Southbank Centre
Mark Kidel
There is a great deal of sense in transposing electronic music to a symphony orchestra. However beautifully crafted, imaginatively constructed, and creatively programmed, the sounds that come out of synthesisers and other digital tools lack the knife-edge fallibility of music that is produced with the hand or the human breath. Brian Eno’s concert with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic provides compelling evidence that his compositions reveal more of their essence when taken on a trip into the world of strings, brass and other wind instruments, and the chance-prone reality of human moods and Read more ...
David Nice
It’s a given that no finer Rachmaninov interpreter exists than Nikolai Lugansky – a few others may see the works differently, not better – and that Vasily Petrenko has an uncanny affinity with both the swagger and the introspection of Elgar. But just how clearly and deeply both made their understanding felt seemed like an harmonious miracle in the most famous of all Second Piano Concertos and a parallel journey of revitalisation from Petrenko in Elgar’s world-embracing First Symphony.So the theme of this season, “Icons Rediscovered”, was for once supremely apt. Petrenko, after an engaging Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Philharmonia’s current season, Let Freedom Ring, celebrates American music through some notably interesting programming. And although last night’s concert was very conventionally structured, with an overture, concerto and big symphony to finish, it was also the chance to hear some repertoire only quite rarely presented.Barber’s Violin Concerto is a personal favourite, a bit of a guilty pleasure as it is undoubtedly Romantically indulgent, and old-fashioned even when it was written. But I’m surprised it’s not heard more often – I’d take it over Bruch or Brahms or Elgar every time. Here Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Martin Scorsese walks onstage to a hero’s welcome, shoulders a little hunched, with a touch of sideways shuffle or hustle, taking acclaim in his stride at 80. He has sold out London’s 2,700-capacity Royal Festival Hall for the BFI’s biggest Screen Talk by far, and the queue for returns stretches into the street, to see a director as big as any star.Fellow director Edgar Wright is here to interview him for 60 minutes about his 27-film career, but barely gets beyond 1980’s Raging Bull in 90. The coked-up motormouth familiar in Scorsese cameos from his backseat rant at Travis Bickle to his Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Epic and intimate, philosophically anguished and rhapsodically transcendent, Mahler’s "Resurrection" Symphony remains one of the most mountainous challenges of the orchestral repertoire. For the opening of the Southbank’s new season Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra delivered an interpretation of superlative resonance and clarity, in which it felt that we explored every detail of the foothills as well as the earth-shaking views from the top.The vigorous attack of the LPO strings at the start of the Allegro maestoso made for a dynamic, athletically poised start, before the Read more ...
David Nice
Big Ben was chiming the quarter-hour as I hit the South Bank side of the river after a not terribly inspiring Remain rally in Parliament Square. What delight, then, to hear the wacky and wonderful Carol Williams playing Vierne’s “Carillon de Westminster” as the opening fanfare of her Royal Festival Hall organ hour. It’s one of my two favouite organ voluntaries – the other being the most famous, “the Widor Toccata”, and she ended with that. All was well, in fact, from start to finish.Williams announced at the beginning of her First Person piece for theartsdesk that she’d sat through so many “ Read more ...
Edward Gardner
“If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.”“What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.”With these two quotations from Mahler, I already feel like putting my pen down. I had intended to write about my approach to the upcoming performance of his Second Symphony with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, but the more I thought about words, the more reductive my thoughts became.Journalists trying to unlock Claudio Abbado’s genius in interviews on Mahler were met a smile, nod, and just “schöne Musik”, “beautiful music”. As ever Read more ...
Carol Williams
I have always had a fascination with concert programmes. I did my Doctorate thesis on this subject. I remember vividly as a youngster attending many uninteresting programmes and thinking “there has to be more exciting, exhilarating, interesting music for the concert goer!” What type of repertoire makes audiences come back to solo organ concerts?The varied repertoire kept me alive and my studies at the Royal Academy of Music with David Sanger were priceless. I came from a musical family - Dad had an amazing ability to play the theatre organ, Mum the piano and Aunt Olwen played organ in church Read more ...
The SpongeBob Musical, QEH review - musical based on popular kids' animation sinks for lack of focus
Gary Naylor
There are many things that you are not told about being a parent, a vast landscape of details that batter you with unwelcome difference from that comfortable life of Friday night prosecco and pizza. One is a whole new palette of garish colours barging into your eyeline – fluorescent yellow, eye-bleeding orange, vomity green. As quickly as you learn about this hitherto unknown spectrum that even van Gogh might think a little too much, you forget, the brain too addled by fatigue to retain any information from those shocking sleepless years. Until you go to see The SpongeBob Musical – then they’ Read more ...
David Nice
Sullivan’s score for his eighth collaboration with Gilbert is vintage work, mostly equal to the splendid sentinels flanking it, Iolanthe and The Mikado. On Wednesday night master animator John Wilson did its buoyancy and occasional pathos full justice. But what of Gilbert’s words? “A woman’s [sic] college! Maddest folly going!” doesn’t promise an operetta for our times.In fact it’s more complicated than that. In the battle of the sexes, men are lunks, bullies or silly young things; the women come off rather better, but their determination to “abjure tyrannic man” walled up in Princess Ida’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Phil Wang has an interesting background: he has a Chinese-Malaysian father and a white English mother, was born in the UK, and spent his childhood in Malaysia before returning to the UK at 16. His comedy has always mined this rich seam, and now in his latest touring show, Wang in There, Baby!, he mines it a bit more with his opening gags.First up is a discussion about rice, and very informative it is too, as he discusses the different positions English and Chinese people take on it – and what you're really eating when you order fried rice in a restaurant. There's more food-related material as Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Standing ovations on the less-than-passionate South Bank can have a dutiful, grudging quality. However, I’ve seldom heard more heartfelt ardour at the Royal Festival Hall than the acclaim for Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra last night. Rightly so? Beyond all doubt.We knew, from recordings if not live performances, that their stewardship of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony passes beyond curatorial respect and into a sort of rapturous renewal. We’ll never quite hear Mahler’s Ninth (though Bruno Walter certainly comes close). Still, the great Budapest band arguably embodies the all- Read more ...