Southbank Centre
igor.toronyilalic
It's often more fun on the margins. The pickings are richer. The view is clearer. You can take aim easier. The AV Festival has spent more than eight years here, on the counter-cultural edges, delving into the divisional cracks between art, music and film. This year, with the Cultural Olympiad swallowing up everything for its year-long national pat on the back, independent artistic thinking is at a premium. AV, however, have not only escaped the Olympiad's clutches but have upended the boastful spirit of 2012 with a theme that is about as co-optable for national self-aggrandisement as a Read more ...
peter.quinn
Released last month on One Fine Day Records to excellent reviews, last night saw the first of an 11-date UK tour for Gerry Diver's remarkable multimedia work, The Speech Project. Conceived over the past four years by musician, composer and producer Diver, a former member of Irish world music group Sin é and Shane McGowan's The Popes, at its heart The Speech Project features new and archival spoken word recordings of seminal Irish musicians and singers including Shane MacGowan, Christy Moore, Damien Dempsey, Joe Cooley, Danny Meehan, Martin Hayes and Margaret Barry.Specific motifs or phrases Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Despite the best attempts of Stephen Johnson’s programme notes to create synthesis from last night’s London Philharmonic Orchestra concert, there was something rather smash and grab about the programming. It was as though Jurowski, suddenly inspired to play classical Supermarket Sweep, had emerged with a disparate trolley-load of Zemlinsky, Mozart and Szymanowski – oh, and the Brahms Violin Concerto. With a full crowd lured by big-name soloist Joshua Bell, the question was not only what the LPO would make of this disparate collections of curiosities, but also the audience.The Brahms concerto 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 ...
bruce.dessau
Immediately before Barry Adamson started his performance, the audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall was treated to a few fragrant verses about arts cinemas and the homeless from Yorkshire poet Geoffrey Allerton. The keen-eyed soon twigged that Allerton was actually a fictional construct, part-Simon Armitage, part-Freddie Trueman, created by comedian Simon Day. A beautifully idiosyncratic prelude to a pretty idiosyncratic headline set.When Barry Adamson stalked on stage, posing at the top of a short staircase on a white Austin Powers shagpile, it would have been easy to mistake him for Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Poor old Stephen Hough. The Liszt double. Again! Was he not at all Liszted out after last year's epic bicentenary? Were we not Liszted out by last year's epic bicentenary? Hough has been living, breathing and eating these two pieces for the past year and a half. The familiarity might have bred contempt. Amazingly it hasn't. In fact, all the prep work of last year appeared to make this performance of the first two piano concertos one of the most satisfying I've heard.The works are well known to us today. The rhetorical gestures, the reveries, the roulades are pure Liszt, the epitome of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The London Philharmonic’s current festival – Prokofiev: Man of the People? – is all about the question mark. While the festival’s concerts, lectures and even its classical club-night each make their own statement, the overarching spirit here is one of exploration, of questioning. Jurowski and his orchestra are peeling back the composer’s grinning modernist mask and attempting to expose the human face (or possibly faces) behind it. It’s a provocative process, and one that calls Prokofiev’s lesser-known works to testify against the evidence of such popular, high-gloss favourites as Romeo and Read more ...
bruce.dessau
It is a ridiculous idea but also a strangely appealing one. Five Australians recreate the music of composer Ennio Morricone's 80-piece troupe on a variety of traditional instruments as well as an instrument made out of string and a tin can, plus some bubble wrap, an alarm clock, two asthma inhalers and numerous other household items. Imagine a cross between Tom Waits in his junkyard phase and John Noakes building something on Blue Peter three decades ago. As I said, ridiculous, but strangely appealing.From the cod-Clint Eastwood whispered intro onwards this band successfully treads a parmesan Read more ...
peter.quinn
2011 can only be described as a banner year for vocal jazz. Gretchen Parlato is blessed with one of the most mellifluous timbres in jazz, but it's her highly developed rhythmic concept that really marks her out. Like some of the great Brazilian singers, Parlato can make the bar line disappear. It helps that she's got a killing band, and together on The Lost and Found they perform the subtlest metrical shifts in the blink of an eye.Gretchen Parlato performs "How We Love" (excerpt) from The Lost and FoundTwo world-class UK singers, Ian Shaw and Liane Carroll, both released career-best Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Slava’s Snowshow is a Christmas package you don’t want to have unwrapped for you by someone else's description - it’s a fantastical, childlike, theatrical experience that for many is among the most profoundly delighting of their theatre-going experience, for others an empty whimsy. It's a show of mime, clowning and coups de théâtre, stunningly conceived on the twin themes of snow and the gruelling Russian winters outdoors, where street cleaners live out their lives, vagrants of an outcast kind of peculiarity and optimistic imagination, where brooms and bins are constants in their lives, where Read more ...
David Nice
Before his slightly over-extended majesty drops behind a cloud at the end of this bicentenary year, and following Louis Lortie’s light-and-shade monodrama on Sunday, Franz Liszt has moved back to left-of-centre in two ambitious midweek concerts. In the second instalment of Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s rather drily named “Liszt Project” last night, the composer became a kind of black hole absorbing even adventurous successors; but I suspect his dance-of-death side would have disposed him even more favourably to the crazy ambition of Khatia Buniatishvili’s half-elegiac programming the night before. Read more ...