Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Peter Phillips

In times of trouble

Music

This year is the 500th anniversary of the death of Tomás Luis de Victoria, whose work, as I have written before, I consider to be the most moving High Renaissance music there is. This year is the 500th anniversary of the death of Tomás Luis de Victoria, whose work, as I have written before, I consider to be the most moving High Renaissance music there is. But we could have had little idea how the world’s tragedies would follow the Tallis Scholars around, making performances of his ineffable six-voice Requiem as useful as they have been appropriate. From the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, through the disaster at Fukushima to the bombed restaurant in Marrakesh and the murderous performance recently in Oslo, my troupe and/or I have been there or thereabouts.

13 August 2011

Marcus Berkmann

Blighted by Dylan

Music

Is it true that Bob Dylan is 70? I would never have guessed: there has been so little about it in the newspapers. No doubt he is out on the road right now, on his never-ending tour, murdering his old tunes with a relentless indifference, unbothered by what his fans might think. But you have met a Dylan fan. You might well be a Dylan fan. They are not like the rest of us. It is 20 years or so since I saw Dylan live but I have never forgotten the experience. The most serious trainspotters were down at the front, making sheaves of notes. Others cheered a song they knew Dylan hadn’t played for seven years, four months and 18 days. Someone who had missed the fourth night in the run of seven was ostracised by his fellows.

6 August 2011

Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: Elvis Presley

Sure, you don't necessarily think of Elvis as a country singer. But then you remember his gospel roots and the rockabilly and it all makes sense. How could such a great American ever escape the greatest American musical genre of them all? He never did. Or, if you prefer, he just often returned to it.

Lloyd Evans

Musical mockery

Music

They’re back. In August the capital fills with bored, dim-witted, half-naked semi-vagrants who have nothing to do here but get in the way of Londoners who do have things to do here. Tourism is an invitation to robbery. If you aren’t going to a place to work, you’re going there to get worked over. The rites of mob travel invert all the natural obligations of xenophilia. Natives become swindlers and their victims happily connive in the evacuation of their own purses. No one objects because it’s understood that a tourist isn’t a visitor in the proper sense. He’s in London but not engaged with it. He’s half here and half at home.

30 July 2011

Oliver Gilmour

The great unknown

Features

Who was Carlos Kleiber, and why has he been voted the best conductor of all time? Carlos Kleiber — the name evokes both Hispanic and German spheres — cancelled performances, never gave interviews, claimed he only conducted when the fridge was empty, and told Placido Domingo he’d prefer to devote his time to drinking wine and making love. He only conducted 96 concerts in his life (does Valerie Gergiev notch up more in a year?). Yet, according to Claudio Abbado, Kleiber was the most important conductor of the 20th century. He scarcely even wanted to be ‘a contender’, yet staggeringly, he was recently voted the most inspiring conductor of all time by a BBC survey of 100 conductors. Who was this remarkable man?

Andrew Petrie

On a slow night

Music

American trio Low are what you get when a band evolves far from the established music scenes of laidback California and buzzing NYC. Fronted by husband and wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, their sound evokes the relative isolation and five-month winters of their native Duluth, Minnesota, with glacial tempos and minimal arrangements, laced with almost folky two-part harmony. Now, nine albums into their career, they can sell out the Barbican’s main hall. American trio Low are what you get when a band evolves far from the established music scenes of laidback California and buzzing NYC.

23 July 2011

Charles Spencer

Tim Rice: a hard graft to success

Music

When one thinks of Tim Rice, one doesn’t exactly picture a man who has had a tremendous struggle to make it to the top. When one thinks of Tim Rice, one doesn’t exactly picture a man who has had a tremendous struggle to make it to the top. He met Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1965, wrote several world-conquering hit musicals with him, and later moved on to Disney where he got a slice of the action on Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, among others. Unlike his former colleague, who has so often appeared driven and troubled, Rice has always given every impression of enjoying life greatly. But it wasn’t always plain sailing as a fascinating CD makes clear.

Michael Tanner

Present imperfect

Music

Handel’s Rinaldo, the product of a composer of 25, we should remind ourselves, is not thought, nowadays, to be a masterpiece even by the most fervent Handelians, though when it was first produced in 1711 it was wildly successful, thanks to acres of coloratura and some very elaborate scenic effects. Handel’s Rinaldo, the product of a composer of 25, we should remind ourselves, is not thought, nowadays, to be a masterpiece even by the most fervent Handelians, though when it was first produced in 1711 it was wildly successful, thanks to acres of coloratura and some very elaborate scenic effects.

16 July 2011

Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: Robert Earl Keen

Nashville is a fun town and there's a heck of a lot of good stuff that's come from Tennessee but Texas is the other great home of country music and the Texas singer-songwriter tradition is maintained by Robert Earl Keen (among many others). Here he is with The Road Goes on Forever (And the Party Never Ends). True that. Remember: we're in the country of country...

Peter Phillips

Happy anniversaries

Music

There has been much to celebrate in Barcelona this week for musicians of a certain bent. The Medieval and Renaissance Music Society held its annual international conference there, which gave the delegates the opportunity to celebrate the musicologist Bruno Turner’s 80th birthday, as well as the 20th anniversary of the foundation of Musica Reservata Barcelona and the 400th anniversary of the death of the Spanish composer, Victoria. The city may be more associated with architects (Gaudí) and painters (Dalí and Miró) than with musicians, but it knows how to stage a pachanga when the pressure is on. The only disappointment was that Rafael Nadal, who was born in Majorca and so is a Catalan speaker, did not win Wimbledon.

10 July 2011

Alex Massie

Sunday Morning Country: Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

Sorry for the lack of posts here lately. That's what a trip to London, an 11 hour journey home and a weekend of cricket will do. Anyway, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have a new album out and it is as good as you might expect. Here's a bootlegged clip from a recent gig that a) is swell, b) is vivid and c) reminds one of Rawlings' contribution to the partnership. Yeah, I'll Fly Away....

