Little Dragon

Koko

AT THE WATER’S EDGE: TCHAIKOVSKY, SHOSTAKOVICH & BRITTEN

Royal Festival Hall – Philharmonic Orchestra (with B)

Elim Chan conductor

Sol Gabetta cello

BRITTEN Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes

SHOSTAKOVICH Cello Concerto No. 1

–interval–

TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 2, Little Russian

Music by Tchaikovsky and Britten inspired by two very different landscapes, and Sol Gabetta in Shostakovich’s fiery Cello Concerto No. 1.

Elim Chan first conducted the Philharmonia in 2017, on her meteoric rise to a busy international career. She returns at the request of audience members and musicians alike.

Tchaikovsky, on holiday in the Ukraine, worked the folk songs he heard there into his second symphony. The first movement grows out of the haunting melody of ‘Down by Mother Volga’, played first by a solo horn and bassoon, and the energetic finale is a set of variations on ‘The Crane’.

The moods of a very different landscape suffuse Britten’s Four Sea Interludes, extracts from his opera Peter Grimes. In this dark story set on the Suffolk coast, the sea is a constant, implacable presence, whether calm or stormy, at dawn or by moonlight. Britten and his partner Peter Pears, both conscientious objectors, lived in self-imposed exile in the United States from 1939, but it was partly writing this music, said Britten, that made him realise “in a flash… where I belonged”, and they returned to Suffolk in 1942.

At the heart of the programme is Shostakovich’s fiery Cello Concerto No. 1. Widely considered the height of achievement for a cellist, the piece gives the solo horn, and indeed every member of the orchestra, the chance to shine too. Charismatic cellist Sol Gabetta follows in illustrious footsteps – Shostakovich wrote the concerto in 1959 for his young friend, and erstwhile orchestration student, Mstislav Rostropovich.

Anaïs

Purcell Room

Following in the footsteps of Nina Simone, Bob Dylan and Bob Marley, the soul artist’s spine-tingling music speaks of freedom. Breakthrough track ‘Nina’ was released in January 2018. Her transcendent debut album, Darkness at Play, followed in early 2019, produced by Om’Mas Keith (Frank Ocean, Erykah Badu, Jay-Z) and long-time collaborator Aston Rudi. Born in Toulouse but of Senegalese origin, anaïs moved between Dublin and Dakar after her parents split, before finally settling in California. Feeling stuck between languages, anaïs stayed silent for seven months. But after a period of making herself invisible, she felt compelled to bring her voice to the world. ‘Artists had always been the freedom leaders of the world,’ anaïs says, adding ‘my silence had become a burden, a chain I desperately needed to break out of. ‘My music had to reflect the times, so when Ms Simone said “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me, no fear”, it felt like the song I needed to sing’.

The Cardigans

Hammersmith Apollo

The Cardigans’ fourth album, Gran Turismo, isn’t the most obvious one for them to perform it in its entirety, for its 20th anniversary. On the one hand, their bestselling album shifted 3m copies and made the Swedish quintet even bigger international stars. On the other, it was the product of an unhappy time, when singer Nina Persson was, in her words, “sad and lonely”, pouring her despair and vulnerability into songs she has described as “open wounds”.

The album transformed their public image from happy-go-lucky indie popsters into something darker and electronic, but, with no new Cardigans material for a decade, it hasn’t proved the hottest ticket. The venue is undersold, and the songs boom around, all bass and echo, with the band barely lit, in shadows.

Still, this does give opener Paralyzed – which starts with the line “This is where your sanity gives in” – a weird, unsettling power. While one yearns for the album’s clarity, the melodramatic tunes of Erase/Rewind, the Abba-esque Hanging Around and the beautifully sad Explode are strong enough to escape the murk. Persson – now a mother and cancer survivor – says she has developed the “thicker skin” needed to perform these songs but, clad in funereal black, she is certainly reliving them. Her face is concentrated, her vocals soaring and emotional, her lyrics illustrated by darting hand movements.

She remains a fabulous frontperson and if she’s disappointed by the closed balcony and the hall’s empty spaces, it doesn’t show. “Look at you, Manchester!” she yells. With guitarist Oskar Humlebo ably replacing Peter Svensson (who declined the reunion) and the sound ever improving, the country-tinged Junk of the Hearts doesn’t sound out of place in today’s world of Taylor Swift et al.

