Royal Albert Hall, London

The Minnesota Orchestra’s Proms with their music director Osmo Vänskä were object lessons in the creation of excitement and meaning without resorting to rhetorical extremes. Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony and Beethoven’s Ninth, given on consecutive days, were the main works. We have learned to think of both primarily in terms of grand gestures, but they work just as well, if not better, when some of the expected loftiness is removed.

Vänskä’s preference for tension and detail over volume and textural weight results in playing of exceptional lucidity from an orchestra that often functions with the precision of a chamber ensemble. Shorn of its usual upholstered opulence, Bruckner’s Fourth has a combination of rawness, sensuousness and grace that peers back through Wagner to Schumann and Beethoven. The latter’s Ninth, meanwhile, was extraordinarily volatile, even in the adagio – done with rapturous fluidity on this occasion.

Neither performance was without controversy. The Bruckner was given in a new edition by Benjamin Korstvedt incorporating cuts that, some have argued, were made under pressure and are therefore inauthentic. And Vänskä’s insistence on precise enunciation in the finale of the Beethoven led to syllabic, declamatory singing from the BBC Symphony Chorus. They sang from memory, though the less than ideally matched soloists remained score-bound.

The Bruckner was paired with Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, played with understated virtuosity and sardonic humour by Alisa Weilerstein. Berg’s Violin Concerto, meanwhile, accompanied Beethoven’s Ninth. Gil Shaham, a late replacement for the indisposed Lisa Batiashvili, was the soloist in a touching performance that combined great formal control with nostalgic intensity.

Rating: 4/5

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Royal Albert Hall, London

Yannick Nézet-Séguin has big shoes to fill at the Rotterdam Philharmonic, where he took over from Valery Gergiev in 2008. His first Prom at the orchestra’s helm was not the sensation some might have hoped for; but then Gergiev has perhaps built a solid rather than sensational orchestra, and there was still enough evidence of why the Philadelphia Orchestra has snaffled the young Canadian up as its next music director.

Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser was very much a microcosm of the opera: the hurtling bacchanalian music was eclipsed by the godly opening chorale, which grew slowly into an impressive, sustained arc whenever it occurred.

One man who won’t have been listening is Simon Keenlyside, who will have been backstage still warming his voice up furiously in order to be able to float the high note in the first line of Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder quite so beautifully. Keenlyside is not an obvious Mahler baritone in the Fischer-Dieskau mould: the honey in his voice can be switched off as well as on. But it is at the rough edges that it becomes most interesting, and the few extra breaths he needed seemed part and parcel of a performance that was as committed as it was moving. He and the brass spared nothing in the last verse of Um Mitternacht: one man against the trumpets of Jericho.

Nézet-Séguin’s real test should have been Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. He certainly put his stamp on it, and the orchestra found a different sound, with sparing vibrato for the strings. Some of his phrasing ideas were counterintuitive; some were successful, some slightly impeded the flow. The music rarely lacked excitement, but it was more of the minute than part of the long game. Still, Nézet-Séguin can make those minutes magical, as the encore, The Fairy Garden from Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, amply proved.

Rating: 4/5

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Royal Albert Hall, London

The fashion for making big orchestral arrangements of Bach peaked in the first half of the 20th century, and then gradually disappeared as the early music movement got underway. In a day devoted to the composer, in which John Eliot Gardiner and his English Baroque Soloists had already traversed the Brandenburg Concertos at Cadogan Hall, the evening’s two main-stage Proms offered a largely nostalgic look at how audiences once heard Bach, and how later composers viewed him.

Two of the nine works in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s Prom under Andrew Litton were new, though only one of them was really an arrangement. As a large-scale transcription of a movement from a viola da gamba sonata, Alissa Firsova’s Allegro was a bright and multicoloured piece that attracted attention through its command of instruments used in breeze-block manner – sharply defined, if not exactly subtle. Tarik O’Regan’s Latent Manifest drew on a few bars from a solo violin sonata to create a more personal canvas, taking us a long way from a literal reworking into the realms of evanescent fantasy, with delicately evocative results. The rest of the programme – which included showpieces by Stokowski and Respighi, as well as Walton’s dapper Wise Virgins suite, and more workmanlike orchestrations by Henry Wood and Malcolm Sargent – was interesting, though by the time we had heard the third reworking of Sheep May Safely Graze, it was starting to sound like lamb dressed up as mutton souffle.

