Southbank Centre
John L Walters
The 10-day London Jazz Festival, now in its 19th year, is a diverse and international festival that embraces the unapologetically commercial Jazz Voice, the outer reaches of (free) free improv and even Abram Wilson’s Jazz for Toddlers. Despite a line-up that’s both starry and distinguished there was no single name that might encapsulate the festival’s rainbow palette. You can get a taste of its breadth from the three giants competing for our attention on the final night: Brazilian pioneer Hermeto Pascoal, guitarist Bill Frisell and free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman. I rationed myself to Read more ...
marcus.odair
It’s nine days into the 10-day London Jazz Festival, and highlights so far include the double bill of saxophonists Steve Williamson and Steve Coleman, and the UK’s own Empirical supporting veterans Archie Shepp and Joachim Kuhn (the former a mellowed African-American firebrand, the latter a German pianist with all the wild intensity of Klaus Kinski in a Beethoven biopic). Contemporary crooner Gregory Porter, who played the "Jazz on 3" launch at Ronnie Scott’s, didn't do much for me, but it seems already to have been written that he is THE FUTURE OF JAZZ and it might just come to pass.The room Read more ...
geoff brown
Noticed that nip in the air recently? The reason now is obvious: conductor Osmo Vänskä, the brisk wind from Minnesota, has blown into town, challenging London’s orchestral musicians to give beyond their best and uncover new layers in repertory works they previously assumed they knew backwards. Last year, the London Philharmonic sweated blood with the Minnesota Orchestra’s rigorous conductor over Sibelius’s symphonies; last night, in a one-off, orchestra and conductor faced up to Bruckner and his Fourth Symphony, the Romantic. The result wasn’t universally liked. An aggrieved gent, Read more ...
peter.quinn
Funkier than a James Brown bridge, the mighty Soul Rebels Brass Band swung back into town last night and flattened all before them. Possessing that rare combination of serious chops, impeccable stagecraft and down-home soul, they confirmed their position as one of the most explosive live acts on the scene. From the very opening bars of Stevie Wonder's “Living for the City”, taken from their current Rounder album Unlock Your Mind, the Soul Rebels had the entire QEH off their seats.The continuous set featured the reggae-fied uplift of the title track, the dazzling call-and-response interplay Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
We all know the question at issue last night at the Young Vic where Hamlet was opening, but down the road in the Queen Elizabeth Hall it was one of applause. Clapping between movements is a well-worn topic; we’ve had editorial, essays, even an RPS lecture devoted to the subject with no resolution in sight. Every year the Proms reminds us of the natural release a good clap can provide after a monumental first movement, and every year we return to our hands-clenched ways afterwards. Last night, witnessing some of the finest Beethoven London has seen in a vintage year for the composer, I can’t 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 ...
Russ Coffey
The anticipation of Glen Campbell’s valedictory concerts has gone far beyond the goodbye to his music. It’s involved a reflection on his entire life. The sugar-throated cowboy with film-star looks and ballads as epic as daybreak in Arkansas has lived life like a great American novel. One of 12 children of a sharecropper, he went on to play the guitar with The Beach Boys, act with John Wayne, marry four times, and count Ronald Reagan as his friend. But with the onset of Alzheimer’s this is the last time the public will get to see him reflecting on his extraordinary years.Recent interviewers Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I wasn’t around to see when Karole Armitage won her spurs in her twenties as a punk ballet choreographer in America in the 1970s and early Eighties, so we must rely on her programme-sheet biography to explain to us that she is “seen by some critics as the true choreographic heir" to George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham. After last night’s dismal showing by her group, Armitage Gone! Dance, at the Southbank Centre, the only possible response is, “Pull the other one” and a firm slap across the hubris.It had started badly with Armitage stepping up in a sparse Queen Elizabeth Hall to lecture us Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We're living through a golden age of Bruckner conducting. A revolutionary age. Young sparks like Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Ilan Volkov are doing extraordinary things with the Austrian's music, experimenting with speeds and phrasing, reshaping him in a more extraterrestrial, more lithe and modern mould. All of which means that trying to get yourself noticed conducting Bruckner in the 2010s is a bit like trying to get yourself noticed as a footballer in 1970s Brazil. Good luck.But before we got a chance to assess whether the living legend Claudio Abbado made the grade in his Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
William Glock once claimed that Pierre Boulez could literally vomit at music he believed to be substandard. I wonder what he would have made of my friend, who fled at the interval of the opening concert of the Southbank festival on Friday blaming Boulez's Domaines for setting off a panic attack. Her physical response was certainly a welcome corrective to the nonchalance with which the critical world increasingly greets Boulez's language, many of whom still insist that the days of serialism provoking anger or revulsion are in the distant past. Boulez can still upset. He even upset me a Read more ...
David Nice
It was bound, in vocal terms, to be a case of Beauty and the Beast. Stefan Vinke, though useful for killer heroic-tenor parts like this one in Mahler’s Song of the Earth, has made some of the ugliest sounds I’ve heard over the past few seasons, ineffable mezzo Alice Coote many of the loveliest, and with great communication, too. The wild card was fitfully engaged old-master conductor Lorin Maazel: would he stop dragging the Philharmonia behemoth-like behind him and let it be the bird of paradise Coote needed to share her deepest meditations?At first, that seemed unlikely. Maazel (pictured Read more ...
David Nice
How odd that Musorgsky, a composer sanctified beyond his very individual deserts for making social statements in his art, should be feted by an orchestra, or rather an orchestral management, which says music and politics don't mix. They clearly have in recent events which led to the suspension of four London Philharmonic players, but you wouldn't have known it either from an audience riveted into silence - in-house protests fortunately failed to materialise - or from no hint of a leaflet outside the hall (not so good; don't those players have any colleagues willing to advertise their plight Read more ...