Royal Albert Hall
Jenny Gilbert
It might seem odd to laud the entrances and exits of a ballet, but when it comes to stagecraft Christopher Wheeldon is second to none. You lose count of the ingenious ways he finds to shift up to 130 dancers in and out of view at the Albert Hall. Wheeldon created his three-act Cinderella in 2012 for a conventional stage, but for English National Ballet he has reworked it for this vast, non-theatrical O. For once, the wheels of Cinders’ carriage have space to roll.The down side is that the narrative feels overstretched and thin in spite of the pyrotechnics that have been thrown at it – massive Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Prufrock might have measured his life in coffee spoons but for many of us it’s rock albums, the money to buy them way back when scrabbled together from Saturday jobs and student grants – remember them? Many in the audience at the Royal Albert Hall last night for Mark Knopfler surely did and we knew precisely where we were when we heard “Sultans of Swing”, which caught the ear on late-night student radio – that open-tuning National Steel guitar, the story of George, “who knows all the chords”, delivered in a voice and style that seemed to mix Bob Dylan and Lou Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Having long been immersed in folk and world music and acoustically-oriented singer-songwriters, it’s a surprise to be given a CD of music by someone who’s never crossed your radar, especially when the artist concerned turns out to have sold some 14 million albums, though mostly in Europe and North America. It’s probably the case that Loreena McKennitt’s considerable following owes to word-of-mouth, for the music-loving friend who gifted me her 1994 album The Mask and The Mirror had been put on to her by a friend in Europe. Instantly hooked, I explored further, giving her live 2006 CD/DVD set Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Jason Mraz… How can someone so big slip under so many radars. Mine, the muso with whom I trek to all sorts of gigs, and that of a wide range of friends, most of whom are pretty au courant with the scene.Then you hear it. Of course, the big hit – probably on all our mental juke boxes – “I’m Yours”, which has clocked up sales of around 1.4 million, and which comes from his third album, We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things (2008). The single set what was then a record of 76 weeks in the Billboard Hot 100 chart and peaked at number six, going on to win a Grammy and to be named ASCAP Song of the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
A rainy night… not in Georgia, as the great Ray Charles sang, but in London, the second of two nights at the Royal Albert Hall for Jools Holland and his Rhythm & Blues Orchestra. The 35-date tour that began in Dublin on 20 October and ends in Cardiff a couple of days before Christmas has packed the city’s most celebrated concert venue. The excitement is palpable, and it feels like the majority of the audience is comprised of Jools regulars who know they’re going to have the best of evenings. And by the time he breaks in to the final encore, Prince Buster’s “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than Read more ...
Chris Harvey
There was barely a black-clothed, white-faced Numanoid in sight in the packed auditorium of the Royal Albert Hall as Gary Numan made his first ever appearance at the Victorian concert hall. His fans appear to have left that kohl-eyed look behind them as they’ve aged over the four decades since he first broke into the charts with Tubeway Army, but their love for him seems undimmed.Black might have looked a little out of place anyway as the electronic pop pioneer and his band loped on stage looking like a cross between extras from Mad Max: Fury Road and refugees from the desert planet of Read more ...
Ellie Porter
“We will be taking you on a journey,” promises Caro Emerald at the start of tonight’s return to the Royal Albert Hall, which she last played back in April 2017 – and for the next 90 minutes, that’s what jazz-pop queen Emerald and her slick seven-piece band, the Grandmono Orchestra, do. Having bustled in from the cold and dark Halloween night, the audience is ready to be swept away to somewhere a lot more sunny.Prior to departure, however, is a sombre, six-song set by Loren Nine – not a nine-piece jazz combo but a diminutive Dutch singer-songwriter who sits down at her keyboard and smilingly Read more ...
theartsdesk
Ballet superstar Carlos Acosta returned to the Royal Albert Hall this week, accompanied by the youthful dancers of his company Acosta Danza, for yet another show celebrating his long career. Photographer Bill Knight of theartsdesk captured these candid shots of Acosta and company in Christopher Bruce's swaggering rock'n'roll homage, Rooster.Carlos Acosta: A Celebration at the Royal Albert Hall to 5 October
Jessica Duchen
Outside the Royal Albert Hall blue-bereted devotees were handing out free EU flags. A great many people accepted them, while some with the Union Jack looked on askance and muttered. But inside, all differences were firmly put aside: every flag under the sun was there for the Last Night of the Proms party, along with the glitter poppers, an inflatable parrot and a model kangaroo. On the podium, a familiar figure: Sir Andrew Davis (pictured below), long-ago emeritus conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, owning the night again after some 18 years away, but as much at ease as if he’d Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This was the first complete performance of Theodora at the Proms, one of a series of Handel oratorios initiated with William Christie’s Israel in Egypt last year. Theodora is more often performed today as a staged opera, most famously in the Peter Sellars production at Glyndebourne in the 1990s. But this performance demonstrated that it is just as effective in its original guise, the narrative related in brief recitatives, the better to allow the arias and choruses to shine.Theodora is a moralistic tale of Christians persecuted and martyred in Roman Antioch. (Fun fact: the novel on which it Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A day after John Eliot Gardiner and wandering violist Antoine Tamestit had converted the Royal Albert Hall into a sonic map of Hector Berlioz’s Italy, conductor Peter Oundjian and his full-strength divisions transported us to the Western Front. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, premiered in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in May 1962, combines the Latin text of the requiem mass with the First World War poetry of Wilfred Owen to speak, now as then, of fragile human understanding and affection in the face of overwhelming terror and violence. Yet its plea for the still, small voices of truth and Read more ...
David Nice
How do you make your mark in a crucial last week after the Olympian spectaculars of Kirill Petrenko's Proms with the Berlin Philharmonic? Well, for a start, you stay true to recent principles by getting as many of your period-instrument Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique players as can manage it on their feet – Gardiner did it earlier this year in selected items on his mostly-Schumann programmes with the LSO – to dive headlong into the spume of Berlioz's Le Corsaire Overture. Throw in two charismatic soloists, plan special spatial effects that make dramatic sense, and have your orchestra Read more ...