Southbank Centre
Kimon Daltas
Benjamin Grosvenor made his Southbank recital debut last night in a sold-out Queen Elizabeth Hall in another milestone in his unstoppable evolution from wunderkind to fully-fledged concert star. It has been a good year for the 20-year-old pianist, during which he added a Classic Brit and two Gramophone awards to a Critics’ Circle accolade, Decca recording contract and tenure on the Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme.Back in 2004, when he won the piano section of the Young Musician of the Year at the age of 12 (losing out to a 16-year-old Nicola Benedetti in the final), his preternatural Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Some symphonies are natural curtain-raisers: Sibelius’ Third is one. Music began with rhythm and in this piece the cellos are the distant drummers who bring us back to basics with their curt opening measures. Osmo Vänskä clipped the rhythms are kept them on a tight rein - because he knows how this piece goes, how Sibelius’ search for new found economy and textural leanness lends the music an uneasy tension.There’s an extraordinary passage of complete stasis at the point at which one might expect the development of the first movement to start. Vänskä took the dynamics down to Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Forty years ago Michael Nesmith was the tall, woolly-hatted Monkee people called “the talented one”. Faint praise maybe, but there was nothing mediocre about the country rock albums he went on to make. Nesmith had another advantage. His mother had invented Liquid Paper giving him the financial freedom to experiment as he pleased. He soon became a true renaissance man. But according to one newspaper, by 2011 he was also increasingly reclusive and eccentric. Even the promoters billed last night’s concert as “rare and exclusive". With fans not knowing quite what to expect tickets had shifted Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
When The Unthanks staggered into the spotlight with their haunting and beguiling Mercury Award-nominated 2007 album The Bairns, with bracing songs about infant mortality and child abuse, they became a folk band adored by people who don’t even like folk. They were spiritual sisters to brilliant mavericks like Antony & the Johnsons or Robert Wyatt (they did an album of covers of both artists' songs) while remaining firmly rooted in their native Northumberland. The heart of the band being the two Unthank Sisters, one of those terrific telepathic vocal relationships you sometimes get with Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. That's quite a mouthful. Bruckner's symphonies can be too. But this is one of the reasons why Skrowaczewski has acquired quite a cult following for his Bruckner performances; it's why I once drove all the way to Zurich to hear him conduct one. His Bruckner is never offered as an indigestible slab of meat. It's never hard or chewy. What you get from Skrowaczewski's Bruckner is tenderness and deliciousness. I know this not from my trip to the Tonhalle which was a bit of a failure - I got lost in the Black Forest and was turned away at the doors ten minutes late - Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The quest for the spiritual in the musical has been the dominant preoccupation of Jonathan Harvey’s since his earliest works. Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy has been an acknowledged influence on the composer, who has made a career of exploring what Steiner described as “the special character of the individual note”, which “expands into a melody and harmony leading straight into the world of the spirit”. So when Swiss theologian Hans Küng and the Berlin Philharmonic were looking for a composer to set Küng’s massive new libretto as a full-length spiritual work for chorus and orchestra Harvey was Read more ...
David Nice
Can two half-orchestras playing together ever be better than one well-established organism? The second and third concerts in yet another special project masterminded by Vladimir Jurowski, drawing together British and Russian perspectives on war and peace, proved that they could. It may have been disappointing to find the Russian National Orchestra on Thursday evening launching so cold-bloodedly into the feral start of Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony. But when many of their key players upped their game by joining colleagues from the London Philharmonic Orchestra the following evening in Read more ...
David Nice
What, another review of an LPO/Jurowski concert in less than a week? Reasoning the need, it only has to be said that other orchestras may kick off their seasons by mixing the unfamiliar with core repertoire, but none would dare launch with not one but two programmes featuring this only-connect kind of singularity (and more to come in the “War and Peace” series next week). Last night the known quantity of Rachmaninov’s masterly choral symphony The Bells looked back to less familiar fare which shared two of its themes: the sounds of some very unorthodox tintinnabulations and the Russification Read more ...
David Nice
Dissatisfied housewives who eventually stand by their men joined jewelled hands in a divine evening of operatic decadence. Suppressed Bianca all but steps over the body of her strangled lover to get at the muscles of her killer husband in Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy, taking its cue from the deep purple imagery of Oscar Wilde’s story. And in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow), the Dyer’s Wife readily gives up her dreams of sacrificing motherhood and taking up with a fantasy toyboy when domestic violence looms. Dodgy premises both, and unlikely subjects Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This was an odd duck of a concert for the final night of the Olympics. Elsewhere in London were the reformed Spice Girls and Blur and general partying, whereas this was at times a sombre show, curated by Hal Willner as part of Antony’s Meltdown Festival. It was inspired by the Freedom Rides, a turning point in the American Civil Rights movement.The Freedom Rides were in 1961 when, deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives - and many endured brutal beatings and imprisonment - for simply travelling together on buses and trains as they Read more ...
Russ Coffey
“I would cut my legs and tits off/ When I think of Boris Karloff." Those were Lou Reed’s opening lines at the RFH, taken from Lulu, his recent collaboration with Metallica and his most poorly received record since 1975’s Metal Machine Music. One critic called it a “contender for the worst album ever". Reed’s reply was that he does as he pleases. Last night that meant making it a third of his set .It was a good call. Lulu has been terribly misunderstood, and just gets better with time. It didn't matter that Metallica were absent for this Meltdown show. Only a light readjustment was required Read more ...