Liverpool
Glyn Môn Hughes
If you’re going to employ tens of extra musicians for Strauss’s gigantic Alpine Symphony, it’s probably just as well that a few other "biggies" are programmed in the same concert. So it was at the Philharmonic Hall, where the Strauss shared the programme with a new orchestration of Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons as well as a selection of Canteloube’s haunting Songs of the Auvergne. All three pieces are evocations of a place or a season, so this whole concert was almost a musical novel or an orchestrated visit to an art gallery.The Strauss is a blockbuster of a work, with members of the audience Read more ...
james.woodall
Half a century ago today, on a warm August Sunday night in New York, The Beatles played a 30-minute concert in a baseball field. Home to the New York Mets the venue was called the William A Shea Municipal Stadium and had opened in spring 1964.In January 1965 Beatles manager Brian Epstein and US promoter Sid Bernstein had struck a deal to present the boys in the largest space they’d played in: it would be the first gig of the third US tour, and remained, by far, the biggest live event The Beatles ever did. It was, indeed, at the time the biggest instance of outdoor entertainment in history. A Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Things do not start well. Ian McCulloch, in trademark shades, apparently not aged a jot since Echo & the Bunnymen’s 1980s glory days, hits the stage in an offensive strop. He is performing a solo acoustic set from a chair. Beside him on a table sit a glass of water, a glass of milk and another glass with – at a guess – vodka and cranberry juice. He has the demeanour of a diva who’s been having a “party” in their changing room. Milk is good for settling an acid stomach.During his opening numbers, “Rescue” and “Villiers Terrace” from the Bunnymen’s debut album Crocodiles, he repeatedly Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
When the curtain came down on Liverpool’s year in the limelight as European Capital of Culture, back in 2008, there may have been some who thought that the party was over. Things in the city’s arts world were never going to the same, however, and much has changed since 2008, mostly for the better. But there is one institution which, though it’s been through some major changes in its lifetime, is a constant on the Liverpool scene.The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic is celebrating its 175th birthday. Philharmonic Hall has been refurbished and building work continues to provide a new performance Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
If you bought a Beatles album in the Sixties, chances are you also bought The Mersey Sound, that best-selling collection of poems by the Liverpool poets Brian Patten, Roger McGough and Adrian Henri. It was launched at the Cavern Club in 1967 to musical accompaniment. Their poems felt new, accessible and exciting. "Love is feeling cold in the back of vans," wrote Henri, "Love is a fanclub with only two fans / Love is walking holding paintstained hands / Love is /."But though he was best known as a poet, Henri was primarily a painter, as well as a collage-maker and performance artist. He taught Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
When you’re visiting someone for the first time, it’s probably just as well that you make a good impression – or else you may not be asked back. If that’s what the Carducci String Quartet was trying to do on their début visit to Liverpool, then they did all the right things. They mesmerised the audience with their performance of the second of Beethoven’s "Razumovsky" quartets, so much so that they were forced to sit down and perform an encore, which turned out to be a little irreverent Shostakovich, in the shape of the Rondo Polka.If anything, this concert – part of the Royal Liverpool Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
The knots on the purse-strings have certainly been untied at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and it was good to hear another world première in less than a week. This time it was the turn of Michael Torke, the composer of Ecstatic Orange and Yellow Pages and a prolific composer of much else besides. But why this piece? There’s a bit of a connection with “Strawberry Fields Forever”, that iconic Beatles single, and his piece Tahiti was released on CD and recorded by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s contemporary music outfit Ensemble 10/10.The new Concerto for Orchestra was a single- Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
Major change is afoot at the Liverpool Philharmonic. The new season has just opened as Philharmonic Hall has been undergoing a major refurbishment and earlier concerts during the autumn were held in the gargantuan acoustics of both cathedrals, where hearing the work being performed is difficult and where comfort for the listener comes at a premium.Work is still ongoing at the hall, with a new performance space and bar area due for completion in summer 2015 – coinciding with the 175th anniversary of the Philharmonic Society. Cosmetic changes have made the hall a much brighter place but Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Holly Johnson (b 1960) is most famous for being lead singer of 1980s pop sensation Frankie Goes to Hollywood. He was born and raised in Liverpool where, as a teenager he threw himself wholeheartedly into the city’s post-punk scene centred around the club Eric’s. During 1978 he was briefly a member of art rock oddballs Big in Japan, a unit led by local iconoclast Jayne Casey and primarily famous for containing the KLF’s Bill Drummond, Teardrop Explodes/Food Records’ Dave Balfe, Siouxsie & the Banshees’ drummer Budgie, and Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie during its short career.Johnson Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With Cilla Black still fighting fit and eminently telly-worthy at 71, it feels a bit odd to find a three-part dramatisation of her life popping up on ITV. Black apparently gave the project her blessing and has hailed Sheridan Smith's performance in the title role, but all this does is to tacitly suggest that it's a fairly harmless piece of entertainment which is unlikely to go poking about in any dark or controversial areas. Team Cilla would surely have had the scheme quashed otherwise.Thus it was no great surprise to find the first episode (of three) of Cilla bringing us a fluffy, comical, Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
A collective shiver went round the arts community of Merseyside when the Liverpool Everyman announced that it was to be razed to the ground before rising again from the ashes like the theatrical phoenix of the region. And now, a little more than two years after the original theatre closed amidst much breast-beating, the Everyman is back, and with a spanking new production of Twelfth Night that constitutes a national event. The new theatre is light, airy, and accessible, and a massive asset to the creative hub that is Hope Street. And Gemma Bodinetz's way with Shakespeare's timeless comedy of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This progressively darkening Liverpool love story centres on scenes of sadomasochistic sex. Its 90 minutes divide neatly after 45, when Kelly (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) wrecks her relationship with Victor (Julian Morris) by carving his back with broken glass. But Kieran Evans’ feature debut is mostly gentler and sadder than that.The violence Kelly brings into the bedroom after she meets Victor at a club intensifies sex as a place of dangerous refuge from the outside world’s storms. When Kelly goes to her erratic mum’s for tea, she finds her violent ex-boyfriend there too; Victor’s happy-go- Read more ...