Kings Place
David Nice
It only takes a few great Lieder by Schumann and Liszt to show the kinds of songs Wagner didn’t, or couldn’t, write. Very well, so the rarities in this programme were whimsies he composed in his youth, but even the Wesendonck Lieder, sole voice-and-piano masterpieces of his maturity, don’t show much concern for the little details of humanity. Fortunately Janice Watson rose to great form to show us what, quite apart from the two "studies" for Tristan und Isolde, their opulent generalities are all about. And her pianist in a thousand, Joseph Middleton, treated Wagner’s phrase endings with as Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This is the third Songlines Encounters festival at Kings Place. Wednesday’s programme featured Balkans, Polish and Georgian music, Thursday had Egyptian Baladi Blues and Louisiana’s Sarah Savoy, and Friday featured West Africa, Spain and Palestine.Malick Pathé Sow opens with a short solo set on the Senegalese ngoni, the hoddu, singing in a high, clear, declaiming style, the big, deep ghimbri-like bass notes of the large hoddu punctuating and emphasising the verses. Then he is joined by Senegalese kora player Bao Sissoko, with touches of percussion on the calabash, for a song representing “the Read more ...
David Nice
We had, as presenter James Naughtie so wryly remarked, set aside our mourning weeds for the low-key glamour of celebrating a far from moribund classical recording industry. Movers, shakers and humble BBC Music Magazine contributors all shifted from the airy dining space at the ever-accommodating Kings Place yesterday - I won't forget the mint marshmallow - and descended to woody Hall One for the magazine's 2013 awards.Editor Oliver Condy had a hard act to precede in the shape of quick-quipping Naughtie, but he made us laugh with news of an anniversary less vaunted than Wagner’s, Verdi’s or Read more ...
peter.quinn
Suddenly, it's raining Duke Ellington homages. Stateside, there's Terri Lyne Carrington's Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue, a brilliant reimagining of Ellington's classic 1963 trio recording with Charles Mingus and Max Roach that recently hit the top spot on the JazzWeek radio chart. Here in the UK, the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra's latest release In the Spirit of Duke – recorded on tour during October 2012 – features an all-Duke programme which captures the Ellington Orchestra sound down to the tiniest detail. This evening at the QEH, the Nu Civilisation Orchestra joins the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Kings Place’s Bach Unwrapped season invites audiences to come at the composer from new and unexpected angles. Bach gets arranged, adapted and re-orchestrated, and his legacy is showcased in works from three centuries. Occasionally however he also gets played straight – and it doesn’t get much straighter or more authentic than the Academy of Ancient Music and the Choir of King’s College Cambridge performing the St Matthew Passion.Hall One is a lovely, intimate concert hall with a malleable acoustic and good sightlines, but what it definitely isn’t is a church. Bach’s Passions have the Read more ...
David Nice
Faced with yet another world premiere from his friends in the Borodin Quartet, Shostakovich severely asked them whether they’d yet played all of Haydn’s quartets (they hadn’t). As a listener, I feel the same about Bach’s cantatas. Whether or not a lifetime will be enough to catch each of these varied and ever surprising little miracles in the flesh, Kings Place’s Bach Unwrapped series includes a chance to hear nearly 30 of the 200 from seven different ensembles in less than a year. Unfortunately it looks as if I drew the short straw at the end of the first four concerts.There was only one Read more ...
Louise Gray
In 1991, the Basque performance artist Esther Ferrar wrote a letter to modern music’s inventive genius, John Cage, on the future of anarchism. Ferrar’s letter – written in the year before Cage died – was in fact a reply to a question about anarchy’s prospects that the composer had thrown out to the wider world (typically, in the form of mesostic poem called “Overpopulation and Art”), and it’s true to say – as this last event in the short Cage Rattling season made clear, that two streams of anarchy were being addressed: on the one hand, the unfettered possibilities flowing from Cage’s chance Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
If the three-day Songlines Encounters Festival got off to a rousing start with folk-punk rowdiness from Poland’s R.U.T.A, by last night things were decidedly more genteel. The Festival, anyway, was an exhilarating musical voyage. Spiro’s last album is called Kaleidophonica, and sports a dizzying cover. Rather than the lysergic rush that might suggest, their music is pastoral but as intricate as a Swiss watch, seemingly restrained but with visionary undercurrents.The Bristol-based instrumental band have been going for 17 years. A couple of years ago they were signed to Peter Gabriel’s Real Read more ...
simon.broughton
With the yelling and posturing, R.U.T.A. are clearly a punk band, but it’s like no punk band you’ve ever heard before. The lyrics are in Polish, for one thing, and there are no guitars, but Middle Eastern lutes, archaic fiddles and a battery of percussion. They only formed last year, but already R.U.T.A. – a jokey acronym for the Movement of Utopia, Transcendence and Anarchy - have stirred up controversy.The conservative Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (Law and Justice) party, second largest in the Polish parliament, tried to get them banned at a festival for being “anti-Polish and anti-Catholic”. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Relentlessly energetic, opinionated, and never less than passionate about music-making, Ilan Volkov is a close as you get to a prodigy in the world of conducting. Appointed as Young Conductor in association with the Northern Sinfonia at just 19, at 28 Volkov became the youngest ever chief conductor of a BBC orchestra, and almost 10 years later still continues his relationship with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as their Principal Guest Conductor. Most recently appointed as Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, and with a growing schedule of international Read more ...
peter.quinn
Soweto Kinch's set last night as part of the eXplorations mini-series featured gluttony, envy and a host of other vices. No, not A Life in the Day of an Investment Banker, but a tantalising glimpse of Kinch's take on the Seven Deadly Sins.Presenting material from Kinch's most recent release (The New Emancipation) in the first half, “Trying to be a Star” set the mood for the entire evening: a riotous mix of sax, bass, drums, pre-recorded material and spoken/sung elements, with Kinch flexing his singing voice on the chorus hook. From the outset, his rhythm section of bassist Karl Read more ...