Features
Sebastian Scotney
“Jazz people,” one commentator has written this week “are amongst the most adaptable of our species as life mirrors art and we improvise our way through – we're uniquely qualified to weather the storm.” There has indeed been a worldwide flurry of adaptability and creativity. The list below is a selection of seven initiatives to adapt and to bring people closer to the music which have caught my eye since lockdown began.Of course it’s not all about music. The real world, the politics, the unfolding story of the pandemic are omni-present. And there is already sadness and tragedy as Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
No composer since Stravinsky has defined his age as comprehensively as Krzysztof Penderecki, who died on Sunday aged 86. Initially an uncompromising modernist, Penderecki was one of the composers who put Poland at the forefront of the musical avant-garde in the late 1950s. His music later changed, eventually moving to an unashamedly expressive neo-Romantic style in the 1980s. At a time when modernism was declining in some quarters, but defended elsewhere, the reactions to Penderecki’s move cast those divisions into sharp relief. But the grand and increasingly civic style of his music in later Read more ...
Liz Thomson
We’ve all spent time considering our desert island discs, which is of course why the programme Roy Plomley devised one winter’s night in 1942 is still thriving. The choices are perhaps less favourites than music that takes you back to a specific moment in time, that reminds you of someone, or something, special. “Favourites” are almost necessarily changeable. I prefer to think of music – a track, an album – that has in some way changed my life. Clichéd maybe, yet I suspect that most of us for whom music is a central part of life, not mere wallpaper, could come up with a little list of Read more ...
David Nice
He may no longer be the Berlin Philharmoniker's Chief Conductor, but by a combination of serendipity and foresight on the orchestra's part, Simon Rattle's last concert in Berlin for the foreseeable future was filmed without an audience and led the way for other, smaller-scale ventures before gatherings of any sort beyond chamber music with players at a distance became an impossibility. The current stopgap is the kind "his" orchestra now, the London Symphony Orchestra, is offering: past films on the nights when a concert would have taken place.The latest, in place of what we would have Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“Whipped cream with knives” is how Harold Prince, who directed the Broadway premiere of A Little Night Music in 1973, famously described this particular Sondheim show. And nowhere is that borne out with more exquisite agony than in this duet between two unhappily married women. With a book by Hugh Wheeler, the musical, based on Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night, is about the pain, ecstasy and killing disappointments of life, love and desire.Set in Sweden around 1900 and composed largely in waltz time, it’s ravishing and cruel, hearts breaking beneath starched shirt fronts, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Ever since I heard the quintessential prog rock group The Nice do a psychedelic instrumental version of “America” in 1968, I have loved this song. Later on, I was better able to appreciate Sondheim’s lyrics, whose satirical sharpness and superb inventiveness make this the definitive song about migration. Written for Leonard Bernstein’s musical West Side Story (1957), at a time when Sondheim had never written a Broadway show of his own, it was, lyrically speaking, a fabulous debut. Robert Wise’s 1961 film version, currently available on Netflix, is likewise a great revision of the original. ( Read more ...
David Nice
We're learning fast what works and what doesn't with online arts offerings in a time of coronavirus. A distinguished young pianist I know rightly pointed out to me yesterday that however good the artists sharing their talents with us from their living/music rooms, and however reassuring it is to be able to join them at a set time, bad sound cancels out most of the pleasure (though he didn’t rule out making an appearance himself). That's mostly not a problem with the opera companies around the world putting up their back catalogue of productions on film for free.The big guns are turning on Read more ...
graham.rickson
Along with many others, my first exposure to Stephen Sondheim’s art was through watching the film of Bernstein’s West Side Story as a child. The song which still floors me is the Quintet near the end of Act 1. Bernstein’s ecstatic, dynamic music is splendid in itself, but the number’s perfection is sealed by Sondheim’s lyrics, each character distinctly voiced, the rhythms and rhymes flawless. “Sperm to worm,” still makes me grin. That ability to articulate different voices, to overlay disparate musical styles is a trademark. Think of the long opening sequence from Into the Woods, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The following is adapted from a programme note for a show which was to have premiered last Thursday – the very day Sadler's Wells went dark. Nico Muhly – Drawn Lines was part of an occasional series featuring composers who are making an impact on dance. All the music cited is accessible on the usual platforms.Nico Muhly hates labels. Looking very much younger than his 38 years, he has had to suffer being “classical music’s poster boy” for nigh on two decades, not to mention hearing his music described as “indie-classical”. As he has pointed out through gritted teeth to many an unwary Read more ...
David Nice
Two numbers, one hair-raising slice of music-theatre. When Sondheim's paying homage to the older, revue type of musical, you can extract a string of top hits: Follies, from which Marianka Swain chose "I'm Still Here" yesterday, could yield at least half a dozen more choices, Company almost as many. When his aim is a more through-composed kind of story-telling, with leading motifs recurring and transformed, "highlights" are less easily detached. Sweeney Todd (1979) was his first high watermark in that art, Into the Woods (1986) the next; later shows attempted a more minimalistic palette, with Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Surely there’s never been a more apt time for Sondheim’s great cry of defiance? “I’m Still Here” is sung by showgirl-turned-actress Carlotta in Follies (1971) – added during the Boston try-out in place of “Can That Boy Foxtrot”. Loosely inspired by Joan Crawford, it’s the ultimate anthem of showbiz survival.Carlotta looks back on a tumultuous career: “Plush velvet sometimes/Sometimes just pretzels and beer”. Musically, it’s a Harold Arlen pastiche, as Sondheim explains in Finishing the Hat, since Carlotta “would see her life as a flamboyant, torchy ballad”. Lyrically, it’s pure Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Here's an irony worthy of the work of Stephen Sondheim, an artist who clearly knows a thing or two about the multiple manifestations of that word. On the same day that he turns 90, namely today, Broadway is unable to host the keenly awaited American premiere, scheduled for this evening, of the gender-flipped Company that stunned London last year. The city's theatres there (as everywhere else) shuttered by the coronavirus, New York will have to bide its time until audiences can see the director Marianne Elliott's fresh take on the story of a Manhattan singleton, once male and now female, Read more ...