RFH
Jenny Gilbert
Intimacy isn’t everything, but there’s nothing like seeing dance live and up close. A good seat in a large theatre will give you the whole stage picture but lose the detail. Lost too will be that quasi-visceral connection with the movement.A fascinating academic study found that the brains of people watching dance, presuming they are paying attention and not checking their phones, transmit messages to the appropriate muscles as if to prompt a sympathetic mirror dance. We don’t generally act on these messages (imagine the scenes if we did) but subliminally they are there, urging our emotional Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is a great deal of sense in transposing electronic music to a symphony orchestra. However beautifully crafted, imaginatively constructed, and creatively programmed, the sounds that come out of synthesisers and other digital tools lack the knife-edge fallibility of music that is produced with the hand or the human breath. Brian Eno’s concert with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic provides compelling evidence that his compositions reveal more of their essence when taken on a trip into the world of strings, brass and other wind instruments, and the chance-prone reality of human moods and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It all ended in great style, the 20th edition of The Transatlantic Sessions which closed out its tour at London’s Southbank Centre on Saturday. The line-up of musicians is, of course, an embarras de richesse: a house band led by Aly Bain, master fiddler and Scottish icon, and Jerry Douglas, dobro and steel guitar maestro, a Nashville legend whose mantelpiece bears the weight of 14 Grammys.They were joined by the cream of Anglo-American music-making – John Doyle, Phil Cunningham, James Mackintosh and John McCusker among others – each given their moment in the spotlight but mostly content just Read more ...
Mason Bates
What do Beethoven and Pink Floyd have in common?Narrative – ingeniously animated by music.From the Ninth Symphony to The Wall, narrative music has brought a new dimension to the forms and genres it has touched.Musical storytelling is on my mind this month as the London Philharmonic Orchestra performs Liquid Interface, my first large-scale exploration of musical narrative in the form of a “water symphony”. Premiered at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2007, the work features watery orchestral textures and electronic sounds that range from field recordings of glaciers calving, to Read more ...
peter.quinn
A celebration of that most extraordinary instrument, the human voice, this year’s edition of Jazz Voice – which gladly welcomed back a live audience and a full-strength EFG London Jazz Festival Orchestra – ranged from music of intimate delicacy to stunning virtuosity. Across two separate sets, eight singularly gifted artists showcased their distinctive storytelling gifts, enveloped by Guy Barker’s richly detailed arrangements.Georgia Cécile kickstarted proceedings in impressive style with “The Month Of May” from her all-original debut album – recently nominated in this year’s Scottish Jazz Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
During the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in London earlier this year, a black man named Patrick Hutchinson hoisted over his shoulder an injured white man from the counter-protest of the English Defence League and carried him to safety. The photographs made headlines. The incident took place just outside the artists’ entrance of the Royal Festival Hall. As part of the Black Legacies series for Black History Month, the Chineke! Orchestra - inside the hall, if without an audience beyond a select few - paid tribute to Hutchinson’s selflessness with the world premiere of a new work, Read more ...
Ellie Porter
Nile Rodgers, the beaming, beret-sporting curator of this year’s splendidly eclectic Meltdown, strolls on to the Royal Festival Hall stage tonight to introduce his “dearest friend in the world”. The appearance of the CHIC maestro is not entirely unexpected given that he was, earlier this evening, at an event across the way in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, but it’s still a delight. And when Johnny Marr makes his entrance, he greets Rodgers with a powerful hug that shows the feeling’s mutual (he did name his son Nile in Rodgers’ honour, after all).A compact, tanned figure in black bomber jacket, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There is every reason to celebrate Nile Rodgers. For his contribution to music as arranger, producer and performer over more than four decades. And also not least because he’s still around and still performing: he has, after all, pulled through after two bouts of serious cancer in 2010 and 2017. The twenty-sixth annual Meltdown Festival on the Southbank, which he is curating, seems a very good way to do him justice.The festival started on Saturday night with him doing a fascinating talk/Q&A, followed by a 90-minute set from the current Chic line-up. These were both sessions which put the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A Broadway show as melodically haunting and sophisticated as it is niche, The Light in the Piazza has taken its own bittersweet time getting to London. A separate European premiere in 2009 at Leicester's Curve Theatre whetted the local appetite for a show that won six Tony Awards in 2005 but is far from standard musical fare. And here it finally is in the capital, albeit for 20 performances only in a full production, directed by Daniel Evans within the unexpected confines of the Royal Festival Hall. The concert setting grants pole position to Adam Guettel's score and to the distinguished, if Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
What happens on the stage of Stockhausen’s first opera would fill a book – quite a bad novel – but the plot is simple enough. Michael grows up with a domineering, game-hunting father and mentally unstable mother; discovers sex; passes his exams; travels the globe and finds his calling in life as a visionary and saviour.Premiered in 1981 and last seen in London in 1985, this skimpily veiled autobiography launched a cycle of seven music dramas, one for every day of the week and each of them reinventing from scratch what we think of as opera. The brassy Greeting in the foyer of the Royal Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The last time Sergio Mendes, the Brazilian bossa nova legend, played at the Royal Festival Hall was in 1980 when he opened for Frank Sinatra. He shakes his head in wonder at the memory, though it’s not so long ago in the scheme of things – his career started in the late 1950s.The audience is an age-spanning mix: aficionados of his Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66 LPs from the Sixties and Seventies as well as fans of the recent Timeless and Encanto albums, on which he’s reinterpreted his songs with musicians like the Black Eyed Peas, Erykah Badu, India.Arie, Fergie and John Legend. Mendes has Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Great conductors, like efficient auto engines, apply a lot of torque – they can use a little energy to achieve great surges of movement. Now aged 91, the American-born Swedish maestro Herbert Blomstedt sometimes hardly seems to raise his baton-free hands. His feet, meanwhile, remain more or less immobile. Yet, like some highly-geared sports car, last night the Philharmonia zoomed, boomed or swerved at the merest distant kiss of his fingertips.Quietly but completely in command for the second of his Royal Festival Hall Concerts with the orchestra, Blomstedt shares with his fellow- Read more ...