Minimalism
Minimalism Changed My Life: Tones, Drones and Arpeggios, QEH review - from Cage and Reich to 'Tubular Bells'Monday, 30 September 2019
Charles Hazlewood's 2018 two-parter for BBC Four, Tones, Drones and Arpeggios: The Magic of Minimalism explored work by some of the great composers of the genre Hazlewood dubs as “last big idea in classical music”, which emerged from the experiments... Read more... |
10 Questions for conductor Charles HazlewoodMonday, 23 September 2019
Charles Hazlewood (b. 1966) has worked across the gamut of orchestral music, his career showcasing the multitude of ways it can be perceived and enjoyed. Recently he has reengaged with his longstanding love of minimalist music, first via his two BBC... Read more... |
Terry Riley & Gyan Riley, The Old Market, Hove review - gently pleasing evening of improvisationTuesday, 16 April 2019
“I don’t know if I’m going to recognise any of it,” I say to my accomplice as we drain a couple of light ales amid the sea of grey beards in The Old Market’s bar. “I don’t think they’ll play the hits,” he replies, deadpan, “but don’t worry, there... Read more... |
Akhnaten, English National Opera review - still a mesmerising spectacleTuesday, 12 February 2019
You start off fighting it. Those arpeggios, the insistent reduction, simplification, repetition, the amplification of the smallest gesture into an epic. Then something happens. Somewhere among the slow-phase patterns pulsing on ear and eye, you... Read more... |
Roger Scruton: Music as an Art review - how to listen?Sunday, 19 August 2018
Hegel, Kant, David Hume, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Leibniz are all adduced, referred to, and paraphrased, and that’s just for starters. Add Rameau, Schubert, Beethoven, Benjamin Britten and the contemporary composer David Matthews (who is also a... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Max RichterSunday, 22 July 2018
When The Blue Notebooks was originally released in February 2004, it did not seem to be an album which would have the afterlife it has enjoyed. It had little context. Max Richter’s second album was his first for the 130701 label which, at that point... Read more... |
CD: Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch - ÉpoquesSunday, 08 July 2018
At its most impactful, Époques is an aural analogue to the occasions in Tarkovsky’s Stalker when the explorers of “The Zone” find their perceptions of what might be reality warped, and when there’s a growing realisation that this may be a place with... Read more... |
Ligeti Chamber Music, QEH review - inventive celebration of iconic composerSaturday, 12 May 2018
The mini-festival of György Ligeti’s music this weekend at the Queen Elizabeth Hall kicked off with a concert of chamber music that moved from a monumental first half to a second that was a delightful unbroken sequence of miniatures. Curated by the... Read more... |
Tones, Drones and Arpeggios: The Magic of Minimalism, BBC Four - brilliant appraisalMonday, 05 March 2018
By most measures, minimalism is the most successful movement in 20th-century music, certainly orchestral music. The story of its inexorable spread from a tiny offshoot of the 1950s experimentation of John Cage, which was defined and promoted by two... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Bach, Gibson, GungeSaturday, 03 March 2018
Bach: French Suites Zhu Xiao-Mei (piano) (Accentus Music)The sheer perfection of Bach’s output can be unsettling, and faintly terrifying. So it's pleasing to find a musician who's so keen to highlight his friendlier, cuddlier side. Zhu Xiao-Mei... Read more... |
CD: GoGo Penguin - A Humdrum StarMonday, 05 February 2018
They look like a jazz trio, they’re signed to Miles Davis’s label, and in short passages they make the involved and intimate sound we associate with one of the iconic jazz ensembles. But listen to the riotously popular Manchester contemporary fusion... Read more... |
I, Object review - this operatic double-bill delivers just a single hitSaturday, 02 December 2017
A comma divides the title of this opera double-bill in two, but the works paired here (Michael Nyman’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Kate Whitley’s Unknown Position) each explore what happens when you take it away – when natural... Read more... |