2 July 2011

Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: Dwight Yoakam

Been a while since the standard-bearer of the modern Bakersfield sound was featured here. Time to make amends for that prolonged absence. So here's the man himself with a fine rendition of his lovely, mournful song I Sang Dixie. Pure class.

25 June 2011

Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: Glen Campbell

It has to be Glen Campbell this week what with the announcement that, on account of Alzheimer's, his forthcoming tour will be his last. So here he is with a lovely stripped-down (no bloody strings!) version of Wichita Lineman.

18 June 2011

Deborah Ross

Rubies and pearls

Music

It’s so rare I want to shout about anything from the rooftops but I do want to shout from the rooftops about The Ruby Dolls and their latest show, Rubies in the Attic, which takes cabaret and shapes it into something so original that if you can catch it you must. It’s so rare I want to shout about anything from the rooftops but I do want to shout from the rooftops about The Ruby Dolls and their latest show, Rubies in the Attic, which takes cabaret and shapes it into something so original that if you can catch it you must. The Dolls, whom I caught at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, are four women — Jessica Sedler, Tara Siddall, Jenny Grove and Susanna Fiore — who dress glamorously in the Forties style (oh, if only I could wear red lipstick like that!

Peter Phillips

Talented exports

Music

If the atmosphere in Tokyo at the moment is relatively radiation-free — it is said to be less than in the cabin of the aircraft which flew us here — the mood among the local population is one of getting on with life. If the atmosphere in Tokyo at the moment is relatively radiation-free — it is said to be less than in the cabin of the aircraft which flew us here — the mood among the local population is one of getting on with life. Apparently, they collectively held their breaths (and stopped drinking the water) for about 24 hours at the time of the earthquake, and then turned what was left of their attention to abusing the Tokyo Electric Power Company. One of the things they have got on with is attending concerts of Western music.

11 June 2011

4 June 2011

Ed Rex

Taking Time

Music

James MacMillan has a string of large-scale choral and orchestral works to his name, and last month saw the première of his chamber opera Clemency at Covent Garden. One wonders, then, how he makes time to write a new, small-scale choral piece for the re-opening of St Patrick’s Church in Soho Square. James MacMillan has a string of large-scale choral and orchestral works to his name, and last month saw the première of his chamber opera Clemency at Covent Garden. One wonders, then, how he makes time to write a new, small-scale choral piece for the re-opening of St Patrick’s Church in Soho Square.

Damian Thompson

Getting to know him

Music

Here’s a strange thing about Johann Sebastian Bach. Here’s a strange thing about Johann Sebastian Bach. You can be devoted to his work, love it more intensely than any other music, yet never get round to hearing some of his most awe-inspiring compositions, or even know what you’re missing. There are dozens — literally dozens — of pieces of 24-carat Bach whose names are known only to professional musicians and scholars and are barely represented in the recording catalogue: you might find two good digital performances of them, maybe three. Bach wrote at least 400 Church cantatas, of which half are missing.

28 May 2011

Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: Cowboy Junkies

Amidst all the Dylanmania this week it's worth recalling that Steve Earle once said, "Townes van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that." He may be forgiven his touch of hyperbole.

21 May 2011

Charles Spencer

Crowded house

Music

In ‘Poetry of Departures’, in which Philip Larkin imagines escaping his existence as a librarian for a life of wild daring and adventure, he writes: We all hate home And having to be there; I detest my room, It’s specially-chosen junk, the good books, the good bed. In ‘Poetry of Departures’, in which Philip Larkin imagines escaping his existence as a librarian for a life of wild daring and adventure, he writes: We all hate home And having to be there; I detest my room, It’s specially-chosen junk, the good books, the good bed. And my life, in perfect order. It is, he concludes, ‘reprehensibly perfect’. I wish I could say my life was so well organised.

14 May 2011

Peter Phillips

Moving with the times

Music

It is inevitable that a festival the size of the Proms should become a showcase not just for the artists taking part, but also for the way classical music is perceived more generally. There would be no point in a public services’ provider such as the BBC launching such an enterprise every year if it didn’t deliver what people wanted. And indeed it is clear that it matters very much to the BBC how many people do actually attend these concerts: the blurb is as full as ever of figures showing how last year was a ‘record-breaking’ year; and now how this year there were ‘376 tickets sold every minute during the first hour of BBC Proms booking’. Buzz, buzz, buzz.

7 May 2011

Marcus Berkmann

Volume control

Music

Thousands of years ago, in or about 1977, I remember reading the intemperate jazzer Benny Green writing about Genesis, whose years of commercial success were just beginning. Green was not impressed. ‘It’s all very loud bits and very quiet bits,’ he said, or words to that effect. You can just imagine his customary wasp-chewing grimace of lofty contempt. But then everyone over a certain age hated pop music in those days, and senior jazzers were often wheeled out to express the silent majority’s view. Green’s comment hit home with me partly because, at the time, I adored Genesis, and partly because he was right. It was all very loud bits and very quiet bits. That was the fun of it.

David Jennings

My kind of band

Music

In the aftermath of an early-evening thunderstorm on a baked Easter weekend, Trembling Bells took the stage in a Lewisham pub. They seemed like visitors from another time. It wasn’t quite clear which, but the most evident contender is the early Seventies, and it’s no surprise that Joe Boyd, the celebrated producer of Nick Drake and Fairport Convention, referred to them as ‘my kind of band’. In the aftermath of an early-evening thunderstorm on a baked Easter weekend, Trembling Bells took the stage in a Lewisham pub. They seemed like visitors from another time.

23 April 2011