Shaun William Ryder – review
02 Academy Birmingham
Somewhere along the line, Shaun “William” Ryder has acquired a middle name. Most artists try to get by with just the one when they become famous beyond their immediate constituency. Since his stint in the Celebrity jungle last year, Ryder has certainly been elevated, if not quite to the status of national treasure, then at least to the position of everyone’s favourite foul-mouthed relation, one undeniably damaged in the ecstasy wars (and the opium wars and the crack wars), but warmly indulged for his valorous part in them. Well, perhaps not the latter two.
The former frontman of Happy Mondays and Black Grape – and latterly, staunch consumer of crocodile penis – has never been a man to do things the easy way, however. He once infamously went Awol after wandering out of the Mondays’ contract negotiations to get a KFC – Ryder parlance for scoring smack. Tonight, Shaun William Ryder’s drum kit and his bold, black-and-white promotional T-shirts, abbreviate him to SWR. It’s snappy, it’s quite dignified and it’s probably intended to underline Ryder’s break from the Mondays and his new, post-Celeb solo rebirth (Ryder’s first solo album, Amateur Night in the Big Top, came out in 2003).
Confusingly, though, Ryder’s support band tonight are the same musicians who constituted the last incarnation of the Mondays, with whom Ryder made an album, Uncle Dysfunktional, in 2008. “Angels and Whores”, a rum cut from that album, comes early on in a set whose warm highs and painful lows surely mirror, after a fashion, the experience of kicking heroin.
There is still something enduringly fantastic about Black Grape’s “In the Name of the Father“, a tune that, lest we forget, tackles the hypocrisy of the Catholic church in abetting fugitive Nazis. The role of Kermit – the toaster in Black Grape – is tonight played by a man called Tonn, who, with Ryder’s co-singer Julie, fleshes out Ryder’s gruff wordplay. Equally durable is the Mondays’ “Loose Fit”, a hazy delight.
Tonight, Ryder finishes his set with a new song called “Mumbo Jumbo”, whose chief promise lies in the killer line: “She likes the music in the key of death.” There is a solo album tentatively scheduled for late spring, recorded with Sunny “grandson of Quincy Jones” Levine, who produced Uncle Dysfunktional. It might be called X – another Ryder pseudonym. SWR or X, Ryder might, just about, still have a little of the magic that made him the nation’s unofficial addict laureate, a wordsmith who combined previously owned lyrics, nonsense and street wisdom into a kind of soiled and addled poetry.
Ryder went on I’m a Celebrity to promote his current greatest hits album, XXX: 30 Years of Bellyaching. In contrast to other contestants, who are only ever there for “the experience”, Ryder confessed he was there for the record company, to see if he could capitalise upon a repeat of the fondness that coalesced around Bez when he won Celebrity Big Brother in 2005.
Ryder left the jungle as the runner-up, having ingested pretty much everything a hungry Aborigine might have eaten when down on his luck. (A track record of ingesting pretty much anything that would make life more interesting may have helped here.) Ryder, who has been off drugs for a few years now, is now on this national tour to discover whether being rude to Gillian McKeith has rehabilitated his career.
Some signs are not promising. The initials SWR on the drum kit look as though they have been hastily applied with Letraset. The venue isn’t exactly full. Judging from their enthusiastic reception, Ryder’s support band the Twang, who come from Birmingham, may have drawn significant portions of the crowd. There are nagging problems with the sound, too, which means Ryder and the exuberant Julie are sometimes muted in full flow. Ryder spends a lot of time looking down at what might be a teleprompter. Brian Wilson uses one.
But Ryder looks good. He’s still jungle-slim and soberly turned out, in what might be chinos. It’s all in stark contrast to Ryder’s worst years in the pre-jungle wilderness when, unable to work because of a legal dispute with Black Grape’s former managers, Ryder survived on freebies from Adidas and handouts from friends. His chemically assisted swagger is long gone, but Ryder makes up for it with unconventional mike techniques – horizontal, held by the tip – and prodigious swearing.
