RFH
Kieron Tyler
Low don’t really look as though they’re given to ostentatious display. With their black shirts, polished footwear and sensible haircuts, they could be waiting staff in a formal restaurant. One with a lot of dark wood and banquettes. The Hendrix-like squall that preceded last night’s set opener “Nothing But Heart” quickly subsided. These flashes are enough to show how intensely Low’s hidden fires burn.On “Drugs”, Sparhawk sang “I was a child, I was on fire, I stayed alive while all else died”. The fundamental tension at the heart of Low is a battle between intensity and their self-defined Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The Southbank Centre has announced that musician/visual artist Antony will be curating the 19th Meltdown Festival this August. The avant-garde performer and lead singer with Mercury Award-winning Antony and the Johnsons follows in the footsteps of previous directors including Jarvis Cocker, Robert Wyatt, Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Ornette Coleman, David Bowie and, most recently, Ray Davies.The artist who emerged from the New York underground art scene of the early 1990s will curate 12 days of music, debate and performance that reflect his interests, influences and passions. Issues Read more ...
geoff brown
Their bicentennial years may have been and gone, but even Mazeppa’s wild horse wouldn’t be able to stop the world’s top pianists playing Chopin and Liszt almost every month. Last night Maurizio Pollini and his aristocratic art returned to the Royal Festival Hall for a recital featuring both composers, each on either side of the interval. Pollini also brought his Steinway-Fabbrini touring piano – a Steinway from the Hamburg factory, titivated inside with extra refinements by the piano technician Angelo Fabbrini. People clustered round it in the interval snapping photos, as if they’d spotted a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's one of the fundamental rules of concert-going that in any given season there will be one piece that trips you up. And that piece will always be by Berlioz. No matter what new alchemical concoctions Boulez, Lachenmann, Ferneyhough or Rihm will throw at you, someone will programme something by the 19th-century French composer - usually something with a perfectly benign-sounding title like King Lear Overture or Roméo et Juliette - that will in fact sound more modern, more outlandish, more baffling than anything written before or since. So it was again last night.The first riddle was Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You couldn't imagine a less likely acrobat than avuncular American Richard Goode. But when it comes to the piano, there's no mistaking it. A nippy little tumbler he undoubtedly is. Today we saw his fingers bounce about the keyboard like a troupe of prepubescent Romanian gymnasts. The sleepy Sunday concert that many had clearly hoped for was not going to be the narrative of this kinetic performance.The first work on the programme might have lulled some into a false sense of security. Schumann's Kinderszenen called mostly on Goode's avuncularism. He responded with some tender pianistic sketches Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A music broadcaster commented after last night’s concert by the Australian Chamber Orchestra that all the hype, all the talk about the surf-obsessed, free-spirited leader Richard Tognetti, had left her half expecting them to surf onto the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. As they walked on however (decorously, and rather more smartly dressed than most English groups) we were reminded that there’s nothing gimmicky about this ensemble. They might stage surf-music retreats, play concerts in the Australian desert, but when it comes down to performance they are as ferociously serious as any of Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Sometimes the most disturbing images exist only in our imaginations - and so the questions posed in the preface to Bartók’s operatic masterpiece Duke Bluebeard’s Castle become especially pertinent: “Where did this happen - outside or within? Where is the stage - outside or within?” The answers, surely, lie “within”, making the prospect of a “semi-staged” climax to Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Philharmonia Bartók series, Infernal Dance, a potentially troubling one.There was a “set” - a grey-walled shell and a pendulous shard-like mobile whose mere presence had one fearing the worst. And so the first Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
John Grant’s Queen of Denmark was released less than 18 months ago. Yet here it is, already being performed at one these "so-and-so plays such-and-such an album" shows. Does it merit this treatment? Based on last night, yes. This one-off reunion of Grant with his patrons, Texas’s Midlake, lit the Festival Hall with the beauty and literate miserabilism of his songs. In jeans, suit jacket and a T-shirt, Grant strolled on stage and the audience erupted in applause. He’s touched a chord.Although last night was billed as “performing the songs from Queen of Denmark” it was more than that. It Read more ...
David Nice
If Eric Coates’s Knightsbridge March is good enough for Gergiev, who conducted it as a saving-grace encore of a very messy World Orchestra for Peace Prom in 2005 (17 orchestral leaders in the first violins, not a happy gambit), then it’s certainly worth the time of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and one of its biggest sound-shapers. Bright spark John Wilson unhesitatingly claims Coates as his favourite light-music composer. But this concert served up more than just bubbles in the champagne of the Southbank’s Festival of Britain 60th anniversary celebrations; there was some decent semi-serious Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Tickets were like gold dust for this one and the stage was lit as if some of that dust had been sprinkled on the Festival Hall in a midsummer dream of a concert. The massed ranks of the Crouch End Festival Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra and a backing rock band magicked up on the Southbank to pay handsome tribute to the presiding Puck and genius loci Raymond Douglas Davies, alumnus of the William Grimshaw Secondary Modern School, in the manor of Muswell Hill. As the last night of the Meltdown series, curated by Davies, was it all hopelessly OTT? Short answer: yes. But it was also Read more ...
David Nice
What next - Boulez and Daniel Barenboim in Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov? The two numbered Liszt concertos are probably as far as they're going to go in lacier romantic repertoire, and last night it didn't feel far enough to justify the predictable standing ovation. Like three of the works on the advertised programme - Wagner's Siegfried Idyll the exception - the performances were masterly and original without hitting the heights, revealing in orchestral textures and pianistic versatility without being revelatory.Curiously, of the two it was Barenboim who fell shorter of every facet required by Read more ...
david.cheal
How much did I like this show? Well, here’s a clue: at the end, the only really bad thing I could think of was that the bass guitar could have been a bit louder. I’ve seen David Gray on stage quite a few times now, and this was easily the most satisfying show, the one that did justice to his voice, his music, his songs, and especially his lyrics, which were, almost uniquely for such an event, audible and understandable almost word for word.Ever since he had a hit 12 years ago with the folktronic “Babylon”, David Gray has become the man that the pop cognoscenti like to sneer at; a singer- Read more ...