Beethoven: The Nine Symphonies Vienna Philharmonic/Christian Thielemann (Sony)Another Beethoven symphony cycle, released hot on the heels of Chailly’s Leipzig set. That Decca box earned rapturous praise. I’m not sure that Christian Thielemann’s will be quite so warmly received; there’s a lot here which will infuriate fans of historically informed performance. Thielemann’s approach is defiantly old-school – tempi are expansive and disarmingly flexible, orchestral sonorities are huge, rich and fruity. Once your ears have adjusted, there’s an awful lot of music-making here which sounds Read more ...

There’s a phrase in Andrzej Wajda’s 1960 film Innocent Sorcerers, “spirit of our time”, that perfectly captures the atmosphere of the four films on Polish Cinema Classics, originally dating from 1957 to 1960 whose great black and white photography is very stylishly restored here in Second Run's release. It’s a light and playful world of young people looking for their personal identities through love; there’s little hint of politics in sight, and the melody of their lives is jazz – in Wajda’s film, as well as Janusz Morgenstern’s Goodbye, See You Tomorrow from the same year, set to the music Read more ...

The ubiquity of the all-conquering Adele has obscured the fact the her trail was blazed by Katie Melua. She was the biggest UK-based female act in 2007, when her album Pictures became a world-wide best seller. Five years on, with the release of her fifth album, you wonder if there’s room left for Melua.'Secret Symphony' has the feeling of comfort zones being reinstatedHer last album, 2010’s The House, was produced by William Orbit rather than Mike Batt, the Wombles mastermind who had steered her career up to that point. Although Guy Chambers cropped up on one track, it was mostly written by Read more ...

Nobody could ever accuse pianist Vijay Iyer of having narrow tastes. This highly anticipated follow-up to his award-winning 2009 album, Historicity, runs the gamut from Heatwave's über-smooth slow jam, “The Star of the Story”, to the tricky contrapuntal games of Henry Threadgill's “Little Pocket Size Demons”. In the two and a half years since the making of Historicity the trio has been on the road pretty much constantly, and you sense from the very opening bars of Iyer's self-penned “Bode” an even more refined rhythmic concept, a greater attention to textural detail, and a more intense attack Read more ...

On the face of it, a low-budget French film featuring the story of a pre-pubescent girl who pretends to be a boy promises little more than an off-centre tale of gender envy. Hardly edge-of-your-seat stuff, but Céline Sciamma’s second feature is lifted way beyond the run-of-the-mill by extraordinary performances, a daring but totally accomplished formal simplicity and a script that generates as much tension as the best Hitchcock thriller.Moving to a new home with her famiy gives Laure, the film’s young heroine (Zoé Héran),an opportunity to re-invent herself as “Michael”, convincingly passing Read more ...

Over the years, Sinead O’Connor has put her fan base though the mill but, with her ninth album, may have redeemed herself. Quite apart from her many well-publicized personal eccentricities, those who have been waiting for her to make an album that’s stylistically akin to her early material rather than, say, a collection of reggae numbers of Irish folk, should now be happy. Together with her first husband and long term collaborator John Reynolds, with whom she created her debut The Lion and the Cobra back in 1987, O’Connor delivers 10 songs freighted with passion, raw emotion and occasional Read more ...

Where the creative interconnections between hip hop, jazz and soul are concerned, Robert Glasper proves himself a master on Black Radio. Featuring an impressive roll call of guest singers and rappers, the pianist has finally made the album which brings together all of his musical predilections into a single whole, and the results are outstanding.With three Blue Note albums in the bag - Canvas (2005), In My Element (2007) and the Grammy-nominated Double Booked (2009) - the pianist clearly feels he's demonstrated his bona fide jazz chops, and devotes this first full-length album from his Read more ...

 Handel: The Eight Great Suites Lisa Smirnova (ECM)This set slipped out quietly at the end of 2011. The typically muted ECM cover gives no hint of how life-enhancing these two discs are; I felt like getting the fluorescent highlighters out and jazzing up the monochrome sleeve art. Pianist Lisa Smirnova, Moscow-born and now living in Vienna, makes a bold case for these underrated, immensely enjoyable suites. Comparing them with Bach’s keyboard output is inevitable. Both are fabulous, of course, but it’s hard to disagree with Uwe Schweikert’s comments in the sleeve notes, that Handel’s Read more ...

The fourth album by Carolina Chocolate Drops, the old-time string and jug band with 21st-century attitude, fizzes with their characteristic energy. They’re essentially a live band, great communicators and purveyors of a musical style that was designed to brighten the evenings of hard-working mountain people in the Piedmont region of the Appalachians. The upfront quality of Buddy Miller’s production and the contagious joy the musicians bring to their singing and playing goes a long way towards transcending the limitations of the studio.The Carolina Chocolate Drops learned much of their Read more ...

With most horror films the monster gets flushed down the metaphorical toilet - blown up, spat out, switched off. In this one you must live with the monster forever. As most people know, We Need to Talk About Kevin is about a boy who becomes a multiple murderer. That’s established in the opening shot (using barrel-fuls of tomato passata, I'd guess) with a vivid repellency and realism that you only slowly realise has drawn you deep into his mother’s mind - where you will stay for the rest of the story.Lionel Shriver’s novel seemed to me somewhat too schematic and clever in its treatment of her Read more ...

It’s four years since their extremely successful debut album. But then again it’s not easy to hone perfect dumb-ass pop music from just two or three major chords while still making it shine like a new gold coin. The art of simplicity is a complex thing: in the Ting Ting’s case it’s about paring down, resisting overt sophistication, sounding freshly squeezed rather than made-from-concentrate, and being in your face without getting on your nerves. So has the long gestation period and rejection of a whole load of material they weren’t happy with resulted in another swaggering, kicking bag Read more ...

There's a whole world of music out there that floats in the zone somewhere between jazz, club music, sound art, contemporary classical and meditative new age background sound – so much of it that it all too easily blurs together. But there are artists who can make something more, and when you stumble on something truly individualistic like this album it shines out like a beacon in the fog. Like Santiago Latorre's first album, Órbita, but more expansive, this passes breathy saxophone sounds, voices singing in Spanish and Taiwan Chinese, field recordings, rhythm tracks and more through digital Read more ...