Southbank Centre
howard.male
I love the fact that under the “genre” tab on their Facebook page, Orchestre National de Barbès have opted for “Other” from the dropdown menu. Obviously in Facebookland “Other” simply means not rock, soul, hi-hop, jazz, reggae, classical etc. However, in a metaphysical/philosophical sense “Other” can mean that which is alien, different or exotic. But what tickled me is that the music of this Parisian-based, largely Algerian band actually embraces just about all the Facebook categories they could have clicked on, even if none of them fully sums up the multilayered din they create.Although the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Summertime and the living is easy. Gershwin wrote it but it could almost be written by that apostle of California sun, Brian Wilson, who sung it with his band last night. Wilson wouldn’t have come up with a line like “your daddy’s rich, and your mama’s good-looking” - a bit too knowing. Wilson’s music was focused on surf, girls and cars, but had elements in common with Gershwin – working with brothers and burning out early, among other things.Gershwin died at 38, and by 38, Wilson, a sensitive soul, one of the walking wounded of the psychedelic wars, was into a couple of decades of catatonic Read more ...
Russ Coffey
There are some acts you’d rather not catch in a concert hall. The relatively recent pairing of King Creosote and Jon Hopkins isn’t, however, one of them. Diamond Mine, their seven-year project, is a deceptively serious piece of art that prefers to be listened to closely and without distraction. It may have been one of the more obscure nominees at this year’s Mercury Prize, but that recognition has resulted in an album that could easily have slipped quietly by, gaining fans fast. And last night those fans found themselves immersed in Diamond Mine’s meditative soundscapes whilst 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 ...
Kieron Tyler
Ólafur Arnalds used to drum for a hardcore band called Fighting Shit. But since 2007 he’s produced a string of achingly emotive CDs that integrate sparse piano, keening strings and subtle electronic texture. He’s Icelandic and, inevitably, his instrumental music is usually described as evoking empty landscapes and long stretches of darkness. But judging by last night's concert, his sunny outlook, affability and humour cut dead all thoughts of dark nights of the soul feeding his muse.A stately piano piece, based around a series of repeated and building arpeggios titled "Poland" wasn’t a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The weekend of 29 to 31 July will see London's Festival Hall transformed into what the venue describes as a “multi–venue vintage playground”. Vintage, founded by Wayne and Gerardine Hemingway, comes to London for the first time to celebrate the popular culture of Britain’s past. The Festival Hall is a fitting host, as it was constructed for 1951’s Festival of Britain and is, itself, a piece of living history.Vintage is a bulk-buy experience. The decades celebrated are the 1920s, Thirties, Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. There will be eight nightclubs, each dedicated to one Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s hardly as if he needed critical resuscitation, but the work of Simon Gray is enjoying a moment in the limelight. Butley, starring Dominic West, is currently on in the West End, while in August BFI Southbank is to show a season of films written by Gray for the small screen and large.Among his films written for the BBC are his Play for Today double bill Plaintiffs and Defendants and Two Sundays, shown in 1975 and both starring Alan Bates. From his scripts for Screen Two there are After Pilkington starring Bob Peck and Miranda Richardson as childhood sweethearts who meet again in 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 ...
bruce.dessau
The Meltdown Festival's tribute to Tony Wilson was a lot like the charismatic post-punk legend himself: funny, eccentric, obscure, populist; all over the place but never dull. Wilson died in August 2007 and this event was a reminder of his reputation as one of music's most fascinating post-punk provocateurs, giving the world Joy Division, Happy Mondays and more. It was also a reminder of his reputation, as poet Mike Garry put it, as a "knobhead". As someone who appeared on regional news programmes quoting Wordsworth while hang-gliding, Wilson could be spectacularly uncool.Proceedings, hosted Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
"I used to be able to run down these," whispered a wobbly 77-year-old Harrison Birtwistle to friends as he stumbled down the stairs to the Queen Elizabeth Hall stage to take his bow at last night's London Sinfonietta concert (for some inexplicable reason part of Ray Davies's Meltdown series at the Southbank). Birtwistle and his former partner-in-crime Peter Maxwell Davies - and their feral musical creations - used also to be very good at running foul of the musical establishment. For some reason, Sirs, Harrison Birtwistle, CH, and Peter Maxwell Davies, CBE, Master of the Queen's Music, don't Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We all make mistakes. I was absent for the start of Ingrid Fliter's Tempest sonata at her Queen Elizabeth Hall debut. Fliter was absent (mentally speaking) for much of the final movement of the Appassionata. The parts of Fliter's recital that we were both wholly present for, however, suggested she may well be as good a Beethovenian as she is a Chopinist.
Chopinists don't always make great Beethovenians (or vice versa). Fliter showed she had all the essential tools to be both: an engineer's feel of logistics, a circus entertainer's eye for variety, a bombardier's sense of timing. In the Read more ...