21st century
Peter Quantrill
How can an orchestra perform the music of the future? This was the question posed by Francois-Xavier Roth, congenial maestro and charming educator, as the standard concerto for platform arrangers played out behind him on the floor of LSO St Luke’s. Roth had just offered one confident answer to the question, with the first performance of Dr Glaser’s Experiment by Darren Bloom.Californian-born in 1982 but long resident in the UK, Bloom made use of both the performing space and the virtuosity of the LSO. Radiating out from a core of bass and percussion were pairs of solo and duo winds and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What a load of balls. No, seriously. Globes, orbs, moons, suns, juggling balls, beach balls, er balls balls: if it’s spherical and pregnant with symbolism then you’re bound to find it somewhere on the props table for English National Opera’s Akhnaten. At the centre of Phelim McDermott’s new production of Philip Glass’s opera is a troupe of jugglers. If that idea appals you it’s worth suppressing your doubts, because it turns out that the greatest trick on display in this mesmerising show isn’t ball skills at all, it’s conjuring – dramatic sleight of hand of the most sophisticated, bewitching Read more ...
Kelly Grovier
The back cover of my book makes a big claim. “This book dares”, it says, “to predict the 100 most significant works of art made since the 1990s.” Although the tagline is an entirely accurate description of what I attempt to accomplish in my study of contemporary art, the phrase “dares to predict” has always made me a little anxious. It seems to suggest that the act of forecasting or foreseeing is deliberately provocative, defiant, or even risky.The truth is, ours is The Age of Prediction. Every time we grab for our smartphones to tap out a text message to a friend, and everytime we click onto Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since Benedict Cumberbatch is now one of the world's most in-demand actors, and his sidekick Martin Freeman isn't doing too badly either, getting them on a set together is like trying to get Simon & Garfunkel to do a reunion. Hence Sherlock fans now have just this one-off New Year special to slake their Cumberlust.To compensate, writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat (pictured below) had laboured feverishly to cram as much as possible into this swirling 90-minute ride. The novelty du jour was to whisk the sleuthing chums back to the 1890s, into which they slotted so slickly that you Read more ...
David Nice
It’s never funny like Ligeti’s Le grand macabre, though it touches on that joke apocalypse’s more nebulous soundscapes. Nor is it obviously dynamic like David Sawer’s From Morning to Midnight, with which its title is not to be confused (there are no transitional stages here, only birth and death). Wagner’s cosmic sweeps don't entangle the banal with the numinous like this. So what exactly is the new opera Morning and Evening?Of only one thing I’m sure: Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas and Norwegian writer Jon Fosse have created a world, before and after life as we know it, like no other Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Justin Bieber’s undoubtedly had a tricky time of it, living in the full glare of the world’s media. While it’s demonstrably not “the toughest thing in the world”, as he recently suggested in Billboard magazine, it can’t be much fun having your every misdemeanour writ large. His fourth album, Purpose, purports to be his mea culpa, but I’m left wondering what he’s supposed to be apologising for. Surely a teenager who has been gifted unimaginable wealth should be forgiven for occasionally acting like an impatient dick and driving badly? We let pensioners get away with it all the time.At the time Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
If you thought the era of the impresario died with Diaghilev, think again. Alistair Spalding, chief executive of Sadler's Wells, has commercial and artistic vision in spades, and masterfully combines them in his operation at the Wells. Witness last night's show, Gravity Fatigue: inviting a fashion designer, even one as visionary as Hussein Chalayan, to create a dance show might seem like a risky (and expensive) venture, but the theatre was packed to the rafters, fashiony types mingling with the theatre's usual dance audience and all convinced they had come there for a major Artistic Event.It Read more ...
Florence Hallett
From its title, you could be misled into dismissing this show as narrow and self-referential: a small exhibition in a small gallery curated by a Belgian artist concerned only with his own countrymen. In fact, it is something of a survey, featuring works with influences that range from Piet Mondrian, Ad Reinhardt and Lucio Fontana, to the Color Field painters. Its considerable reach gains focus through the prism of its curator; Luc Tuymans’ own uneasy commitment to the figurative sets up a productive tension with the works he has selected, and with the many and conflicting ideas, subtly Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
What’s it really like to be a dictator? Or president, if we put it more circumspectly, as Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf does in his new film of that name – though this President clearly believes he’s of the “for-life” variety, if not even a rung higher given that the mode of address in this contemporary court is, “Your Majesty”.In fact the plans for dynasty are well in place, as the first scene of The President nicely illustrates. Its eponymous hero (Misha Gomiashvili) is taking a break from signing death warrants to take his young grandson (Dachi Orvelashvili) over that familiar lesson Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Every 75 years or so, Halley’s Comet comes round to say, "Hi". When it does, there’s genuine excitement, not because there’s any kind of stock trade in fond reminiscence when it comes to glowing lumps of rock, but because it’s a genuinely captivating event. The Orb’s latest offering is similarly hurtling through space once more, and reminding us of their conceptual debut that slapped us around our collective face back in 1991. It feels like a similar event.The first thing to say is that this is, without doubt, the most coherent offering from the Orb (currently comprised of Alex Paterson and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Connections are missed and made in Jonathan Dove’s Flight – a giddy airport fantasy of what might be and what never was. Not yet 20 years old, this contemporary score is quite a departure from Opera Holland Park’s staple fare of well-aged verismo and bloodily rare Italian drama, but in a glossy new production by Stephen Barlow it pulses with all the same urgency and human interest – and not a suicide/secret pregnancy/long-lost parent in sight.Driven by propulsive motor rhythms and percussion ticks, Dove’s score has the same slick statelessness as Andrew Riley’s designs. Here a bit of Copland Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When International Feel label boss Mark Barrott moved from Uruguay to Ibiza, it was surely only a matter of time before he hooked up with Café Del Mar’s legendary sunset soundtracker José Padilla – inevitable even. The choice of producers to work alongside Padilla on this, his fourth album, is far from predictable however – in fact it’s inspired. Alongside Padilla himself and Barrott are Henning Severud (Telephones), Jan Schulte (Wolf Müller) and Lewis Day (Tornado Wallace). Padilla is in good company here – a fact he has been keen to acknowledge himself.On first listen, this seems Read more ...