20th century
judith.flanders
Genius does not mean having no influences. Monotones, one of the very greatest of Frederick Ashton's ballets, is heavily influenced by other works: by George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations and Apollo, by Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère. And it in turn has influenced other great works: Kenneth MacMillan’s searing Gloria would not exist without this unearthly, moon-calm vision.Monotones II, the second or “white” half, was created first, a gala piece which defies the usual fate of gala pieces. The starkness, the heroic simplicity and grace of this trio was immediately apparent, and Ashton Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
As Julian Lloyd Webber combatively suggests of certain strands of 20th-century music: “Let’s make a noise no one likes. If the audience likes it, you have failed as a composer.” In general, though, the first programme in this welcome three-part series is if anything too measured and respectful in guiding us through the labyrinths of 20th-century music – from Debussy to Richard Strauss (relatively easy on the ears) via the tougher, spikier Schoenberg and Webern.Partly encouraged by the fact that Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise has become a bestseller (who knew so many people could Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC has suddenly noticed that there used to be these really brilliant things called "albums", and now they're going out of style and out of date. Hence they're holding an Albums Season in all media (Danny Baker's Great Album Showdown, Steve Wright's Album Factoids, Johnny Walker's Long Players and many, many more). The rest of the planet has been living with the digital revolution in music for years, or even decades, so this late, lumbering response feels rather quaint. It's as if the Death of the Album can only occur when the Corporation says so, rather like pop music didn't Read more ...
mark.hudson
Travelling through Canada by train – more decades ago than I care to divulge here – I bought a book of Man Ray photographs at Banff in the heart of the Rockies. I spent the rest of the journey with one eye on the majestic mountains, and the other glued to the luminous, edgy, ineffably stylish images of the American surrealist in Paris.Those images were pretty well-known then. They’re infinitely better known now. The "Ingres" woman with violin marks on her back (pictured below, Le Violon d’Ingres, 1924), the pale-faced Parisian beauty with the African mask, the solarised profile of Lee Miller Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Cage 100 Various artists (Wergo)Wergo’s handsomely produced box set was assembled for last year’s John Cage centenary. Fans will lap it up, and one hopes that curious newcomers will take the plunge and open their ears to this extraordinary, approachable music. Joshua Pierce’s 1970s album of the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano still sounds definitive. Cage’s Table of Preparations is included in the booklet, listing in alarming detail the position, size and orientation of every bolt, washer and screw inserted in Pierce’s piano. Inevitably, you start to wonder if the bell- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The tabloids are getting shriller every day in their warnings about the army of Bulgarians and Romanians about to descend on British shores, so it’s probably lucky that none of their journalists was present last night at the Barbican to witness an Eastern European musical coup of deadly efficiency. Kristjan Järvi and the London Symphony Orchestra may have cleared the path with a little help from Enescu and Kodály, but it was Bulgarian virtuoso performer-composer Theodosii Spassov – playing an instrument no one had ever heard of – who routed us completely. The kaval is a “chromatic, end- Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Pop Art collages of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi and, more recently, the wayward sculptures and installations of artists like Phyllida Barlow would be unthinkable without the inspirational presence in Britain of Kurt Schwitters. Yet the German emigré is hardly a household name.The Tate exhibition Schwitters in Britain hopes to put that right by showing the full range of his work. These include reliefs and collages made from detritus picked up off the street; oddball sculptures fashioned from plaster, wood, stone, metal or bone; grotto-like installations that crept across walls Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
And so John Adams’s residency with the London Symphony Orchestra reaches its finale – a brisk allegro of a concert with a cheeky coda in the form of the composer’s latest orchestral work, Absolute Jest. One of contemporary music’s most articulate advocates, Adams here swapped pen for baton in a beautifully programmed concert that took a postmodern road-trip across 20th century musical America, guiding listeners along the highways of Copland’s Appalachian Spring and Ives’s Country Band March and off-road for Elliott Carter’s Variations for Orchestra.Ives’s Country Band March is Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
We’re still in the foothills of the Southbank Centre’s year-long The Rest is Noise festival, but already the harmonic ground is becoming unsteady underfoot. Last weekend saw the gemütlichkeit of Johann Strauss give way to the brutality of Richard Strauss, exposed us to the moistly chromatic flesh of Salome that lies behind the seven veils, and showed just a hint of Schoenbergian ankle. So surely this weekend’s return to 1900 and Elgar’s choral-society-stalwart The Dream of Gerontius is something of a retreat?Not exactly. Although latterly exorcised of its dangerous Catholic subversion and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
While the history of 20th-century music is undoubtedly the history of the 20th century – from the decadent expressionism of fin-de-siècle Berlin to the imagined surrealist worlds of 1920s Paris – few composers lived or wrote the century quite as vividly as Witold Lutosławski. He is celebrating his centenary this year. Although latterly obscured by the reputations of his countrymen Szymanowski and Penderecki, Lutosławski’s music combines lyricism and a fiercely rigorous formalism to produce works whose narrative force is unequalled.Fleeing Warsaw as Prussian forces approached in 1915 for the Read more ...
judith.flanders
The worldwide success of John Cranko’s 1960s version of Tchaikovsky’s opera, in turn an adaptation of Pushkin’s verse-drama, might have taken even the choreographer by surprise. Tchaikovsky himself worried that “Pushkin’s exquisite texture will be vulgarized if it is transferred to the stage”, and added, “How delighted I am to be rid of Ethiopian princesses, Pharaohs, poisonings, all the conventional stuff.”No scenic effects? No excess? No melodrama? Well no, not quite. First, Cranko was not permitted by his opera house to use Tchaikovsky's opera, so instead had Kurt-Heinz Stolze Read more ...
David Nice
This may have been the official, lavish fanfare for the Southbank’s The Rest is Noise Festival, which if the hard sell hasn’t hit you yet is a year-long celebration of 20th Century music in its cultural context and based around Alex Ross's bestseller of the same name. For Jurowski and the LPO, though, it was very much through-composed programme planning as usual, though with a sweeping bow towards the festival theme of how modernism evolved as it did.In this case Jurowski fashioned a very selective, very long (it could have been a three-parter) and often unusual nine-year odyssey for Richard Read more ...