The sublime, unsettling Higher and a singalong My Favourite Game finally score a difficult triumph, before Persson switches to a natty green outfit with a rosette and the band are drenched in colour for a 45-minute romp through their back catalogue. The lovely Communication and the playful breakthrough hit Lovefool from 1996 sound particularly glorious. Despite celebrating Gran Turismo, they sound much more comfortable once they’ve left it behind.

Dave Simpson in The Guardian

Sola

Bermondsey Social Club

We’ll forgive you if you haven’t heard SOLA’s incredible music just yet, she’s only just put out her debut single. Sacrifice Me is a dramatic statement from this new artist who’s ready to hit the ground running. Dark, brooding experimental electronic production makes way for soul and jazz-influenced vocals, all created by SOLA herself.

Drawing on Yoruba imagery and Afrofuturism, SOLA describes her sound as “warped soul” and we’re really into it and you should be too. Get on this wave.

Last and First Men

Barbican

Music, film and narration form a poetic meditation on memory and loss in a performance of Jóhannsson’s breathtaking multimedia work, Last and First Men.

Based on the cult science fiction novel by Olaf Stapledon, it combines music, film and narration from Tilda Swinton, sitting somewhere between fiction and documentary. Images of a decaying futuristic landscape – filmed in 16mm black and white in the former Yugoslav republics – are placed against Jóhannsson’s haunting orchestral score, crafted over seven years, before its premiere at the 2017 Manchester International Festival.

Having passed away in February, we’ve made the decision not to replace Jóhann – instead, the performance will go ahead in tribute to him, and recordings that Jóhann made of his own parts will be played live alongside the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Daníel Bjarnason.

War requiem

ENO/Palladium

Wolfgang Tillmans Delves into the Inherited Violence of Britten’s ‘War Requiem’
The Turner Prize-winning photographer’s set design for ENO’s new production asks: can the greatest horror be better communicated by the unseen?

On 11 November 2018, Pages of the Sea marked the centenary of the 1918 Armistice: a temporary installation of portraits of First World War individuals drawn at aerial scale into the sands of 30 beaches, from Folkstone to St Andrews, under the direction of filmmaker Danny Boyle. One of the most high-profile commissions from 14-18 Now, the five-year programme of artworks marking the First World War centenary, Boyle’s was also the shortest lived: each image washed away with the day’s tide. This ephemerality was to my mind the work’s redeeming feature – evoking not so much the poignancy of lives cut short by war, but the strange amnesia that exists within our memorial practice: in which unrelenting solemnity about the tragedy of war is seen to pose no friction with ongoing military engagements.

Six days after Pages of the Sea, different tides were under scrutiny in the intermission of English National Opera’s new production of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962): shaky tracking shots of foaming, detergent-filled waves breaking on an anonymous shore. The footage was the work of artist Wolfgang Tillmans, making his opera debut as designer for this dramatized, semi-narrative new staging of what is widely considered Britten’s masterpiece, directed by the company’s Daniel Kramer and with choreography by Ann Yee.

War Requiem was originally commissioned for a festival marking the 1962 consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, built besides a 14th-century forebear which was destroyed by bombing in World War Two. But rather than the grand, Basil Spence-designed structure for whose spaces Britten devised the piece, it is the remains of the older cathedral which inspires the most piercingly effective part of Tillmans’s visual design. At the end of the Mass’s first section, the Requiem aeternum, the vast projector screen at the stage’s back (Tillmans’s primary means throughout the production, along with three tall moveable LED screens) is filled with a wide shot of the medieval ruins, bare against the sky; broken masonry and unloved benches give the scene a dowdy, municipal air. At first almost unnoticeably, the camera zooms in on an indistinct bit of carving (a piscina perhaps) to the centre-right of the frame, until it fills the screen: a vertiginous effect, like gliding down the barrel of a gun. As the shot tightens on this unpromising detail, the true subject comes into focus – a piece of moss, growing unnoticed over the stones. As the image grows in size it takes on different aspects: at one moment, it recalls mould on a heel of bread, at another, grasses sprouting in a landscape. Even among dreary ruins, strange new life grows.

