RFH
Ralph Moore
The Robert Smith-curated Meltdown festival in London came to a close on Sunday night with a spectacular, concept-driven headline set by The Cure, or CUREATION 25, as the band was actually billed, presumably because of a previously contracted show at Hyde Park that's due to take place in two weeks’ time. Like Nine Inch Nails on Friday night at the same Smith-curated venue, seeing a band of this stature up close on such blistering form is a dream come true for fans, who have come far and wide to see Smith and his cohorts: bassist Simon Gallup plus Reeves Gabrels on guitar, Jason Cooper on drums Read more ...
David Nice
Live exposure to centenary composer Leonard Bernstein's anything-goes monsterpiece of 1971, as with Britten's War Requiem of the previous decade, probably shouldn't happen more than once every ten years, if only because each performance has to be truly special. It's been nearly eight since Marin Alsop last conducted and Jude Kelly directed MASS at the Southbank Centre. The new era of Barack Obama still had an early-days sheen then. No-one could have imagined when this similar-but-different spectacular was planned how its vital youth component - not just among the singers but also in an Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
How to change the way we hear Chopin and Beethoven: play Bach first. Richard Goode opened his Royal Festival Hall recital with the Partita No.6 in E minor, perhaps the most enigmatic and challenging of its siblings. Its intricate contrapuntal lines and harsh, crunching harmonies cast a long shaft of light over the rest of the programme. Without Bach, it seemed to suggest, neither of the other two composers would have written as they did.With Goode, a recital is all about the music (that might sound like stating the obvious, but one can’t guarantee it with every pianist these days). The Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain was a work of political protest when it premiered in 2000, in 2017 it’s a piece that reads more like a commentary – a disturbing musical documentary that captures nearly 20 years of escalating European tensions, suspicions and right-wing extremism. As harmonic consensus gave way last night to chattering confusion, musical certainty to a distorted multiplicity of possibilities, abstraction has rarely felt more pointed, more horribly specific.But Haas’s most famous work brings its own baggage. Hailed internationally as a contemporary masterpiece and championed Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Age is finally catching up with Maurizio Pollini. This recital was one of a series to mark the pianist’s 75th birthday, presenting Beethoven piano sonatas, music at the core of his repertoire. His legendary status was justified by these readings, his usual combination of rich, robust voicing and elegant, craggy lyricism. But the technical problems were too apparent to ignore, especially the uneven passagework and clumsy transitions. Fortunately, though, Pollini’s innate understanding of this repertoire shone through, and the playing improved as it went on, culminating in an "Appasionata" that Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Mitsuko Uchida specialises in elegant, if uncontroversial, interpretations of core Austro-German repertoire, yet she’s never predictable, and every performance is full of unexpected insights and welcome surprises. Mozart and Schumann stand at the far ends of her repertoire, and between them demonstrate what makes her playing great: In Schumann we hear subtlety of tone, gradually shifting moods and psychological depth, and in Mozart an unbridled joie de vivre, elevated, through her consummate artistry, to the highest of artistic ideals.Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C, K 545, was really just Read more ...
joe.muggs
At the Royal Festival Hall the cliché seemed complete. Milling around were white men, white men and more white men – all in their late thirties and older, most looking a little bohemian and a lot geeky, with a few of them a little more hardcore in black bomber jackets, black jeans, black trainers and black baseball caps. These were London's electronica fanboys out in force for Autechre, the duo who, second only to The Aphex Twin, epitomised the moment the rave generation went weird and disjointed, and since the mid-Nineties have explored all the sonic abstractions that technology has to offer Read more ...
peter.quinn
Following the seismic events across the pond earlier this week, an outcome which has left the rest of the world blinking in disbelief, Guy Barker’s brilliant arrangements for this year’s Jazz Voice offered much needed balm for the soul. Creativity, collective endeavour, community: humanity’s finest qualities were in evidence.Relocating to the Royal Festival Hall this year and hosted by Jay Rayner, this celebration of song announced the opening of the 2016 EFG London Jazz Festival and featured the customary jazz-related anniversaries, birthdays and milestones stretching back from 2016.Known Read more ...
David Nice
Sunlit golden mean or slightly hazy middle-of-the-road? Conductor-director Iván Fischer's fully costumed and imagined concert of The Magic Flute - or perhaps it would better have been titled Die ZauberFlute given its intelligent mix of sung German and English dialogue taken by six excellent young British-based actors - was always going to be hard pressed to match the recent, hyper-communicative English National Opera/Complicite revival.In fact, its concept shaped up rather well in comparison. But whereas ENO had at least two world-class singers in the Tamino of Allan Clayton and Lucy Crowe's Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Charles Dutoit gets the best from the Royal Philharmonic. He conducts with broad, sweeping gestures, and the orchestra responds with dramatic immediacy and vivid colours. This concert’s programme was well chosen to play to their shared strengths, and the results were impressive: colourful Respighi, muscular Dvořák and taut, compelling Stravinsky.Respighi’s Fountains of Rome opens and closes with evocations of dawn and dusk. Dutoit has little interest in miniature, fragile textures, and never ventures into the quietest dynamics. But he and the orchestra compensate with luminous colours and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Dave Gorman was probably the first comic to have embraced technology in his stand-up. Albeit, in the early days, it was using 35mm slides, hand-drawn graphs and an overhead projector, but then latterly a computer and the ever-more influential Internet and social media. And so, as is a feature at all his shows, there's a large screen on stage when I see him at the Royal Festival Hall and when he says: “I've put it on a graph” there's a loud cheer of recognition from the audience. But this isn't a show for geeks; rather a conversation piece using the Internet and technology to flesh out or Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The memories were flooding back last night. Daniel Barenboim's speech after the concert, lasting about a quarter of an hour, contained vivid recollections of his first appearance on that stage in 1956 as a 13-year-old (playing the Mozart A major Concerto with the RPO and Josef Krips). There was a welling-up of emotion as he summoned back memories of the RFH stage from his time living in London: “I remember Jacqueline...Barbirolli.” And a decade with the English Chamber Orchestra. “Don't tell anybody in the orchestra: I was learning my trade.”The speech ranged wider too. There was a story of Read more ...