Reviews
Robert Beale
Coinciding with Mothers' Day, and a week after International Women’s Day, Manchester Camerata gave this fascinating window into the world of lesser-known music by British women composers.Why such an education is needed is a good question. Are some of these pieces (which are to be recorded for CD by John Andrews, soloists Alexandra Dariescu, Alex Mitchell and Rachael Clegg and the Camerata strings this week) in the nature of what a former, male and very Lancastrian, member of the Hallé brass section once defined for me as “justly neglected masterpieces”?Or should we go looking for hidden gems Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s disquieting, as a bloke, to hear 2000 female voices singing about the sexual frustration caused by premature ejaculation. A noisy chorale, heartfelt, behind Lily Allen’s 2009 hit “Not Fair”, cascades from two tiers of balconies. “And then you make this noise, and it's apparent it's all over.” Lily Allen isn’t even on yet. Just this celebratory femme-centric congregation around the joys of dating a one-minute man.It’s the first half of the show – and make no mistake, this is a show, touring theatres, not a gig – and it’s a simple set-up. Three female cello players, clad in black, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the bulk of the 20 tracks collected on Eternal Journey - The Arrangements and Productions of Charles Stepney were originally issued between 1967 and 1971, the period evoked by this compilation dedicated to the titular musical polymath is not limited to the late Sixties and the early Seventies. There is an early Nineties character too.That was when a lot of what’s heard on the compilation reached a fresh listening audience. Twenty or-so years after they were first released, Terry Callier’s “What Color is Love,” Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleur” and Marlena Shaw’s “California Soul” Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This programme – of Weir, Bartók, Finzi and Stravinsky – was right up my alley, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo delivered on its promise, with performances that ranged from the grandly ceremonial in the Weir to touchingly intimate in the Finzi. In addition there was an enjoyable concerto for South Korean star Yeol Eum Son and, to finish, one of the great orchestral showpieces, The Firebird, or rather some of it. I have known Judith Weir’s The Welcome Arrival of Rain forever, but performances in the concert hall are sadly few and far between. But it is great to hear it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Jazz,” exclaims an audience member just after Plantoid launch into “Ultivatum Cultivation,” tonight’s second song – also the second song on the band’s recent second LP Flare.He’s got a point. What’s emanating from the stage at East London’s Moth Club is more a candidate for a description as jazz rather than the math rock – or even the prog rock – tags often cropping up when trying to pin down Plantoid. Jazz: in this case a take on the genre fusing a Miles Davis Bitches Brew sensibility with, in contrast, softer things; things suggesting a familiarity with Gary McFarland’s Sixties Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s the first date of Manchester rockers Witch Fever’s European tour and things are off to an iffy start. Drummer Annabelle Joyce has food poisoning. It was touch’n’go whether the band would play. But they do. Singer Amy Walpole advices us that Joyce may need to leave and puke at any point. But the crop-haired drummer’s made of sterner stuff. They hold their own. The band shaves two songs off the set but it matters little. Witch Fever rock.But let’s rewind. Support act Cowboy Hunters have a buzz growing. It’s easy to see why. The Glasgow duo are an original. They appear to an initially Read more ...
David Nice
The master pianist and pedagogue Heinrich Neuhaus impressed upon Elisabeth Leonskaja the maxim "don't look for yourself in the music, but find the music in you", something she says she reflects upon daily. Which is how she seems to channel the essence, shedding ego but retaining personality. More recently she's given us one-composer marathons - Beethoven's and Schubert's last three sonatas above all - so to be reminded of what genius there is in her more diverse programming was a special pleasure in last night's recital of Beethoven, Schoenberg, Chopin, Webern, Schubert and Mozart. The Read more ...
James Saynor
Do we really care what Hitler liked to eat? Well, here’s a film that does, so I can reveal an answer. Typical meals might have included chick pea salad with marinated courgette, pea soup with mint, or “cabbage fantasy” with cheese béchamel, followed by “his beloved apricot cake”. Of course, as every quiz expert knows, the Führer – along with having one testicle – became at some point a committed vegetarian.We watch the above dishes being queasily consumed in The Tasters, a movie about women dragooned by the Nazis into sampling Hitler’s food to protect him from poison plots and paranoia. It Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason follows up Godland with an equally striking film, this one about a moribund marriage. It’s a living album of impressions and memories, small incidents and fragmented snapshots, with no conventional narrative shape. Yet there’s a coherence and weight lent to all these disparate elements by the teasing affection of the director’s lens.The family preparing for the break-up are parents Anna (Saga Gartharsdóttir), an artist, and Magnus, known as Maggi (Sverrir Guthnason), a trawlerman, with their young family: two boys (Thorgils and Grímur Hlynsson, Pálmason’ Read more ...
Sarah Kent
My walk through Hyde Park was an absolute joy. Spring is in the air, the weeping willow is in leaf (pictured below right: photo by S.K), the narcissi are in bloom and the sun was shining, yet the Serpentine Gallery is plunged into darkness.The lights are dimmed to enable you to see David Hockney’s frieze of iPad paintings which wrap around the gallery walls in a continuous strip. Of the 200 or so pictures he made in the course of a year following the changing seasons in Normandy, where he has a studio, roughly 100 are on show (main picture: detail). But even when your eyes have adjusted to Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
My last St John Passion arrived during the Proms in the vast hanger of the Royal Albert Hall, where the impeccable, discreet musicianship of Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan sometimes struggled with the chilly open spaces all around. At St Martin-in-the-Fields yesterday evening, no such problems: the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, with Peter Whelan directing, balanced intimacy and grandeur in a reading whose visceral impact and involving immediacy wholly filled the church, while never overwhelming it. Vocally and instrumentally, the Monteverdi singers and EBS Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To watch Martin Hayes play the Irish fiddle is like watching a man possessed by his music. As his bow flickers across the strings the infectious energy of it spills into the air, through his limbs, and eventually out into the whistling, whooping crowd. Through the course of his career, Hayes – most famous for founding the Irish-American supergroup The Gloaming – has joined forces with musicians ranging from Paul Simon to Yo-Yo Ma, and played everywhere from small pubs to Obama’s Whitehouse. At Koko last night, with his ensemble The Common Ground, his virtuoso repertoire of Irish Read more ...