Kings Place
Boyd Tonkin
Just now, music about survival, transcendence and the afterlife may have a special resonance for the BBC Singers. After all, the supremely versatile century-old chamber choir has endured its own near-death experience – at the hands of the BBC top brass who, in 2023, planned to axe them.At Kings Place, with the Aurora Orchestra and its conductor Nicholas Collon, the Singers made a typically refined and resourceful contribution to a concert in the venue “Earth Unwrapped” strand. Sense and spirit merged in a programme that began with three a cappella numbers and concluded with the 1893, chamber- Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
What better way to start a season about the Earth than by looking back on it from an astronaut’s perspective? At a time when the activities of assorted billionaires and emerging superpowers are making the space race topical again, it feels more than appropriate for Kings Place to begin its Earth Unwrapped programme with Terry Riley’s Sun Rings.As one of the deities of minimalism and experimental music, Riley was an obvious choice when NASA was looking for a composer to celebrate 25 years since the launch of the Voyager space programme. His ten-part composition – liberally punctuated with high Read more ...
Mark Kidel
As the Middle East continues to fragment in hate and horror, a tragic unfolding of events with roots reaching back to the middle of the last century, any sign of love and deeply felt collaboration provides a welcome beacon, and signals the possibility of understanding and reconciliation.Ana Silvera (pictured below), a British Sephardi Jew with family from Izmir and Aleppo, sings songs from the Ladino tradition, the culture that accompanied the Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th Century. Saied Silbak (pictured below, right), a Palestinian oud player, draws on Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The young Elmore String Quartet, recent graduates of the Royal Northern College, made an impressive Kings Place debut last night with a programme that put music written by composers at a similarly early stage in their careers alongside another’s last work. They played with a subtlety and thoughtfulness that point them up as a group to keep an eye on.Leo Geyer (b.1992) (pictured below) is a multi-faceted musician, not just a composer/arranger but also conductor and, recently, a presenter on Radio 3. His Unfurling, receiving its premiere, was a short piece which – and how often is this Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
What a beautiful, alternative evening of Christmas music this was, ranging in tone from bleakness to transcendence – a thrilling escape from the season’s cloying commercialism to a sense of something both mysterious and profound. Powerful new commissions from Ukrainian composers including Natalia Tsupryk heightened the sense that Christmas is a time to reflect as much on redemption from cruelty and the unknown as on any status-enhancing material possession.Last year the SANSARA vocal collective won universal plaudits for their album The Waiting Sky, which traces the journey from Advent to Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottír found her work put under a strangely unforgiving lens when it was featured in Tár, the now infamous Todd Field film made in 2022 starring Cate Blanchett as a tempestuously exacting female conductor. In a scene where Lydia Tár is taking a masterclass at the Julliard, she savages a student who is conducting a string quartet playing Thorvaldsdottír’s music, saying it sounds like “tuning up”.Yet it’s part of the film’s sophisticated psychological narrative that this scene, far from condemning Thorvaldsdottír’s music, represents Tár’s divorce from the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It was great to see Kings Place full on Saturday night for I Fagiolini’s take on the Monteverdi Vespers, added, rock’n’roll style, as an “additional date due to public demand” after the Friday show sold out. And it was superb. Hearing the Vespers, often sung by a large choir, here performed by small forces (including the period instruments of the English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble) in the clean acoustic of Hall One was completely engrossing, and I can’t remember when I last experienced time passing so fast in a concert.The Vespers were published in 1610, possibly a calling-card in a bid by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s probably an unconscious action. Sat on a stage-centre chair, Julie Byrne sings. The two acoustic guitars she plays for about half the set are beside her, on their racks. One hand is above the other, palms down. Each moves side-to-side in a chopping motion. It’s not simultaneous with the song’s rhythm and independent of the meter of the lines. It’s not obvious what's being complemented or ticked off, but it must draw from something concealed by the exterior.Looking for signals of what’s within at this London show by the US singer-songwriter is inevitable. The completion of Byrne’s recent Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
One of the singers smashes out a jittery pulse on a shaman drum and the 50-strong choir intone a chant, while at the front a tenor who looks like a doorman you wouldn’t mess with spits out what sounds like a threat from between gritted teeth. It is the Estonian National Male Voice Choir performing Veljo Tormis’s Raua needmine (“Curse Upon Iron”) and it is utterly entrancing, invigorating – and just a little bit scary.The Estonian Tormis (1930-2017) wrote almost exclusively for voice, usually engaging in some way with Estonian folk traditions. But if this suggests bucolic Read more ...
Tim Cumming
These encounters are ones that may lead to lifelong relationships, with the halls at Kings Place this coming weekend filled with music from Mali, Colombia, Turkey, Georgia, Estonia, Tibet and a woodland in Sussex.Friday’s double-headed line-up features Malian blues-rock guitarist Vieux Farka Toure returning to his roots on his recent album, La Racines, with a focus on Songhai music from northern Mali, while in Hall Two the all-female London-based Mariachi band Las Adelitas reverse a few macho stereotypes.Saturday will be a high point, with not only a surround-sound remote connection with Sam Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The distinctive silvery tones of the viola da gamba were eclipsed in the 18th century as music moved from intimate settings to the brasher acoustic demands of the concert hall. Yet for Liam Byrne, discovering the viola da gamba at Indiana University was a way both of channelling his own musical voice and of connecting to the influential early music movement dating back to figures like Arnold Dolmetsch in the early 20th century.A collaboration with the Icelandic composer and audio engineer Valgeir Sigurõsson in 2013 introduced him to a form of electronic music making that he realised, Read more ...
Helen Wallace
2023 is surely the year the performing arts reach peak "immersive", a word endangered by its own ubiquity. From Punchdrunk’s Burnt City to Danny Boyle’s The Matrix we are promised a swallowing-up by art. Kings Cross is the location for two visual and aural initiatives: David Hockney’s 3D Bigger & Closer at the Lightroom, and Sound Unwrapped at Kings Place, a year-long series of intimate, immersive events kindled by live performance.The roots of the series are two-fold: firstly, the generous offer (from German company d&baudiotechnik) of a 360 degree, 25-speaker Soundscape system Read more ...