21st century
Bernard Hughes
Julian Anderson’s 50th birthday this year was the prompt for the latest of the BBC’s Total Immersion days, devoted to the work of a single contemporary composer. I have long been a fan of Anderson’s music since hearing the marvellous Khorovod in the 1995 Proms, but, after a couple of recent blips – I was not so keen on the opera Thebans or the recent Piano Concerto – I was ready to have my admiration re-awakened. And, in large measure, it was.The day consisted of three concerts of which I heard two: the BBC Singers surveying Anderson’s choral output and the BBC Symphony Orchestra his Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The controversial historian Niall Ferguson is the author of some dozen books, including substantial narratives of the Rothschild dynasty, a history of money, and a study of Henry Kissinger up to and including the Vietnam war. His new one has the subtitle Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power, and in it he turns his attention to analysing that most overworked 21st century word, “network”, as well as one that makes many uncomfortable in its encapsulation of inequality, “hierarchy”.We are given to conspiracy theories, but Ferguson goes well beyond exploding such myths – we are Read more ...
mark.kidel
Robert Plant once again ploughs the vibrant field he cultivated on his last album Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar. The mix of Led Zeppelin-rooted hard rock, softly passionate English folk with Arab rhythm and blues works wonders. Plant has, perhaps more than any other British musician, served the sacred roots of rock’n’roll. From the opening “May Queen”, which references age-old Celtic rituals, driven along crazily by the snare-buzz of the North African bendir, until the quiet and meditative closing track, “Heaven Sent”, Plant, as before accompanied by the Sensational Space Shifters Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Director Jakob M Erwa's Centre of My World may be a coming-of-age story, but it’s definitely not a “coming out” one. Youthful hero Phil (Louis Hofmann) has barely reached the third sentence of his voiceover narration before he tells us he’s gay, and absolutely fine about it. There may be plenty of other emotional dysfunction in Phil’s world, but concerns about his own sexuality don’t feature.It’s an encouraging perspective to start from, particularly when we remember that Erwa’s film is an adaptation of an acclaimed Young Adult novel by Andreas Steinhofel The Centre of the World (Die Mitte Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Apparently it was Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s idea to invite Jörg Widmann to be the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Artist in Residence this season – indeed, according to backstage rumours she made the phone call herself. If that’s true, it’s a hugely encouraging bit of intelligence. Widmann’s the perfect choice of artist to surf the energy that Gražinytė-Tyla is currently generating in Birmingham. He’s a charismatic soloist, and a composer of music with real potential audience appeal: flamboyant, vivid, grounded in (but never inhibited by) tradition, and madly in love with the sound Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When An Inconvenient Truth won the best documentary Oscar 10 years ago, the film’s success marked two significant events: a positive turning point in the campaign to avert environmental catastrophe; and the resurrection of the public career of Al Gore, after his presidential defeat at the hands of George W Bush. It also happened to be a very good documentary.That first film galvanised both debate and action related to climate change. The aim of the cutely titled second has a textbook campaigning duality: to trumpet the efforts and successes of the past decade, while reminding Gore’s growing Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The blossoming of modern classical into a serious commercial contender has been an unexpected recent development. Then again, it should come as no surprise that in a world raddled by stuff to hear and look at 24/7, people are turning to music that offers contemplative peace and quiet, that’s all about eyes-closed, non-verbal beauty. For it is the floaty, gentle, soothing styles that are taking off, not a resurgence in Wagnerian opera. The likes of Ludovico Einardi, Max Richter, Joep Beving, Nils Frahm and Jóhann Jóhannsson, often with connections to cinema, are offering rich, mostly keyboard- Read more ...
Helen Wallace
"Everyone suddenly burst out singing"’ wrote Siegfried Sassoon in his paean to humanity amidst the horror of war, "Everyone Sang". And sing they did, all 180 of them, crammed onto Garsington’s modest stage for its new community opera Silver Birch by Roxanna Panufnik to a libretto by Jessica Duchen. Here were primary school children, teenagers, professional singers, members of a women’s refuge, ex-military personnel, and a waggy-tailed dog. Even Sassoon’s own great-nephew lent voice to a chorus of roof-raising passion and purpose.And though the poet’s ghost (an expressive Bradley Travis) Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Oh those Victorians! Hail Prince Albert whose far-sighted ambition led to Albertopolis, embracing museums, galleries, universities and the Royal Albert Hall. And what in the early 21st century do you do with the Victoria & Albert Museum itself: one of the world’s greatest museums occupying higgledy piggledy buildings which have been a-building, expanding and growing topsy-turvy for more than a century and a half?In its largest building project since 1909, the museum continues to enhance, expand and change to meet different demands: demands from visitors, and demands from the objects Read more ...
Bill Knight
At heart, Photo London is a selling fair for expensive photographic prints. You wander through the steamy labyrinth of Somerset House from gallery show to gallery show surrounded by black-clad snapperati, assaulted on all sides by images until lost in photography. This year the show is said to be the subject of a "rigorous curatorial process" designed to show rare historical treasures, new work by established masters, and work by the brightest new stars. But surely I saw that print here last year? And didn’t I see that Karsh portrait of Winston Churchill on a five-pound note?There are great Read more ...
mark.kidel
Contemporary music from Mali hovers delicately (and creatively) between purist tradition and more or less successful attempts at making things more attractive to a younger and worldwide audience. Oumou Sangaré’s first five albums for the British World Circuit label stuck mostly to the raunchy Wassoulou style, characterized by pentatonic style and irresistible loping polyrhythms; but her first with No Format, who have, paradoxically, distinguished themselves with very fine acoustic albums for Ballaké Sissoko, Vincent Ségal and Kasse Mady Diabaté, launches into new territory, the great singer’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain was a work of political protest when it premiered in 2000, in 2017 it’s a piece that reads more like a commentary – a disturbing musical documentary that captures nearly 20 years of escalating European tensions, suspicions and right-wing extremism. As harmonic consensus gave way last night to chattering confusion, musical certainty to a distorted multiplicity of possibilities, abstraction has rarely felt more pointed, more horribly specific.But Haas’s most famous work brings its own baggage. Hailed internationally as a contemporary masterpiece and championed Read more ...