This single sequence feels like the heart of this production’s visual schema (indeed, it appears literally in the middle of the programme, a close-up of the moss reproduced as a gatefold edition). In a sense, the image is well-trod territory for Tillmans (an act of concerted looking, uncovering something wonderful in the everyday) – but it also strikingly resonates with the organic metaphors so common to British WWI art, from ‘In Flanders Fields’ to the closing credits of ‘Blackadder Goes Forth’ (1989). Accompanying a section of the Dies irae is a towering projection of Tillmans’s monochrome Chrysanthemum (2006) – an improbable plume of white, resplendent on an almost black background, as stark as a flare in the night. Momentarily conjuring the poppy (designated badge of remembrance wherever the British Army has a presence), it also brought to mind the submerged trauma in Monet’s Grandes Décorations (1914–18), begun the winter that hostility broke out, the sound of artillery fire sometimes audible at Giverny.

Though commissioned within the context of post-WWII recovery, War Requiem is redolent with references to the earlier war. In a sense, Britten didn’t respond to any particular war so much as war itself – war, and its stupefying ability to germinate in generation after generation. The Requiem’s very structure, indeed, emphasizes violence unfolding across eras, as Britten complements the main chorus with distinct voices of the past – a baritone and a tenor who sing poems by Wilfred Owen, thus identified as WWI soldiers – and voices of the future, in the form of the children’s chorus. With Nasir Mazhar’s excellent costumes (a melange of flat caps and bonnets, hoodies and sleeve garters) blurring the sense of historical period, Tillmans’s visuals in this production too emphasise the intergenerational dynamics of violence. Thus, the chorus first emerge on stage squeezed between two screens, each showing pages from Ernst Friedrich’s pacifist 1924 photobook Krieg dem Kriege! (‘War on War!’), progressing from images of militaristic children’s toys – soldiers, cannons, warships – to excerpts from a series of portraits of wounded troops, graphically detailing the disfiguring effect of modern warfare.

‘Photography as shock therapy’ is how Susan Sontag described Friedrich’s book in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). But if so, this therapy’s effectiveness has no guarantee, this production implies: the trauma conveyed by the score still follows the audience’s shocked exposure to these images, just as historically, the ‘War to End All Wars’ proved nothing of the sort. Britten, a committed pacifist, composed the work against a backdrop of the Cold War, nuclear proliferation, and growing awareness of atrocities in Vietnam and channelled his ‘outrage’ at such into the work, as Philip Reed’s essay in the programme claims. Tillmans is true to this unquiet spirit, showing the audience a banner for a website commemorating the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, and shots of resurgent racist nationalists on the streets in Poland. In this framing, war is not merely a matter of the deeds of our ancestors, but a question for us – for those to come.

From Friedrich’s illustrations of toy soldiers onwards, children in the production are shown to enact and re-enact inherited forms of violence. In one striking tableaux, one group of the children’s chorus from atop a karst-like lump of silver metal, observe another playing a game of Ring-a-ring o’Roses, while a single isolated child lies cruciform on the ground. Owen’s retelling of the biblical sacrifice of Isaac, ‘Parable of the Old Man and the Young’, which Britten inserts alongside the Offertorium is performed here by the tenor and baritone as a grim entertainment to the children of the chorus. One unfortunate boy is plucked from the crowd as a co-performer, held close to the baritone as he mimes slitting the boy’s throat (a fascinating metatextual commentary, given Britten’s complicated psychosexual investment in the figure of the youth, intriguingly explored in ENO’s 2011 production setting of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a boys boarding school).

The elder’s willingness to sacrifice the younger (Tillmans’s 2012 Sheep Shadow is projected at one point, in lieu of a literal scapegoat); that the experience of war does not stop one generation sending another to fight again (the death toll of the final line of Owen’s ‘Parable’ – ‘half the seed of Europe, one by one’ is flashed up on the screen) – these are the subjects of the production’s ire. In the night’s most heart-stopping moment, during the Agnus Dei, the child members of the chorus are laid down at one side of the stage with all the dreadful neatness of a planned mass grave. Then, at the call of the tenor-solider, they stand erect and file into line, ready to march to a new war.

