cred with an ongoing concert series at Kings Place.If BIS (bought by Apple in 2024) remain the old-school, traditionalist offering, then Platoon are the edgy, digital younger sibling. So far the roster includes violinist Daniel Pioro, rising violin star Stella Chen, conductor Dalia Stasevska and now the Grammy-winning American Attacca String Quartet, whose new recording of the Ravel String Quartet put them in the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
On the first date of a 17-concert tour that had its preview at Celtic Connections in January, Across the Evening Sky begins with the liminal, predatory dangers of associating in any way with the sly “Reynardine”, with Matt Robinson on piano and electronic keyboards and Alec Bowman-Clarke’s bass evoking the twilit murk of the magical faerie song, recorded by Sandy on Fairport’s Liege & Lief.From that opening performance, Clarke had the room, the charm was cast, her own distinctive voice and stylings merging with Sandy’s originals – filling the vessel but in doing so assuming her own shape Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just now, music about survival, transcendence and the afterlife may have a special resonance for the BBC Singers. After all, the supremely versatile century-old chamber choir has endured its own near-death experience – at the hands of the BBC top brass who, in 2023, planned to axe them.At Kings Place, with the Aurora Orchestra and its conductor Nicholas Collon, the Singers made a typically refined and resourceful contribution to a concert in the venue “Earth Unwrapped” strand. Sense and spirit merged in a programme that began with three a cappella numbers and concluded with the 1893, chamber- Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
What better way to start a season about the Earth than by looking back on it from an astronaut’s perspective? At a time when the activities of assorted billionaires and emerging superpowers are making the space race topical again, it feels more than appropriate for Kings Place to begin its Earth Unwrapped programme with Terry Riley’s Sun Rings.As one of the deities of minimalism and experimental music, Riley was an obvious choice when NASA was looking for a composer to celebrate 25 years since the launch of the Voyager space programme. His ten-part composition – liberally punctuated with high Read more ...
mark.kidel
As the Middle East continues to fragment in hate and horror, a tragic unfolding of events with roots reaching back to the middle of the last century, any sign of love and deeply felt collaboration provides a welcome beacon, and signals the possibility of understanding and reconciliation.Ana Silvera (pictured below), a British Sephardi Jew with family from Izmir and Aleppo, sings songs from the Ladino tradition, the culture that accompanied the Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th Century. Saied Silbak (pictured below, right), a Palestinian oud player, draws on Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The young Elmore String Quartet, recent graduates of the Royal Northern College, made an impressive Kings Place debut last night with a programme that put music written by composers at a similarly early stage in their careers alongside another’s last work. They played with a subtlety and thoughtfulness that point them up as a group to keep an eye on.Leo Geyer (b.1992) (pictured below) is a multi-faceted musician, not just a composer/arranger but also conductor and, recently, a presenter on Radio 3. His Unfurling, receiving its premiere, was a short piece which – and how often is this Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
What a beautiful, alternative evening of Christmas music this was, ranging in tone from bleakness to transcendence – a thrilling escape from the season’s cloying commercialism to a sense of something both mysterious and profound. Powerful new commissions from Ukrainian composers including Natalia Tsupryk heightened the sense that Christmas is a time to reflect as much on redemption from cruelty and the unknown as on any status-enhancing material possession.Last year the SANSARA vocal collective won universal plaudits for their album The Waiting Sky, which traces the journey from Advent to Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottír found her work put under a strangely unforgiving lens when it was featured in Tár, the now infamous Todd Field film made in 2022 starring Cate Blanchett as a tempestuously exacting female conductor. In a scene where Lydia Tár is taking a masterclass at the Julliard, she savages a student who is conducting a string quartet playing Thorvaldsdottír’s music, saying it sounds like “tuning up”.Yet it’s part of the film’s sophisticated psychological narrative that this scene, far from condemning Thorvaldsdottír’s music, represents Tár’s divorce from the Read more ...