Earlier, David Briggs marshalled the full forces of the Royal Albert Hall organ for the console equivalent of these orchestral extravaganzas. Virgil Fox’s arrangement of Komm, Süsse Tod took the prize for the most lurid. At its best, Briggs’s own arrangement of the Third Orchestral Suite sounded suitably grand; at its worst, grandiose.

Rating: 3/5

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According to a report on Cnet, Apple had updated is iDisk service and MobileMe iDisk App, allowing users to stream music stored on the cloud to Internet-connected devices including the iPad,

Apple’s iDisk service is a part of its MobileMe family of apps, which allows users to store files on a cloud-based system, similar to Google Docs and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.

Apple’s enabling of audio streaming on iDisk was reported by Music Ally, which cited a blog post made by MP3Tunes CEO Michael Robertson, who revealed that the new iDisk release notes indicated the software’s ability to stream audio files on an Apple device via the cloud.

The Grammy Award-winning VAN HALEN was formed in 1972 in Pasadena, California and released its first album in 1978, quickly becoming one of the most influential rock bands in history. In 2007, after more than three decades dazzling audiences with their energetic performances and establishing their catalog of songs as one of the most enduring in the history of popular music, VAN HALEN was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

With 11 studio albums, VAN HALEN is the 19th best-selling group of all time in the U.S., according to the RIAA, with more than 56 million albums sold in the U.S., 10 of them certified platinum or multi-platinum, six albums that reached No. 1 on The Billboard 200 and two of them, “Van Halen” and “1984″, achieving diamond certification. VAN HALEN has been nominated multiple times by the American Music Awards and, in 1992, won “Favorite Heavy Metal/Rock Album” for the album “For Unlawful Carnage Knowledge”.

“It’s fantastic to continue our relationship with VAN HALEN, which is one of the most enduring and successful partnerships within our roster of songwriters,” said Scott Francis, President, Warner/Chappell Music, and Chairman and CEO, Warner/Chappell Music U.S. “Since its inception, VAN HALEN has written driving melodic rock songs performed in groundbreaking style.”

During its more than three decades as a band, VAN HALEN has featured a number of different lineups and three different lead singers, and throughout has produced a string of multiplatinum albums that contained numerous No. 1 singles, including “Jump”, “(Oh) Pretty Woman”, “Why Can’t This Be Love?”, “Humans Being”, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Me Wise Magic”.

Most recently, the band toured with founding brothers, Eddie and Alex Van Halen, its original lead singer, David Lee Roth, and Eddie‘s son, Wolfgang, playing bass. The group is currently in the studio recording an album with Roth that is due for release in 2011.

Royal Albert Hall, London

It was the Cleveland Orchestra that commissioned Fantasias, Julian Anderson’s latest orchestral work, and gave the premiere last November. But the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain got the chance of introducing it to the UK, and made it the centrepiece of its summer tour, framed by French music and conducted by Semyon Bychkov.

It is Anderson’s first multi-movement work for orchestra, and, for all their subtle interconnections, the five pieces that make up Fantasias aim at maximum variety and contrast. The opening fantasia, for brass alone and sounding like a Gabrieli sonata with a postmodern makeover, is followed by a movement overflowing with ideas and luscious, deliquescent textures, and a whispering, creaking nocturne apparently inspired by rainforest sounds. The tiny, evanescent scherzo and breathtaking prestissimo finale both introduce quarter-tones, giving a fuzzy strangeness to some of the harmonies. It’s a wonderfully rich score, which the NYO at maximum strength – six bassoons, five harps, three tubas – played with remarkable precision.

