21st century
graham.rickson
Streya: New works for solo violin and violin with electronics Olivia De Prato (violin) (New Focus Recordings)Combining acoustic instruments with electronics is a dark art, and tantalisingly few details about the process are revealed in the sleeve notes to violinist Olivia De Prato’s recital disc. Are the electronics taped or generated live? How is De Prato experiencing them? And how are the sounds notated, if at all? We're not told. Three electro-acoustic pieces are included here. Most immediate is Missy Mazzoli’s Vespers for Violin, a deep, warm bath of sound which sets solo violin Read more ...
Robert Beale
Adam Gorb’s The Path to Heaven, with libretto by Ben Kaye, is his longest work to date (almost two hours’ running time without interval) and on a story that could hardly be more tragic – the Holocaust. Its premiere at the Royal Northern College of Music was conducted by Mark Heron and given by members of Psappha with singers and musicians from the RNCM, directed by Stefan Janski.This was the culmination of a two-day festival of the music of Anthony Gilbert and Adam Gorb (pictured below), the first and present Heads of Composition of the RNCM respectively. It’s really a kind of opera Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Hot in the burning footsteps of Bargou 08, last year’s subtle but daring mix of traditional Tunisian sounds and electronic beats and textures, Sofyann Ben Youssef launches a new project under the name of AMMAR 808, Maghreb United. There is a great deal more fire and confidence in this new album, which plunges deeper into the rich sonic universe of the Maghreb while taking a few more risks with the contemporary electronic and rock elements that are deftly combined to create a beguiling whole.Traditional popular music from the Maghreb works with distortion – the snare on the bendir frame drum, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
One space, one person, one story, one voice – the monologue is theatre distilled, the purest form of entertainment. On a stage of packing boxes and boards, over the course of just over an hour, Paterson Joseph relays and plays the life of Charles Ignatius Sancho, the first British man of African origin to vote.As befits any good piece of bombast set in the 18th century, The Author opens Act One. In actual fact, the author is Paterson Joseph himself, who, having written himself, performs himself – a fictionalised, larger-than-life, theatrical simulacrum. He explains, “Politics wasn’t Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
In just five years, what the team behind Hidden Door Festival has achieved is quite remarkable. Having sprung up in 2014, taking over a group of disused vaults behind Waverley train station, the festival’s mission to transform redundant spaces in Edinburgh has left an immovable, and much needed, creative footprint on the city. In 2017 this not-for-profit festival, which is run entirely by volunteers, re-opened the Leith Theatre, a stunning venue which had lain in disuse for almost three decades.Having breathed new life into this incredible space, which is now gradually becoming used more and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A rope is mercy; a razor-blade to the throat, a kiss; a red-hot poker… But, of course, we never get anything so literal as the poker in George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s elegant, insinuating retelling of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. The title may separate its two concepts – Lessons in Love and Violence – but what we’re really unpicking here (what we’re always unpicking with these two authors) is the fleshy tangle of the two, the stubbornly indivisible, Roger McGough-style loveandviolence.This is an opera built on the sliding panels of elision, metaphor and metonymy – a shifting world Read more ...
David Nice
Insistence was the name of the LA Phil's first game in its short but ambitious three-day Barbican residency - insistence honed to a perfect sheen and focus, but wearing, for this listener at least, some way in to the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony played in the second half. The essence was a layered, ultimately blistering performance of Varèse's ever startling Amériques sculpted with the energetic rhythmic precision at which Gustavo Dudamel excels, and rich with sensuous perspectives not easy to achieve in this flattening, amplifying hall. That would have been enough to send us home bouncing and Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
It’s as intricate as it is concise. The depth to the architecture of James MacMillan’s Saxophone Concerto – which was given its world premiere this week by saxophonist Amy Dickson and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – is quite astounding, and all the more so for being packed into three five-minute movements. As with much of MacMillan’s music, the work is inspired by Scottish folk tunes, which certainly takes the saxophone into unusual territory in this concerto for solo instrument and string orchestra.The first movement, based on a march, strathspey and reel, is tight and spry, with the solo Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The title signalled what was coming so clearly, it may as well have been called When Bands End Badly: the two camps, the arguments and sniping and the eventual collapse of Culture Club’s US and UK tour to promote an album of new material. It’s hardly a surprise though – this is a band that, history shows, would have benefitted from the visible presence of an armed UN peacekeeping force.What is surprising is the way in which Boy George appears to be cast (by the rest of the band at least, if not explicitly the filmmakers) as the architect of this collapse: a sort of Fred Dibnah to the band’s Read more ...
Michael Rakowitz: The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, Fourth Plinth review - London's new guardian
Katherine Waters
Fifteen years ago on a cold grey Saturday in mid-February, Trafalgar Square was filled with people marching to Hyde Park in opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq. A million people gathered in London. Three times that number turned out in Rome. That day, across Europe and the rest of the world, between six to eleven million people participated in the largest coordinated anti-war rally in history. The scale of the movement was unprecedented. Protest globalised. Just over a month later air strikes took out Iraqi observation posts and troops crossed over the borders. The invasion of Iraq Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
McMafia has taught us to recognise one thing – you might call it the “Norton stride”. As the charismatic Alex Godman, James Norton has been advancing, confidently at screen centre, towards one challenge after another, and they have been coming (mildly put) from all sorts of unexpected quarters. He’s dealt with everything by pressing onwards, ignoring advice from all and sundry.Quite who he was propelling ahead to meet at the end of this final episode of Hossein Amini and James Watkins’s series was left a mystery. But if Vladimir Putin himself had slipped into shot, smiling lopsidedly, arm out Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The “insider’s guide to the music business” tag attached to Hits, Hype and Hustle: An Insider's Guide to the Music Business (BBC Four) dangles the carrot of all kinds of clandestine scams being exposed, such as extortionate recording contracts, systematic chart-rigging or Mafia rackets involving cut-out records. Instead, this episode was merely a meander through the history of live performances in rock music.Our host was John Giddings, a veteran agent and promoter who has worked with almost everyone you can think of, from the Stones and U2 to Genesis, Bowie and Madonna, and currently runs the Read more ...