20th century
alexandra.coghlan
Another day at the Proms, another English choral masterpiece. Last night it came courtesy of the newly formed BBC Proms Youth Choir – a moveable feast of an ensemble that will bring together different youth choirs from across the UK over the next three years. I can’t imagine a more apt work to inaugurate the project than Tippett’s bravely painful meditation on human cruelty and capacity for endurance, A Child of Our Time. Framed intelligently within a collage of 20th-century American styles it offered a hopeful vision of the future, both musically and philosophically.Trained by Simon Halsey, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A friend of mine has an Eames lounge chair that he treats with enormous reverence and claims is the comfiest seat ever made. I simply don’t get it; with its bent plywood shell and black leather upholstery, this 1956 American design classic looks to me dark, clumsy and uninviting – especially when compared with Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair of some 50 years earlier or the delicate designs produced in the 1920s for the Bauhaus by Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe.Since the Eames phenomenon didn’t readily cross the Atlantic and we are not overly familiar with their achievements, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a lovely moment in The Opera Group’s production of Bow Down. An actor motions to a member of the audience and grins bleakly: “He thought he was here for an opera….”. It’s an aside, over before we’ve even fully registered it, but it’s one that reminds us that both Tony Harrison and Harrison Birtwistle knew exactly what they were doing when they constructed this amputated, bleeding limb of a work and christened it an “opera”, back in 1977.It would be hard to imagine two more brusque, pitilessly beautiful artists than Birtwistle and Harrison. From Lancashire and Yorkshire Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
This has to be the only music festival I've ever been to where two vacuum cleaners were on standby in case the star performer conked out. But that's what happens when your star performer is a player piano - they seem to run on Hoover tubes. With 11 concerts and one film in two days, this celebration of American maverick Conlon Nancarrow was London's alternative marathon. One that was no less eccentric, exhausting or adrenalin-generating (though much less running-based).At the core of the weekend was a nine-concert cycle of the complete studies for player piano. As far as anyone knew, it was Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Lord count was perhaps surprisingly high in the first instalment of Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture. Among the talking heads I counted there was only one who wasn’t a life peer or a “proper” hereditary one, and there was only one who was neither Lord, Lady or Dame (though she did have a CBE). That hereditary baron Ferdinand Mount was not only squeezed into the minority corner but never actually uses his title was, I suppose, a telling comment in itself about contemporary Britain and our egalitarian self-image, but more so the fact that two of the lifers, Lord Bragg and Peter Hennessy, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Recorded music has a lot to answer for. Until its arrival, most people made their own music – at home, using whatever resources were to hand. If you were lucky, you might have owned a piano. The less well-off might have had access to a ukulele. Tony Coleman and Margaret Meagher’s enchanting, lo-fi documentary stakes a bold claim for the ukulele’s pivotal role in 20th-century music history.A variant of a folk instrument introduced by Portuguese immigrants to Hawaii in the 1870s, it was championed by King David Kalakaua, who was beguiled by the ukulele’s sweet sound. The annexation of Hawaii Read more ...
howard.male
It’s a song which hangs in the air like pollen or reefer smoke, before gradually rising like a never-to-be-answered prayer. It began life as a lullaby but grew up to be a protest song, a scream of existential angst and even a purred invitation to sex. It’s a song like no other song, in that it has been covered more than any other song (its nearest competitors being “My Way” and “Yesterday”), and it was written by three Jewish immigrants before eventually being adopted by African-Americans as their own. A friend of Gershwin’s said, when reminiscing about hearing it for the first time Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“Blessed are the dead”, sings Brahms in the final movement of his German Requiem. And as far as the rest of this concert was concerned it was perhaps just as well. In Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, the children are all dead; and in Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw everyone else has passed on except, of course, the survivor. The audience was not so much dead as largely absent, frightened off, I suppose, by the dreaded Arnold. Or maybe they were just at home painting pumpkins.They missed a brave programme, but a brilliant one. Schoenberg’s brusque, utterly unsentimental masterpiece is Read more ...
judith.flanders
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so ambivalent about a show, and so strongly both pro and con. The pros first, then. This is an astonishing, revelatory exhibition of avant-garde art and architecture in the Soviet Union in the brief but hectic period from the Revolution to the Stalinist crackdown in the 1930s. The show draws on Soviet archival photographs, never before exhibited, architectural photographer Richard Pare's gorgeous contemporary images of the buildings, and art from the extraordinary collection formed by George Costakis in the Soviet Union, when Constructivism and Suprematism were out Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This is a strangely kaleidoscopic approach to documentary. A selection of recently unearthed footage and interviews which shows the Black Power movement in the USA through the eyes of idealistic Swedish film-makers, now re-edited and framed with the voices and music of both modern and veteran black radical cultural figures, it provides a disorienting, shifting set of superimposed viewpoints of a period in which in any case change seemed to be the only certainty.The footage itself is gripping and often truly eye-opening, particularly when it's at its most ordinary. The stories of dramatic Read more ...
David Nice
You don't need to buy into the loose hell-purgatory-paradise trajectory of Puccini's one-act operas to greet the triptych as his comprehensive masterpiece, full of wry interconnections, orchestral wizardry and grateful if tough vocal writing. Fourteen years on from his gorgeous recording, Royal Opera principal conductor Antonio Pappano is still digging for treasurable detail in each opera; and that master-director of the unexpected Richard Jones was bound to find hidden links between his already classic production of towering operatic comedy Gianni Schicchi and the two thornier propositions Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week there's another new Mahler symphony recording, along with some disquieting British piano music and an enjoyable disc of originals and transcriptions played by a young Baltic accordionist.Frank Bridge – Piano Music Vol 3 Mark Bebbington (Somm)The bolder, more challenging pieces are the stand-outs in Mark Bebbington’s handsomely played and produced Frank Bridge recital – yet they’re sometimes curiously reticent to lodge in the memory. Bridge, still best remembered as the young Britten’s most influential teacher, possessed an acute sense of economy and scale – few of the miniatures on Read more ...