This is an extraordinary piece of work: a new suite of tracks from an artist previously new to me, which had me pressing my headphones to my ears on repeat plays, hungry for every morsel of sonic detail, and enveloping me in a shifting atmosphere of both delight and dread. Absolute required listening. * Daniel…
Category: review
World’s Finest Musicians Perform in Raphael Court at the Victoria and Albert Museum
Photograph : Rebecca Reid Just when you think you are getting blasé about streamed events, there comes along a concert that you shouldn’t ignore. Conductor Oliver Zeffman is young and has grand ideas. During the pandemic, he commissioned opera-film, Eight Songs from Isolation, from eight leading composers to great acclaim. With his latest project Live at the V&A, he…
Flowers Fascinate in a new show at Dulwich Picture Gallery
Karl Blossfeldt 1928. Photogravures Flowers have always fascinated. In an intriguing exhibition entitled Unearthed: Photography’s Roots, The Dulwich Picture Gallery, endeavours to bring us its story of plant photography, from 1840 up to the present day. Taking…
Set free?
A couple of evenings before writing this, I had the privilege of attending the first art song recital with a live audience at London’s Wigmore Hall since it re-opened to socially-distanced audiences in line with the UK’s current ‘roadmap’ for ending lockdown. The concert was an all-Schubert progamme, performed by soprano Carolyn Sampson and pianist…
Worth waiting for: Dubuffet at the Barbican
Freed at last from the Covid lockdown vault, this quirky show may be just the ticket if you’re looking to re-engage with actual, red-in-tooth-and-claw art. He may not be for all tastes, but there’s no denying that the work of Jean Dubuffet (1901-85) still packs quite a punch. Dubuffet it was who famously championed, and…
Brahms Third Symphony – a well-kept secret
Brahms wrote his Symphony no.3 in F major in 1883, at the height of his career. Though it was a great hit with nineteenth-century audiences, very little is known about the sources of this mature work today. We do know that the notoriously secretive composer wrote it in Wiesbaden, a picturesque Rhine resort, and that…
Lieder column: some recent art song releases
A slight change of pace for this piece. Blogging is a privilege that allows us – without any oppressive deadlines or word count restrictions – to immerse ourselves in individual releases when approaching each article. That said, it also makes me acutely aware of those times when there’s a run of discs I love, and…
New recording of Arne’s Eighteenth Century Hit Impresses
I sat down to Arne: Artaxerxes over the Bank Holiday and believed, at first, that I was listening to a newly discovered Mozart opera. Young Mozart may well have seen Artaxerxes in London in the mid-1760s when he was touring. He loved opera with a capital L and Thomas Arne’s hit work must have fuelled Mozart’s boyhood passion…
Soprano Malkin takes on motherhood
With her latest recording, This is Not a Lullaby, Dutch soprano, Channa Malkin, explores motherhood. On her album photograph, she perches on a high stool, in a beige baggy sweater, leaving her legs bare. Malkin, a new mother herself, is challenging the almost unshakeable image of the idealised mother and child, which requires women to…
Street Dance Has Come of Age
In January last year, I had the great pleasure of covering POPCityUK’s international Hip Hop and Popping 2020 competition in London. Hundreds of dancers descended on Shoreditch Town Hall. The artists ranged in age from 16 -30, and the variety of styles displayed that day, showed me that Hip Hop and Popping were more than…
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