Spain
stephen.walsh
“It doesn’t need me,” Sebastian Thomas writes in this season’s Longborough programme, “to labour the idea that the content of a theatrical or musical piece should find some relevance to our own lives.” No, indeed. Practically every director one could name labours it already, sometimes with very odd results.For some reason, the 1950s are a current favourite touchstone of relevance. So it’s a mild relief that Thomas Guthrie has chosen to locate his new production of The Marriage of Figaro at the start of the First World War, like some binned episode of Downton Abbey. Count Almaviva appears Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The EU referendum isn’t the only thing causing polarised opinion over European issues. The question of what constitutes Balearic Beat looms large over the music community. For some, it’s a fixed point, namely celebrated DJ Alfredo’s record box in the mid-80s. For others it’s built on more shifting sands, a sentiment DJ and author Bill Brewster summarises with trademark élan: “Balearic Beat today is the same as it was in 2011, 1999 and 1984. It’s shit pop records and brilliant EBM records. It’s everything and nothing.”International Feel record label boss and producer Mark Barrott’s take is Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Painted during his first trip to Paris in 1900, Picasso’s Le Moulin de la Galette is an outsider’s view of an exotic and intimidating new world. Men and women are seen as if through some strange distorting lens, their blurred, mask-like faces indistinct but for red-slit mouths and coal-black eyes. We seem to be in the room with them, and yet we are isolated. Even a woman looking out from the edge of the canvas gazes straight past us: if not invisible, we are certainly inconsequential.The painting is a heavily symbolic start to this exhibition, which tells the well-worn but, to all but the Read more ...
David Nice
"We're off to Glyndebourne, to see a ra-ther bor-ing op-ra by Rosseeeni," quoth songwriting wags Kit and the Widow. So here it was at the Sussex house after a 34-year absence, the most famous of all his operas which includes the overture’s oboe tune to which those words were set, and it wasn't possible that The Barber of Seville, pure champagne, could ever be boring. Or was it? Never underestimate the power of vaguely-conceived direction to rob musical wit and precision of their proper glory.Cast and conductor have been near-perfectly chosen. Enrique Mazzola is a crisp and elegant master of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Tucked away in a warren of residential streets in the older part of Guildford, The Old Glassworks looks like a lock-up garage, and seems to have been designed to repel unwanted attention with a private force-field of anonymity. Once you've been welcomed inside, however, you find yourself in an improbable wonderland of mysterious musical instruments, from lutes and rare 17th century guitars to members of the violin family in various states of deconstruction.Above all, you'll find the newly-built guitars of the owner of the establishment, Brian Cohen. Born in South Africa but resident in Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Claims to embody the spirit of flamenco, or to be born with flamenco in one's blood, abound in the programme of the annual Sadler's Wells flamenco festival. Sara Baras, whose show Voces opened the two week festival on Tuesday, doesn't make such a claim in writing: she doesn't need to. Her every move on stage radiates the self-possession of a flamenco aristocrat, a confidence so vital it simply bulldozes proscenium and fourth wall to set up a visceral – and vocal – relationship between audience and performer.Whether this is your cup of sangria or not probably depends on how you respond to that Read more ...
joe.muggs
The career of the Gran Canaria-born musician Pablo Díaz-Reixa seems to work in an accelerated time-frame, speeding through decades and eras as he develops his sound. Though he has always worked with digital technology, his early work sounded archaic, its massed carnival percussion and traditional melodies roaming around the Afro-Latin diaspora.Then, on 2008's Pop Negro, he embraced modernism, albeit still with a retro twist, rigorously examining and adopting the high-gloss production and songwriting techniques of the biggest mainstream American and Latino pop acts of the mid-1970s to mid-'90s Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The latest themed season from WNO, to add to their fallen women, Donizetti queens and what not, goes by the slightly worrying title (for anyone with a short attention span) of “Figaro Forever”, and consists of an operatic sequence derived from Beaumarchais’ three Figaro plays and ending with a new opera by Elena Langer partly based on the last of them, La mère coupable.That comes up next weekend. Meanwhile we’re getting Rossini and Mozart, both in new productions and sung in English. The three operas hardly amount to a trilogy (I’ve seen a run-through of the Langer piece); in fact anyone Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Guadalupe Plata are a Spanish three-piece whose tunes will be a sonic treat for those who like their blues raw but with an extra dash of flavour. On their self-titled second album, spikey blues, bebop and rockabilly sounds rub up against the Moorish and Romany roots of Andalusian traditional music to produce a very special gumbo that will appeal to lovers of RL Burnside, Tav Falco, Link Wray and gutsy Latino bands like The Plugz and Tito and Tarantula. In fact, there are plenty of times on this disc when Guadalupe Plata could quite easily be deputising for the supernaturally groovy house band Read more ...
David Nice
"I fell in love with the psychology of Goya and his palette,” wrote brilliant composer-pianist Enrique Granados at the beginning of an evocative paean prefacing his six original Goyescas of 1909-11, finely-wrought gems of the piano repertoire. In love, too, are most of us who have gaped with awe at the astonishing range and careful selection of portraits in the current National Gallery exhibition - one of its best ever, equal in revelation to the recent Rembrandt spectacular.No-one wants music to distract from the detailed contemplation of all those Spanish nobles, intellectuals and craftsmen Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
L'Arpeggiata seem to revel in being L'Anachronista. The baroque-jazz group led by the Graz-born theorbo player Christina Pluhar has been proudly and brazenly flouting the dictates of those who set the rules of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) for all 15 years of their existence.The printed programme, for example, mentioned “Francesco Turrisi – harpsichord”, and described in detail the delicious and lengthy agonies of tuning which his 1624 Ruckers copy harpsichord would have gone through prior to the concert; but what it didn't mention was that Turrisi would be spending roughly Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The second instalment of this three-part series on the history of Spain (from the BBC in collaboration with the Open University) told a tale that is probably still relatively unfamiliar in the Anglophone world. That’s despite the fact that one of its star turns was the financing by that fervently religious 15th century Iberian power couple, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, of the legendary voyage of Christopher Columbus. Their own relationship was dramatic, too: the young, ambitious and highly intelligent teenage Isabella had turned down no fewer than seven aristocratic aspirants Read more ...