Scotland
Tom Baily
A documentary about celebration, fellowship, and the comforting afterglow of cherished memories. What better way to spend a cold late-Autumn evening? Such is the effect of this charming, low-key investigation into the story of Scotch. Rich with personal stories, The Amber Light studies whisky via social history: how and why the golden dram has brought people together.Water, barley, yeast, a boiler and a barrel. Most of us know the basics of how whisky is made (the film devotes about 30 seconds to reminding us), but how and why did it originate? Director Adam Park teams with writer Dave Broom Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There was something fitting about the Lumineers entrance in Glasgow. As “Gimme Shelter” blared around the SSE Hydro, lights pulsating over the crowd, it was drummer Jeremiah Fraites who took the stage and started the opening beat of “Sleep On The Floor”, an array of phones quickly whipped out to act as a welcoming committee from the crowd. The rest of the band followed in due course, but this is a group for whom the drums are at the heart of their stomping songs, no matter what.The other key element is, of course, the voice of Wesley Schultz , an unassuming and laid back frontman, who Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Time moves fast in the music business. It has only been a matter of months since Fontaines DC were playing the far smaller confines of King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow, and here they were at a sold out SWG3, celebrating the success of debut album “Dogrel”. If that record is one of the finest released this year, then this gig was not quite the victory lap hoped for, albeit still a show that displayed evidence of their quality.The record itself is rich in thoughtful lyricism, the nuances of which were somewhat lost in a live setting. That was not particularly problematic, because the sheer Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Composer, classical guitarist and ensemble leader Simon Thacker has spent the past decade immersed in distinct musical cultures; from the reinterpretations and reimaginings of the musical traditions of eastern Europe and the Roma people that underpin his Songs of the Roma trio, to his collaborative work with musicians from across the Indian subcontinent under the ever-expanding Svara-Kanti name. Simon Thacker’s Ritmata is a back-to-basics of sorts: the first album from Thacker’s original musical ensemble, Táradh is a collection of mostly original compositions which draw inspiration from Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
To hear Neeme Järvi conduct the Royal Scottish National Orchestra is to witness one of the great musical partnerships, one that has evolved into an enduring friendship. It was in 1984 that the Estonian Järvi was appointed to succeed Sir Alexander Gibson as the then SNO’s principal conductor; as a BBC technician at the time I remember his first radio interview with BBC Scotland – this unknown conductor, from an almost forgotten Baltic state, seemed shy and awkward in front of the microphone and struggled in faltering English to articulate his vision for the orchestra. But what a difference he Read more ...
David Nice
Verdi, Elgar, Janáček, John Adams - just four composers who achieved musical transcendence to religious texts as what convention would label non-believers, and so have no need of the "forgiveness" the Fátima zealots pray for their kind in James MacMillan's The Sun Danced. Dodgily championed by fellow conservative Damian Thompson - ouch - as "fearless defender of the Catholic faith and Western civilization" (for which I read, no Muslims in Europe, please), MacMillan is rather nauseatingly cited as a composer with a direct line to his Catholic God (he doesn't claim that himself); but, dammit, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In March of this year Edwyn Collins released his ninth studio album, Badbea, his fourth since two life-altering cerebral haemorrhages derailed him in 2005. It’s a vivacious collection that runs the gamut of what guitar pop can be, from acoustic strumming to psychedelic riffing to lo-fi punkin’, all catchy as burrs. His set is peppered with it. By the time he reaches the encore, even the slow, elegiac title track, with its gloomy references to “a ruined monument to life and death”, holds the audience rapt.Clad in a Fred Perry-style white shirt with red trim, Collins initially appears on stage Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It’s now Edinburgh Fringe transfer season in London, but here’s one they made earlier: Cora Bissett’s Fringe First-winning autobiographical play from the 2018 Festival about her time in 1990s indie band Darlingheart. Though the broad shape of this tale is familiar, Bissett’s gig-theatre approach lends it a raw authenticity and engaging confessional quality.Bissett (pictured below) was still at school when she replied to an advert in the local Fife paper and became the lead singer of Darlingheart. She was driven less by musical ambition – though Patti Smith was already a favourite – more Read more ...
David Nice
Human sacrifice has a disconcerting and wonderful effect upon great composers, above all when it involves the supremely queasy issue of a father vowing to offer up his child: think of Britten with Abraham and Isaac, Mozart with Idomeneo and Idamante, Gluck with Agamemnon and Iphigenia, and here Handel with Jephtha and Iphis in his last oratorio. How the nominally devout composer responded to this Old Testament horror is at its most astonishing in the choral response at the end of the Second Act, and that certainly hit us hard in last night's Prom.Changing lines from Pope ending "what God Read more ...
David Nice
Puccini's and Abbé Prévost's glitter-seduced Manon Lescaut might have been inclined to linger longer in the salon of dirty old man Geronte if he'd served her up not his own madrigals but Bach's music for various harpsichords and ensemble. Five such concertos gave us a morning of pure pleasure in the light-filled, packed-to-the-rafters surroundings of the wonderful Queen's Hall (★★★★), a sober though appreciative audience sitting and standing around the artists in the converted church like a Lutheran congregation, yet were all but eclipsed by the seductive force of Puccini's first great love Read more ...
David Nice
Love him or hate him, Lars von Trier has time and again made the unpalatable and the improbable real and shatteringly moving in a succession of great films. Breaking the Waves set an audacious precedent. Baldly told, it's a story of a mentally ill, deeply loving woman at odds with her Hebridean community who thinks she can save her paralysed husband by having sex with strangers and describing the acts to him. The numinous outcome requires suspension of disbelief, and in one way opera is equipped to do that. But the art-form is littered with problem plots about sacrificial women, albeit so Read more ...
Royce Vavrek
It was during the 1997 Golden Globe Awards telecast that I first caught a glimpse of the film that would change my life completely. Midway through the ceremony was featured a short clip of a paralysed man telling a young woman, his wife, to go and find another man to make love to. She was to come back to him and tell him about her sexual encounter. “It will feel like we are together,” he says. “Love will keep me alive.” My 13-year-old brain exploded.They were Bess and Jan, the central characters in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Wave; the complexities of their narrative I would fully glean Read more ...