The rest of the concert was equally vivid. Bychkov set the tone with a wonderfully alert account of Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, brimming with wit and pictorial immediacy and showcasing some superbly characterised solo playing from the NYO principals. In the Symphonie Fantastique, the conducting revelled in the tonal possibilities of such a huge orchestra, sculpting the music in expansive sweeps and making Berlioz’s scoring seem even more tinglingly surreal than usual. The detail was remarkable, whether it was the evocative offstage cor anglais in the slow movement, the trio of tubas snarling magnificently in the March to the Scaffold, or the E flat clarinet that led off the final Witches’ Sabbath with manic glee. A fabulous, exhilarating concert.

Rating: 5/5

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Village Underground, London EC2

No matter who makes the shortlist, the nominations for the Mercury prize always prompt the same response. The reaction to this year’s runners and riders was no different: they were either praised as examples of the vigorous health of the British music business, or bashed as a sign of how it’s all gone awry. There then followed the familiar assessment of whether the judges are even fit for purpose. Evidence that they might be: inspired choice of winners such as Dizzee Rascal. Signs that too much of the awards ceremony’s house red sometimes wrecks the critical faculties: Gomez and several others who’ve walked off with the prize and into steep career decline.

It’s fitting, then, that Klaxons should reappear just a week after this year’s nominations were made public. Their debut album, Myths of the Near Future, was a surprise winner three years ago, its giddy dance-rock hybrid edging out the sex’n'drug-damaged retro soul of Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black as well as the more orthodox rock of Arctic Monkeys’ second album, Favourite Worst Nightmare. Whether history records this an example of supreme wisdom or trend-hopping foolishness will be decided in the next few weeks, by the reception to the London-based quartet’s follow up, Surfing the Void.

Dismissing the Klaxons is easy enough. To the more serious minded their semi-jokey talk of kick-starting “new rave”, enthusiasm for the drug ecstasy and not-unrelated fondness for spouting cosmic gibberish (their Mercury winnings were going to be donated to a “telepathy charity” said guitarist Simon Taylor-Davis) were a wind-up, proof they were no more than a Mighty Boosh skit that got out of hand.

In truth, the basic idea – combining the twin energies of rave and punk – was sound, and executed more successfully than by Jesus Jones, EMF or any other of the forgotten rock bands who sought nirvana through MDMA and drum machines 20 years ago. Top 10 hit “Golden Skans” also suggested that a genuine fondness for pop music lurked beneath all the undergraduate references to JG Ballard (from whom they cribbed the album title) and Thomas Pynchon (they have a track called “Gravity’s Rainbow”).

Trouble is, they were enjoying themselves so much they turned up at initial sessions for album two having neglected their homework. So the first stab at Surfing the Void was famously rejected by their record label, Polydor, who packed them off to Los Angeles to record with producer Ross Robinson, best known for his work with lucrative but commercially derided early noughties nu-metal bands such as Korn. If this doesn’t strike you as the behaviour of supposed visionaries and independent thinkers, you’d be right. It was more a case of salvaging careers and making the best of the opportunity that the Mercury win had provided. Robinson knocked them into shape with a bizarre mix of personal training and group therapy, with morning runs on the beach accompanied by unintentionally hilarious motivational instruction, such as telling drummer Steffan Halperin his next take was a “goodbye note to his family”.

So far, so suitably ridiculous. On the plus side, they actually delivered something listenable, even if it is a slightly more grey-sounding approximation of the first album. Its better moments are those where their undeniable way with a chorus rises above an inevitably heavier new approach. Heard alongside old favourites during this evening’s low-key warm-up gig in front of a partisan home crowd and it seems like the Klaxons have indeed pulled themselves away from oblivion. “Twin Flames”, Surfing the Void‘s lightest, most engaging moment, slots perfectly between “Golden Skans” and fellow Myths‘ highlight “Two Receivers”.

