Reviews
simon.broughton
“This is not so much a total immersion, more of a quick shower,” said Simon Wright, biographer of Villa Lobos at the start of the day-long exploration of his music. With up to 1,500 works in existence – the exact number is unconfirmed – he promised we’d be “hacking our way through a tiny part of this immense jungle”, to use another metaphor that seems alarmingly appropriate with this composer.Heitor Villa Lobos (1887-1959) was Brazil’s greatest "classical" composer and yet less than a handful of works are commonly played in Europe. Best-known is his luxuriant Bachianas Brasileiras No 5, in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Hito Steyerl is a cool cookie. As well as studying film and television in Munich, she gained a PhD in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and her intelligence shines through in every magical frame of her videos. Three are on show at the ICA along with two recorded talks in which she uses words and pictures to spin beguiling tales that – part fact, part fancy – operate in the space between lecture and performance.Water permeates every pixel of her latest video, Liquidity (main picture and below right) which follows the fortunes of financier Jacob Wood. After losing his job Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
There’s been reasonable diversity in the ballet shown on the BBC in recent years – from full-length broadcasts of Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty and The Red Shoes to the compelling 2011 fly-on-the-wall The Agony and the Ecstasy. That’s why it was something of a disappointment to find this week’s five-hour ballet season, which finished last night, pushing a rather blandly uniform story about Tchaikovsky, Darcey Bussell and Margot Fonteyn.Last Saturday, the season opener, Darcey’s Ballerina Heroines (BBC 2), set the tone by getting the predictable Fonteyn panegyric in early, and by giving Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Revelling in the acoustic precision of the recently opened Milton Court concert hall last night, Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen showed once more why his quartet’s combination of tersely lyrical melodies and syncopated rhythms is so appealing. For his new album, some of which was played here, his typically European, restrained sound was, to a greater extent than previously, augmented by some distinctly funky passages, which were drawn out with immense skill and sensitivity from what had gone before. Several pieces shared both an extraordinary variety of style, and a seamlessly smooth Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sadly, the name may not mean much. Jacopo Pontormo is a Florentine painter whose fate it was to come of age in the years after the high tide of the High Renaissance. Its vast shadow has left him languishing in second-division obscurity. Every day in Paris thousands of tourists turn their backs on his Madonna and Child with Saints to gawp at the Mona Lisa. No one visiting Florence lingers in front of his Venus and Cupid, c. 1533 (pictured below) in the same room as the statue of David. The National Gallery has stuck its small stash of Pontormos in a little side room. He has the Mafia to thank Read more ...
philip radcliffe
No one could accuse Manchester’s musical forces of short-changing Richard Strauss on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Under the title Strauss’s Voice, over two months three orchestras, eight conductors and a dozen soloists have delivered eleven concerts and several open rehearsals and talks. The enterprise has been led as a labour of love by 88-year-old Strauss authority Michael Kennedy, who started the series by enthusing about the composer’s ability “to exploit the radiance, eroticism, drama and tenderness of a voice”, especially the soprano voice.It fell to principal Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tyrannosaurus Rex: A Beard of Stars/T.Rex: T.Rex, Tanx/Marc Bolan & T. Rex: Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of TomorrowReactions to these reissues are going be determined by what level of fandom the band's acolytes subscribe to. These are not for the casual purchaser. Each is stuffed with masses of bonus tracks, many previously unreleased. The primary content is overwhelmed by the bonuses. Whether it's good or bad to put original albums in the shade is a matter of taste. The volume of extra material makes it hard to appreciate what Bolan intended each album to be in the first place.With Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There was a poignant moment last night as the Stranglers performed the song “Never To Look Back”. It hails from their 1990 album, 10, the last to feature singer Hugh Cornwall heading their original line-up. Behind the band, four giant gilt frames flash a slide-show of their career. We see them, all lean black leather and venom, transform slowly into the band before us, a greying, likeable, punk-adelic war-horse. In some of the final images drummer Jet Black – who, bear in mind, was 40 when The Stranglers' career took off in the late Seventies – wears an oxygen mask (as in the image above). Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Back in the days before you could bash together an album on a phone, recording used to involve a group of musicians playing together in the same room. Finding the perfect studio ambience and acoustic was 90 per cent of the battle, and many a veteran musician will tell you that the studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama were the greatest of them all.Many of these old troupers had been rounded up by film-maker Greg Camalier for this fine and evocative documentary, which avoided the Brian Pern-style cliches of the bog standard rock-doc by being packed with great stories, brilliant music and loads of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Haydn: Nelson Mass, Symphony no 102 Boston Baroque/Martin Pearlman (Linn)In a week bristling with geo-political tension, we need Haydn's "Mass for Troubled Times" more than ever. Here, Boston Baroque's natural trumpets blast out their tattoo in the Kyrie with a punch matched by that of the choir. Such a magnificent opening – the boldness due in part to Prince Esterházy's economically-driven downsizing of Haydn's orchestral forces. Woodwinds and horns had been dismissed, and trumpets and timpani were used instead to supplement the ripieno strings. Martin Pearlman's swift speeds are Read more ...
emma.simmonds
300: Rise of an Empire is the follow-up to perhaps the most homoerotic film of all time, 300 - a film whose obsession with the well-lubricated muscularity of the male form was matched only by its unabashed exaltation of ultra-violence (rendered endlessly and often tediously in slow-mo). It was hardly high art or sound history, but it had aesthetic bravado and a certain logic, with the strangely sexy battles effectively evoking the Spartan idea of a glorious death. 300 was less swords and sandals, more pants and posturing and its sequel delivers (too) much of the same.The original's director Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Bastille didn’t so much raise the roof at Alexandra Palace last night, as ask it politely if it wouldn’t mind elevating itself a touch. Their gentleness belies their success over the past year, since their first album, Bad Blood, was released. The album, most of which they played last night, is characterised by surging melody, sexlessly tumescent choruses, marching band drum solos, string parts as glossy as nail varnish, and cascading synth lines. Critics couldn’t agree, some finding it inspiringly tuneful, others derivatively risk-averse. Live, though, it’s difficult not to get carried away Read more ...