The children, watched by the rest of the chorus, horrified and still, disappear offstage during the Libera Me. While the battlefield is hidden, the on-stage screens show an abstract quiver – a pooling brown field, like a mutated sample of one of Tillmans’s ‘Greifbar’ images (2014–15). With such gestures the production seems to ask: if graphic imagery such as Friedrich’s fails as prophylactic, can the greatest horror be better communicated by the unseen? The final image Tillmans presents is a projection of his Tree Filling Window (2002), which towers over an open grave, left over from an earlier burial scene. Tree Filling Window is one of the artist’s most ravishing works: perfectly framed, balancing profusion and restraint, the tree’s colour greening the whole frame, as if cellulose is infusing the architecture. Like the earlier moss among ruins, placing an image of natural growth at the end of the Requiem here provides a reiteration of the vegetative myth: that after death another, green world is possible (even inevitable). For a production so attentive to the ongoing-ness of violence, and the potential hollowness of remembrance, it’s a strangely consoling – even complacent – closing motif here. Still, I imagine, it’s probably never looked more beautiful.

Matthew Mclean in Frieze

Lykke Li

Brixton Academy

Sigrid, MØ, Alma, Tove Lo: Scandipop is in excellent health in 2018. And happily there’s still space for its 90s and 00s progenitors, among them the still-reigning Robyn, Little Dragon and Lykke Li, who released her first record a decade ago this year. The Swedish singer has since released three more albums of introspective pop, and expanded into swaggering R&B and trap on her latest, this year’s So Sad So Sexy.

At her first London show in four years, the stage is bathed in scarlet light, with a gigantic triangle and Li’s eyes on the backdrop. Dressed top to toe in PVC and wielding a tambourine, she is a striking figure, and is soon propelling herself around, staging a dance break and explaining her crotch-grabbing choreography to the crowd as she struts purposefully.

There’s space for a clutch of tracks from 2014’s balladeering I Never Learn, but largely the focus is on her latest work. Not that the show is one-note: the bombastic club vibes and syncopated strobes during Deep End contrast with a near-a cappella version of Bad Woman, during which her band retreat into the shadows.

If Li’s patter often feels generic (there are lots of appeals for the crowd to dance) then the show is the opposite, as she segues with ease and power from swelling beats to quasi-rap to torch songs, and even a hushed cover of Usher’s U Got It Bad: unexpectedly, its admission that “I’ve been there, done it, fucked around … nobody wants to be alone” feels right at home alongside her own songs.

Li’s sound is more mainstream and divisive than ever, cloaked in occasionally overbearing percussion and the odd awkward appeal to her “bae”. Yet it retains the heavy emotive core that’s threaded throughout her past decade’s work: on Better Alone, her newfound mettle meets stirring harmonies, fusing past and present.

Hannah J Davies in The Guardian

Olafur Arnalds: re:member

Palladium, London

Arguably one of the most creative, influential and devoted songwriters around, Icelandic composer and songwriter Ólafur Arnalds bought his long-awaited new album to Manchester. Arnalds is known by many for his work with Kiasmos, an IDM and classical music fusion of sound he began with friend Janus Rasmussen in 2009. Yet it is his compositions of classical sounds and his ability on piano is where Ólafur Arnalds truly shines.

His talent not only as a composer but as a musician is unquestionable. It only took 5 minutes of his set to truly appreciate the music that he crafts and how powerful and invigorating his sound is. The Albert Hall, Manchester provided the perfect space for his sound to explode into life. The stunning acoustic range of the venue arguably makes it the best sounding venue in the city. He opens with the set with the ever growing ‘Arbakkinn’, an emotional beginning which builds to a luscious flowing soundscape that you just can’t escape… but why would you want to? Opening with Arnalds on stage with a soft flowing piano, other musicians slowly join him on stage.

Before sweeping into ‘Brot’, Arnalds used the crowd for an experiment. Everyone was asked to sing one note for use in the track. He began to record the note sung by the onlooking audience and further joked about reverb and how “sometimes we add autotune if it sounds terrible” prompting laughter from the crowd. This elongated and manipulated note sung by the crowd acted as a deep-lying synth within ‘Brot’. As it played, the other musicians began to play the track. This shows that Ólafur is keen to engage the audience as much as possible during the set and to actively include them as an instrument.