They’re a band reborn in another sense too. Robinson’s peculiar boot camp has given them some technical skill and live they’re no longer a triumph of vigour over ability. Gone are the days where Righton, Taylor-Davis and bassist Jamie Reynolds appeared to be playing three entirely different tunes. Reynolds recently admitted that “the sobriety thing’s got a massive amount to do with it”, but whatever the reason, something’s clicked and old favourites, such as their cover of Grace’s mid-90s dance hit Not Over Yet, are rendered with fresh intensity.

They’re not entirely free of pointlessly trendy touches, insisting on addressing the east London crowd as “Shoreditch” in deference to the area’s fashionable reputation. And there’s a coy early reference to new rave from Righton when it might be better to forget the matter entirely: its only legacy is the sheer volume of brightly coloured sportswear Topshop managed to flog at the time.

There’s also a lingering feeling that while they might have rescued their career, Klaxons haven’t really advanced either. The shock of the new has worn off and while they still talk a good game – they’ve discovered South American shamanic rituals and the Jungian theories of Arthur Koestler – it feels like we’ve been here before. Which was surely never the point of them in the first place. Proficiency is one thing, imagination quite another.

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Roundhouse, London
Marina Diamandis sparkles on the verge of pop stardom, while Goldfrapp go for the glam-stomp jugular

Imagine a gig – a proper gig – where everyone gets in for free. Now imagine an event where the fabled guest list (a bit of an oxymoron, granted, when everyone is getting in for free) is not a grubby, well-thumbed wodge of paper, but a shiny, box-fresh iPad. Picture 31 of these gigs, back to back, featuring a diverse array of acts whose common denominator is faintly elusive, all of which are being filmed. If it’s Fearne Cotton trailing around all miked up, and everyone else has a bit of plastic on a lanyard round their necks guaranteeing 10 free past performances to download, it must be the iTunes festival – the annual series of gigs helmed by the most powerful music-selling device currently extant.

Watching musical powerbrokers ebb and flow might not be the sexiest-sounding of pastimes. But you don’t need to read reams of dry financial news to twig that Apple recently posted profits of £2.1bn for the last quarter. Shiny box-fresh iPads accounted for more of that figure than downloads by Marina and the Diamonds, obviously. But the inescapable conclusion is that iTunes is one of the few music-brokers with the current wherewithal to sponsor a month of free gigs by major artists at a landmark London venue. Music is being done their way now.

And their way is slick. The beautiful Roundhouse has been transformed into one giant TV studio, spectacularly lit so you can see the ironwork holding up the vaulted ceiling. But as with all that is free, there are attendant benefits and costs. Liggers yap their way through both sets. Cameras swoop by like hungry pterodactyls.

The visuals, though, are sharp – as are the performances. Marina Diamandis and her business-like backing band (not, incidentally, the Diamonds – Marina is a solo performer, and the Diamonds are the fans) gleam with a pop starriness that is, thus far, more an act of will than one of record-selling. Her album, The Family Jewels, went top 5 in the UK when it was released in February, but has so far mustered 110,000 sales – solid for a quirky debutante, but not enough to fund the bling that Marina’s surname demands. Indeed, she has cardboard-cutout diamonds perched like glasses on her nose for “Shampain”, possibly the most conventional of her strident remakes of chart-pop. More endearingly, she sports an extraordinary knitted grey cardie with a bear’s head hood for “Mowgli’s Road”, which, if they were being sold on the merchandise stall, would probably pay back her advance in a trice.

Diamandis has inspired both love – on blogs by Perez Hilton and Kanye West – and disdain for her daffy but gimlet-eyed take on mainstream pop. The hiccupping theatricality of her delivery remains a stumbling block, but there is a tantalising carnivorousness to her lower register tonight that is rarely heard outside pagan ceremonies. More of it would help define her in a marketplace where Florence and her Machine have hoovered up all the credibility. Diamandis’s next single, “Oh No!”, could really change things, though, taking on Katy Perry for cartoonish impact. It sounds like a hit-in-waiting, with the faint echo of Buggles.

