RFH
Joe Muggs
Often at gigs by bands of a certain vintage, the fans can look like they're on a special awayday: like they've dug their T-shirts out of the back of the drawer and geared themselves up for one last canter round the paddock. Not so for Killing Joke. At the Royal Festival Hall last night, a very large section of the crowd had the look of still actively living very rock'n'roll lives, and of having done so for at least the last 30 years. “How many times have you seen them?” asked a shaven-headed gent in the seat next to me. “This'll be my 46th Joke gig,” he continued with obvious pride. This is Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A programme of French music under the baton of the LPO’s talented young principal guest conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin should be a treat. Nézet-Séguin’s affinity for French textures and gestures has already been amply proved, as has the orchestra’s own aptitude for them, yet whatever was happening to the Fauré Requiem last night at the Royal Festival Hall was neither polished nor delightful. To attribute it simply to a bad day might be the kindest thing, but when you take into account the sold-out hall, the Saturday-night profile of the concert and all the people who had come to London’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
We’ve all seen singers go wrong. Forgetting words, missing entries, skipping verses – it happens often enough, and is generally cause for little more than some awkward laughter and a second attempt. Never, however, have I seen a wrong entry (as ill-luck would decree, in the only sacred work of the programme) greeted with a resonant expostulation of “Oh, shit” from the performer, followed by minor audience uproar and many apologies. It wasn’t the finest moment of the evening for Juan Diego Flórez, but – loath though I am to admit it – it wasn’t the worst either.The familiar Flórez recital tics Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Mahler, Mahler and anyone who even remotely knew Mahler. There is, of course, more to the South Bank's 2011 season listings than this but the great symphonic agoniser (and his many chums) forms the bedrock of the classical programming as we all go wild for the centenary of his death this year. In contemporary music big names such as Rumer, Elaine Paige and Brian Wilson will pack them in, while newcomers like Josh T Pearson and Melissa Laveaux have first Southbank exposure. The London International Mime Festival in January leads off dance and performance, which has a child-friendly look this Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Who knew the changeover of the EU Presidency could be this much fun? Amid the formal bowing and scraping at the Royal Festival Hall bunfights last night that signalled that the Hungarians were now at the tiller of this sinking political ship were some dodgy political metaphors, a round of orchestral Where's Wally and some extraordinary music.Conductor Ivan Fischer had shuffled his Budapest Festival Orchestra as if a pack of cards and distributed them seemingly chaotically across the stage. The principal bassoon was with the first violins. First flute led the cellos. Horns, principal clarinet Read more ...
theartsdesk
Earlier this month, George Osborne, Vince Cable and Jeremy Hunt were spotted in a Royal Opera House box surveying the country's most expensive artistic patrimony. What they thought - and how they and the Arts Council might wield their axe - will change the musical landscape of Britain forever. So here to point them in the right direction, theartsdesk's merry band of regulars - Edward Seckerson, David Nice, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, Alexandra Coghlan, Graham Rickson, Stephen Walsh and Ismene Brown - separate the wheat from the chaff in this round-up of the best and worst concerts, opera, musical Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The heroics came fast and fervently with Andris Nelsons and the Philharmonia Orchestra emerging from suffocating pianissimi to rip out the exultant fanfares of Beethoven’s Leonora No 3 Overture as if already limbering up to take on Strauss’s critics in Ein Heldenleben. That he saw them off so decisively didn’t, on his present form, come as much of a surprise. Nelsons doesn’t need anyone to fight his battles for him – not even the egotistical Strauss.This was an evening of much trumpeting, offstage and on. Indeed when Håkan Hardenberger came on to play the familiar Haydn Concerto it was as if Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It has been said that making money is music to the ears of any entrepreneur. In the case of Ian Rosenblatt you might need to turn that concept on its head. The music itself is his passion and the financial losses he routinely absorbs in pursuit of musical excellence is for him a small price worth paying. Well, not so small actually: through Rosenblatt Solicitors - his prestigious City law firm - he spends around £400,000 a year financing the Rosenblatt Recital Series, a now internationally recognised platform for up-and-coming operatic talent. Major young singers of today, stars of tomorrow. Read more ...
peter.quinn
A member of Miles Davis's legendary second quintet (“arguably Miles's best ever group” according to the Penguin Jazz Guide); a composer of standards (“Watermelon Man”, “Dolphin Dance”, “Maiden Voyage”, “Cantaloupe Island”) and soundtracks (Antonioni's Blow-Up, Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight); winner of over 10 Grammy Awards, the first for his 1983 hit single “Rockit”, the most recent for his magnificent 2007 Joni Mitchell tribute album River: The Joni Letters (one of only two jazz recordings to win the coveted Album of the Year award, the other being Getz/Gilberto over 40 years ago). Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Helmut Lachenmann is to instrumental technique what The Joy of Sex was to suburban nookie. A conduit to a whole new carnal world. Even those of us supposedly well versed in what a stringed instrument can do watched the Arditti Quartet perform the Lachenmann string quartets at the Queen Elizabeth Hall mouths agape. You can do that? With that! And you're going to stick that where?! We were an audience of gawpers and grimacers, smilers and starers. Who knew that so much could be done with the back of a violin? Or that the metallic screw at the heel of the bow could play little melodies Read more ...
josh.spero
Talking to Jude Kelly at the Royal Festival Hall last night, Stephen Sondheim gave a glimpse into his own theory of lyrical composition by contrasting Noël Coward (whom "I intensely dislike") and Cole Porter.The problem with Coward, he said after some hesitation, was that he was born poor, and so when he writes about the rich, he does so with the outsider's sneer. Porter, on the other hand, was born rich and thus could treat his peers with good humour and kindness. Sondheim compared Coward's "I've Been to a Marvellous Party" with Porter's "Well, Did You Evah?", both songs about parties, Read more ...
kate.connolly
Just seconds into a performance by the Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil Teresa Carreño it is immediately clear what Sir Simon Rattle meant when he said, “I have seen the future of music.” The passion and physical and mental energy with which they play, along with the sheer joy they seem to glean from it, is enough to instill hope in even the staunchest cultural pessimist. At the Berliner Philharmonie last week, the orchestra - an even more youthful offshoot, or second generation, of the now world-famous Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra - took the city by storm with their vibrant execution of Beethoven Read more ...