Scotland
graham.rickson
This Saturday we’ve a new recording of a famous Russian symphony played by an Italian orchestra under their London-based principal conductor. There’s a rare Shakespearean opera written in the 1950s by a Swiss master using a German text. And a Scottish composer celebrates his 60th birthday with an invigorating collection of piano and chamber works.Rory Boyle: Music for Solo Piano, Phaethon’s Dancing Lesson
James Willshire (piano), Bartholdy Trio (Delphian)
As a 12-year-old I sang in the first performance of Scottish composer Rory Boyle’s children’s opera Alfege. Dressed in grey tights and Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Has the King of Knotty Ash been usurped? I saw him embrace Shakespeare and play Malvolio here just 40 years ago. I’m talking about Ken Dodd, more used to playing the fool. Now, another upstart from Knotty Ash is even more ambitiously playing the King of Scotland. I’m talking about David Morrissey. No fool he. In Macbeth he returns to the cradle of his birth as a fledgling actor to grace the last production at the Liverpool Everyman before it closes for a two-year £28 million redevelopment.It all started for Morrissey when he turned up on spec at the Hope Street box office 25 years ago – and Read more ...
david.cheal
This is the sound of a band who want to be big. Really big. Produced by Flood (The Killers, U2 etc) and recorded in California, the second outing from Scotland’s Glasvegas bursts with epic widescreen soundscapes, its chiming guitars designed to shimmer around arenas and festivals, its throbbing, pulsing synths adding depth and drama, the heavily treated voice of James Allan pleading and hollering.Whereas last time around they sounded like The Jesus and Mary Chain, now they sound a bit like The Killers (especially on “Euphoria Take My Hand”) or like U2 (especially on “Dream Dream Dreaming”).It Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The name King Creosote conjures up an image of an old jazz player, lips cracked from cigarettes smoked and horns played. In actual fact it’s the stage name of Kenny Anderson, a prolific Scottish folk and indie singer with more than a passing resemblance to Bill Oddie. On recent form there’s every chance that he may be about to become best known for his work with indie supergroup The Burns Unit. But he’s also made more than 40 albums over 20 years, and Diamond Mine is a project where he’s looked back over and re-imagined some of the less obvious moments of his back catalogue.It’s the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
"I’m very hard to categorise,” says John Byrne (b 1940), tugging at his magnificent moustache. A restless, defiant, shape-shifting polymath who was an exponent of multimedia long before computers ruled the world, Byrne's singular career is perhaps doomed to gentle underappreciation simply because he can do so much so well. “If you’re hard to categorise they don’t like that." He peers into his coffee as though looking for something. "Whoever 'they' are.”Raised in the “Dickensian” gloom of Paisley’s Ferguslie Park estate in a family shaped by his mother’s severe mental illness, Byrne graduated Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Opera outside London flourishes in the hands of Opera North, Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera. In 2011 the popular hits such as Carmen, The Merry Widow and La Traviata intermingle with rarer landmarks such as From the House of the Dead, Orlando and Intermezzo. Wagner has a fine showing in the North and West from Opera North and Welsh National Opera. A true rarity is Opera North's British premiere of a Polish opera on a Gogol story, The Portrait, directed by the great David Pountney, whose wonderful Cunning Little Vixen production with the late Maria Bjørnson is revived at Scottish Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Actor/director Peter Mullan describes NEDS, his third film as director (after Orphans and The Magdalene Sisters), as “personal but not autobiographical”, although it undoubtedly draws heavily on his working-class upbringing in 1970s Glasgow. He was, like his lead character John McGill, the academically gifted younger brother of a local hard man, determined to do well at school and escape the violent life he saw around him. Their father, as in the film, was a “raping, bullying alcoholic”.Actor/director Peter Mullan describes NEDS, his third film as director (after Orphans and The Magdalene Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It’s a testament to the authenticity of the Scottish folk ethos that this band even exists. A bunch of mid-career songwriters going on a musicians' retreat, getting caught in the vibe, and deciding to form a band. It sounds like something from the Sixties. So sometimes do they, at least when Karine Polwart goes all Sandy Denny. And they half look it too, with eight of them on stage swapping vocal duties as a musical collective. And then there’s the hippy names like King Creosote and MC Soom T, which sound more jazz than folk. But despite being both experimental and folkie in their approach, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Via the Chichester Festival and acclaimed runs on Broadway and in the West End, director Rupert Goold's Macbeth has made a sizzling transition to television. Set in an anarchic, war-torn Scotland and suffused with imagery of murder, torture and Stalin-style purges, it placed Patrick Stewart's thunderous central performance in a spinning black hole of evil, into which he was remorselessly sucked as the action developed.We saw Macbeth steadily torn apart by a maelstrom of ambition, conscience and destiny, the latter revealed in regular bulletins from the flesh-crawlingly sinister Three Witches Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Primal Scream's gig last night may well have been the loudest gig theartsdesk has ever attended. Three hours after returning home, my ears are still ringing like they've never rung before. At the time I didn't notice the volume though. I was enjoying the veteran band's emphatic performance too much to realise quite how many decibels were being pumped out.The main reason for the two-night stand at Olympia was the opportunity to perform the Mercury Award-winning 1991 album Screamadelica. Before that, however, there was the small matter of a quick greatest hits set. The surrogate Stones homage " Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Scottish Ballet’s artistic director Ashley Page yesterday angrily made clear that when he leaves the company in 2012 it will be against his wishes. Last Thursday the company issued an emotionless brief statement that Page had “felt he was unable to accept” an extension to his contract, which ends after 10 years' work in 2012.Yesterday, however, Page’s agent issued a statement that he had on the contrary been eager to take a further three-to-five-year contract, but that he had felt "great disappointment" at the offer of only a single year as an interim measure while the company’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not often that a serious musician goes into the recording studio to play requests. But as the closest that classical music strays to The X Factor (unless you count Paul Potts), Nicola Benedetti has a different kind of relationship with audiences. At the age of 23, several years into a professional career which began at 17 with a hugely popular victory in the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year competition, Nicola Benedetti has released a CD which lacks an agenda or a slant. There’s no new work, no transcriptions or retrieving unknown bits and pieces from dusty archives. Instead she recorded Read more ...