Alison Goldfrapp and her silver-clad backing band arrive onstage through the centre of a giant silver doughnut whose holeyness immediately sets the mind racing. Having popularised human-animal hybridisation onstage around the time of her Supernature album, and having freely exploited the double entendres inherent in rockets on her latest, Head First (ach!), Alison Goldfrapp attracts this sort of licentious interpretation.

Somewhat disappointingly she looks less like a dominatrix Dr Doolittle tonight, and more like a woman who has recently been extricated from a bin full of unwound VHS tapes. Later jackets (neo-Tudor ruffles and fuchsia Honey Monster, respectively) work hard to put things right, but Goldfrapp’s image as an imperious visualist takes a dent here.

Goldfrapp’s high-impact set ignores their most refined album – 2008′s criminally underselling Seventh Tree – in favour of a lubricious discoid shakedown culled from what you might call the rumping, pumping records – Black Cherry, Supernature and Head First. After all, Goldfrapp is credited with kicking off the vogue for glam electronics among young women in search of a pop career.

But even this accessible set takes time to ignite, despite the sublime sound design and the calibre of bass frequencies that can melt cellulite. Marina Diamandis is rumoured to be the kind of synaesthete who assigns colours to notes and numbers, but you can taste every single one of Goldfrapp’s delicious notes on your tongue tonight.

Two keytarists take Goldfrapp’s current 80s synth influence to amusing extremes on tracks such as “Believer”, but Goldfrapp’s glam stomps remain their most authoritative medium. “Ooh La La” and “Train” finally whip the crowd into a lather. A concluding “Strict Machine” is so loud and penetrating it sends everyone home having unwittingly enjoyed free liposuction – something for iTunes to ponder for next year, perhaps.

Music: Music + Live music reviews | guardian.co.uk

Great Eastern Quay, London; Royal Opera House, London

In a long queue outside a former pharmaceuticals factory near Gallions Reach in London’s Docklands, there is mounting expectation and one feels as if one has reached the rim of the world – a scrubby no man’s land of cow parsley and warehouses. The sense is of being on the edge of the known world artistically, too, waiting to see a most exciting and unconventional event – a collaboration between ENO and radical theatre company Punchdrunk. Tickets have already sold out (with frisky bidding on eBay) for this opera based on John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. The play’s jauntily disagreeable 17th-century plot – involving murderous violence and unbridled misogyny – is redeemed by its language, as fresh as if it had been written hours ago. The score is by the German composer Torsten Rasch, who has written the music for 40 films but never an opera – until now.

At the door, each audience member is handed a white mask and instructed not to take it off. The masks – spectacle-wearers take note – do not settle on the nose without pain. But perhaps one should not overreact to minor discomfort in an evening involving multiple murder and ending with the Duchess hanging by her feet in mid-air, like a joint in a butcher’s shop. Every floor of the factory is occupied by musicians, singers and surprises, and what you see – in semi-darkness – depends upon where you choose to go. Felix Barrett’s incredible talent, as a director and designer, is for creating atmosphere: a forest in which the branches are thickly coiled with plastic cables, a dark church with overbearing pulpit, a narrow room behind glass where a woman is overpowered by a man. I witnessed several members of the audience tripping over and, more than once, bumped into someone in the dark. You take your chance. It’s frightening. And Rasch’s music amplifies foreboding: harmonious persecution.

The challenge of the evening – and I struggled with this – is that you must be prepared to lose the plot. You will not see Malfi consecutively. You stumble upon fragments of the story, depending upon where you roam. And you must forfeit language too. The opera celebrates the play’s danger but is careless with Webster’s words (impossible to judge Ian Burton’s libretto, encountered in snatches). Nor must you fret about whatever it is you are missing in other rooms of the building (a lesson for life?). Yet I confess to having felt triumphant relief – like a hunter in search of prey – when I chanced upon Bosola, Malfi’s treacherous manservant (Richard Burkhard), on the second floor, pressing compromising apricots on the Duchess as she sat on a swing in the dark. He sings magnificently, straight from Webster. He observes that the Duchess, contrary to the fashion, “wears a loose-bodied gown”. He has discovered her pregnancy – one of the several secrets she fails to keep. As the Duchess, Claudia Huckle sings seductively, powerful yet doomed.

