Reviews
David Nice
This is what Chopin anniversary year ought to be all about; not some celebrity showcase of plums and cornerstones in too large a hall before a restless audience, but a thoughtfully planned adventure zigzagging through the complete works on which the listener feels privileged to eavesdrop, and where the chameleonic genius of the composer always comes first. This eighth concert in the enterprising Kings Place "Chopin Unwrapped" series was the first I've been able to catch, and I realised what I'd been missing. Both of Cypriot pianist Martino Tirimo's two halves offered a demanding but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The only time I've ever been to Detroit was in 2004, in pursuit of assorted rock stars on the Vote for Change tour. Reader, it was weird. The atmosphere in the deserted streets was deathly, as if an invading army had swarmed into town, committed hideous atrocities and then moved on. The decaying architecture from America's golden industrial age looked unsettlingly like the set for The Omega Man, in which Charlton Heston fought a solitary war against an army of nocturnal psychopaths.These feelings returned vividly as I watched Julien Temple's stupendous Requiem for Detroit?, a thrilling piece Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's hard to miss German composer Wolfgang Rihm. He has an enormous head. There it is, bulging from his giant frame, a big, friendly grin slapped onto it while he wanders around the Barbican on his celebratory day, none of it going to waste. Listen to his prolifically combustible music, the million and one ideas hurtling about with the energy of a school playground and the intensity of a burning sun, and you soon realise that all that cranial space is probably quite necessary.
But for composition you need more than just head space for musical ideas to smash into one another. You need form. Read more ...
howard.male
What do you imagine a Swiss Cajun/Zydeco trio would sound like? It’s not a question that’s easy to navigate without slipping into the politically incorrect quicksand of racial or cultural stereotyping. So it gives me great pleasure to report that any narrow-minded assumptions I may have had in that department were instantly confounded by the reality of the life-affirming racket made by these three young men from Geneva as they rocked the basement bar of the St Moritz Club in Wardour Street.The first clue that this was my kind of band was the cover of their second and most recent album, Brule Read more ...
graeme.thomson
If ever there was a classic case of artist and audience meeting on terribly comfortable ground, Karine Polwart's performance at last night’s fundraiser for the Green Party was it. Held in a beautiful converted church, there was more than a trace of the Vicar of Dibley lurking around the edge of the proceedings. Whatever your political affiliations, the Greens undeniably put on a good spread: it was organic beer, home bakes and Curious Colas all round, a repast matched only in its wholesomeness by a lot of thoroughly fine if sometimes overly polite musical manoeuvres.A gifted singer and Read more ...
David Nice
Adams began with two Debussy preludes swept by a different kind of wind in Colin Matthews's ingenious, luminous orchestrations. Well, windswept was the idea, but there was no more elemental scouring here than by all accounts there had been in the Britten Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes on Sunday (interesting parallel programming, though). "Le vent dans la plaine" sounded more like an apiary of clockwork bees, droning away meticulously but with none of Debussy's dark undertow. Ravel's even more gorgeous-unsettling Valses nobles et sentimentales might better have been conducted by the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
OK, let’s flop it out into the open. Let’s show the cards I was dealt way back when. Those boaters you saw at the start of Cutting Edge's Too Poor for Posh School? I may well, in another lifetime, blameless aeons in the netherworld of one’s past, have been seen wandering along a high street on a hill north-west of London underneath one of those. The tailcoats worn by pews full of adolescents on Sundays? Yep. Once upon a time that was oneself. (Thank God they didn’t show the top hats we had to wear as monitors.) My name is Jasper and I am an Old Harrovian. Thought I’d better get that out the Read more ...
james.woodall
One of the daily tragedies of being human is that notions in our heads of unaided flight, levitation - any thought of lift-off from our material horizon - lie in drastic disproportion to what flesh and muscle permit. As children, we dream of flying, or living, say, on ocean floors without gas-tanks. As adolescents, we dream of many things, most of them impossible. As adults, sportspeople and dancers strain to defy nature, but never do. Most of us go on to live resignedly alongside, or inside, nature, glum in the knowledge that our "machine", as Hamlet terms his mortal frame, will of course Read more ...
sheila.johnston
The opening scene of Martin Scorsese's new film - a storm-tossed ferry buffeting its way to an isolated island off America's East Coast - bears an unmissable resemblance to that of Roman Polanski's The Ghost. So too does its premise, of a vulnerable young man who falls under the sway of a powerful, indefinably sinister older one. Both are by senior directors who have bounced back from crises, professional and personal; both derive from popular thrillers (Scorsese's is based on a bestseller by Dennis Lehane) that twist and turn their way towards thumping third-act revelations. Yet could any Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It's common to feel a real sense of doom when you approach the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre. But it’s not the dodgy hoodies that turn your legs to jelly, it’s the sheer ugliness of the architecture. Yes, aesthetically, this is urban hell. But it’s also the site of the Royal Court’s Local project, in which a rundown shop unit has been turned into a makeshift theatre. Random, a spirited revival of Debbie Tucker Green’s 2008 play, is the first of a season of edgy dramas to make the trek from Sloane Square to Southwark.Outside, a chilly wind; inside a quick frisk by a bouncer, and you’re Read more ...
fisun.guner
Billy Childish claims to think only in pictures. But since writing forms as big a part of his creative output as painting, that can’t be quite true. In fact, he’s written a number of autobiographical novels as well as collections of poetry. What’s more, he’s a hugely prolific musician, so I’m sure he means only that he feels a little more comfortable expressing himself through imagery rather than abstract concepts – though obviously, being human, he must do that as well.Alongside these many activities, Childish also co-founded the Stuckists, that rather silly anti-conceptual art Read more ...
sue.steward
This week I discovered Irving Penn’s little-known portraits of anonymous street traders, taken in Paris, London and New York between 1950 and 1951. Previously unseen in the UK, they are now appearing at Hamiltons’ Mayfair gallery: 33 examples from a series of almost 252 full-length portraits collectively titled Small Trades. While they lack the instant glamour of the celebrity Portraits currently showing at the National Portrait Gallery, these sensitive depictions of skilled street traders – including a Parisian cheese-seller, a London house painter, a New York flower delivery man - are Read more ...