With the introduction of a drummer for the intense “Only The Winds’ and the title track from his latest record ‘re:member’, the set exploded further into life. The beautiful way the violins, piano, drums, synths and double bass blend together on these tracks truly encapsulate his beauty within music in a way I have personally never experienced whilst watching an artist perform. ‘Under’ further expressed his sound with its danceablity and mid-section of the track. The violinists providing a synth-like beat to the track and the incredible ability of the drummer encase you within the sound.

‘re:member’ is a truly remarkable record and it is fully brought to life within Ólafur Arnalds’ live shows. Combinations of distorted/choppy synths and luscious violin make tracks some of the most stunning and breathtaking music of the set. The moments where Arnalds isolates himself on stage are the some of the most gorgeous moments of the evening. The track ‘Nyepi’, named after the day of silence in Bali, Indonesia was one of those moments. Prior to the track, Arnalds describes his time there stating it was good to “give Mother Earth a day off” and that the song was a result of the time he had spent in Bali during Nyepi. Fan favourite ‘Near Light’ completed the set with its cataclysmic synthesisers and gorgeous soundscapes that created the most elegant energy and vibrancy. The powerful drums collided with the beauty of the violins and piano in a masterful way that could only be achieved by Ólafur.

Concluding the set were two very important songs to Arnalds. The first being one of the first tracks that he ever wrote, ‘3055’, a mainly piano-based moment with subtle flicks of violin that cascade into a beautiful creation of sound. Arnalds recently remastered this record, and recalled that the remastering process gave him the influence to begin writing ‘re:member’, saying on stage “I’ve learned so much over the years and it was a rewarding experience that helped shape my new album”.

The most touching and memorable moment of the evening now, as Arnalds introduces the final song of the night, ‘Lag fyrir ömmu’. He began by talking about how his Grandma had influenced him to pursue his career and how he decided to name the song ‘Song for Grandma’ in Icelandic. Yet to further add to the emotion, the departed trio of violinists began playing their instruments to the side of the stage from the middle of the song. As the track progressed, they walked further away down the corridor with the audience sat in complete silence, Olafur facing towards his grand piano, refraining to turn towards the sheer silence of the Albert Hall. It acted almost as a remembered silence for his grandma. I’ve never experienced silence quite like it and it produced arguably the most beautiful and pure moment of any show.

Piran Aston in The Irish Times

Denim World Tour

Soho theatre (with KP)

The conceit of drag girlband Denim’s show World Tour is that they’re performing it on stage at Wembley. Its achievement is to convince you that, were they to do so, they wouldn’t look out of place. They may not be performing to the 12,000 people they envisage in their heads, but they make Soho Theatre sound like that way, with this cheeky, characterful and vocally accomplished hour-long gig.

At the beginning, the five-piece seem too big for Soho’s main house. But then, that’s the joke: their swagger and stadium-pop touches are setting up a punchline to come. And you soon realise that only frontwoman Glamrou La Denim (Amrou Al-Kadhi) is outre in the conventional drag manner, and even her camp theatrics come with political edge. Her opening gag, singing the words “Alan Ayckbourn” in the style of a muezzin, are a mere palate cleanser for the solo routine mid-show, a sharp-clawed attack on attitudes to queer identity. It’s striking how transgressive this feels, as Glamrou retools Whitney Houston’s So Emotional into a cri de coeur.

Her bandmates, meanwhile, bring flavours other than fabulous spikiness to the table, and each gets her solo moment in the spotlight. Crystal Vaginova, she of the sparkling beard and cool, still demeanour, fashions Beyoncé’s I Was Here into something far filthier. Brittle Aphrodite Green, mother of six and with a marriage to Donald Trump under her belt, torch-songs Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Electra Cute, the outfit’s Sporty Spice, blows the gaff on the Wembley conceit then redeems herself with a will-to-power rendition of Rise Like a Phoenix.

It’s all done with a great sense of fun – and a remarkably light touch given the bombastic, stadium-party-pop conceit – by the quintet who emerged earlier this decade as Cambridge University’s first professional drag band. Their act leans less on cattiness and on burlesques of femininity than is sometimes the case in drag. There’s also some lovely singing, solo and choral, all backed by a tight three-piece band. Scheduled in a 10pm slot, it could hardly be bettered for partygoers seeking a smart and uplifting late-night knees-up.

Brian Logan in The Guardian