At one point, to impose order, I played “chase the conductor”. Wouldn’t Stephen Higgins go where the action was? But the man is as quick on his feet as he is with his baton: he kept giving me the slip, vanishing into the darkness ahead. Once, I pushed through a door into a forbidden room where the orchestra had assembled and were about to pour their music into the darkness. A pair of hands firmly redirected me. The highlight of the evening was sharing a pew with the musicians (wonderful to have the orchestra close and visible instead of in the pit). Their music stands had little crosses on them, conveying the sense of being in a graveyard, but the music could not have been more alive: the brass was ominously vivid and, together, the players preached a dark sermon.

The finale pulls cast, orchestra and audience together in high theatre – complete with swinging incense, scarlet dancers and a hellish host of hanged men. It leaves you terrified, footsore and stunned. Yet for all its breathtaking creativity and celebration of simultaneity, I think it unlikely this hide-and-seek opera is the shape of things to come – if only because shape is what it lacks. But what it does, it does brilliantly. Punchdrunk describes its work as “immersive”, and it is. It changes you from being a distant member of the audience to a voyeur (of the wild sexuality of the Duchess and her servant, Antonio) or a witness (to Malfi’s horrific end), and there are moments when you feel – as a dancer’s body brushes against yours – dangerously close to an accomplice.

When I was nine, I was taken to La traviata at Covent Garden – it was the first opera I ever saw. I remember weeping for Violetta – Mirella Freni’s tiny, ailing figure vertiginiously far below. It was a thrill that has stayed with me all my life. Seeing Angela Gheorghiu as Violetta (I missed her 1994 debut), I was thrilled by that same luxurious abandon – there is no more romantic opera than La traviata. Director Richard Eyre is working at the height of his powers, while designer Bob Crowley is in grandly early 19th-century mode.

And Gheorghiu is beyond criticism. Her great gift, whether in party dress or about to die, is to bring out the recklessness of the role. At one point she helps herself to ice and flings it into her face to show a carefree soul, and as a hint of the fever to come. She is consumed – by passion, despair, illness. James Valenti’s Alfredo is glorious – a most tuneful guardian, with admirable vocal delicacy. Zeljko Lucic is grave and velvet-voiced as Alfredo’s father.

There is an extraordinary finale in which the antic shadows of carnival figures pass the long windows of Violetta’s bedroom and she flutters, like a trapped butterfly, on the other side of the glass. Not that she, or the production, is actually trapped. In the transcendent moments that follow she runs, in a death-defying circle, into Alfredo’s arms – her whole life in her voice.

Music: Music + Live music reviews | guardian.co.uk

Paddock Wood, Kent

Hop Farm’s selling point may be its au naturel feel, but perhaps this year the organisers were too laidback – coach companies were given the wrong start time so hundreds of people missed the first four acts, while there were hour-long queues for water on one of the hottest days of the year. Still, the low-key charm worked its magic on Friday night as the crowds were able to sit down to enjoy Van Morrison‘s effortless set. And on a folktastic Saturday, after Laura Marling had commanded her audience with a preternatural serenity, Seasick Steve had them sharing his wine and serenading a young girl, before getting out his diddley bow (not a body part, but a one-stringed guitar). Mumford & Sons rose to the occasion of their biggest gig yet with ecstatic versions of “Roll Away Your Stone” and “Awake My Soul”; Ray Davies rollicked with “You Really Got Me Going” and refused to leave the stage when told. Bob Dylan‘s only UK appearance of 2010 was a supreme display of musicianship, even if you couldn’t hear the words or see him on the big screen (he had apparently refused close-ups).

Best act Mumford & Sons, whose precocious talent would be irksome if they weren’t so damn likable.

Overheard “Who are Chas & Dave?” as Peter Doherty tried to lead a singalong of “Hopping Down in Kent”.

Best discovery Johnny Flynn.

Add your own (short) review as a comment and we’ll publish a round-up in The New Review come the end of the season.

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