Age, meanwhile, cannot wither the brilliant “Step on”, nor custom stale its rush of nostalgia. At the end, the floor of the venue reveals no empty containers of poppers or spilt pills, but a sandwich danced into putty and some lost eyelash curlers. As with the reacquisition of his middle name, there is meaning in that, somewhere.
Esben and the Witch; Trophy Wife – review
XOYO, London
There is a shadow hanging over music that never really goes away. It ebbs for a bit, then rolls back in, shape-shifting like a dank weather pattern. To call it goth would be disrespectfully reductive. Bandying about a phrase such as “the darkness” just rekindles the trauma associated with a long-forgotten comedy band of the early 00s.
You could just about say that, of late, music has been in thrall to a new witching hour. Last year, witch house was the hot American sub-genre name to drop. Its chief proponents were called Salem; its most blogged-about emerging talent in 2011 is called Balam Acab, a name just close enough to Balaam and the Angel to set eyes rolling. It should be noted that witch house – a delightfully restless and doomy digital genre – is actually a derivative of the more experimental fringes of hip-hop production, rather than anything to do with the euphoric dance genre from Chicago. Nowadays, you can affix “-house” to pretty much anything in music, no matter how distant from Chicago, much in the same way as “-gate” attaches itself to any public kerfuffle, however minor.
Overground, pop has witnessed the rise of female solo performers in recent years – a trend mirrored outside the charts. One of the more startling newcomers last year was Zola Jesus, a recovering midwestern goth who now pens full-blooded love songs of exquisite desolation. The LA band Warpaint have to dodge accusations of coven-forming thanks to being an all-female concern, but there is a mantric, spell-like quality to their music that allies them with other artists of altered states. Closer to home, there’s Anna Calvi, more of a classic temptress than a witch, but still a nocturnal operator.
But surely the UK’s most haunted are a wafty art-rock band who actually have the word “witch” in their name. Esben and the Witch must have known this would bring them nothing but accusations. Their name is actually taken from a particularly convoluted and unforgiving Danish fairytale which ends very badly. Esben’s music is similarly convoluted and unforgiving; they offer no easy resolution. Using great banks of effects pedals hooked up to guitars and electronics, this Brighton trio’s sombre soundscapes are topped off by the aerated vocals of singer Rachel Davies. Stage left, guitarist Daniel Copeman looks like an indie wolfman, staggering around the stage in stockinged feet as he coaxes more and more layers of sound out of his instruments. Stage right, the bespectacled Thomas Fisher is a dishevelled professor wiring together an otherworldly creature.
Esben are emphatically not the kind of goths who sleep on crushed velvet sheets, but rather the kind who get excited about obscure medical conditions that turn people silvery blue – that’s “Argyria”, their portentous opening track – or cause them to flail uncontrollably. That’s the affliction known as “Chorea”, which lends its name to a mutating track anchoring both their set and their debut album, released two weeks ago. “And we watched them dance themselves to death,” intones singer Davies implacably. It isn’t some prudish critique of dance culture – Esben are partial to flurries of programmed beats – but a commentary on the Strasbourg dancing plague of 1518 (or possibly the Aachen one of 1374).
There is much to admire in Esben. They don’t play encores, preferring to end their six-song ritual in the barrage of sub-bass that is “Eumenides”. At one point, they gather round their one drum at the centre of the stage and bash it with rag-covered sticks, like Macbeth‘s witches chucking things at a cauldron. With these brutal beats comes a real connection, but it creates an unfortunate contrast to swathes of Esben’s set, which are icy, but a little formless and unanchored.
They lack the aggressive conviction of proper nihilists, too, and the disciplined sonic brinkmanship of their influences – bands such as the thunderous instrumental nonet Godspeed You Black Emperor, or Mogwai, who explore the contrasts between density and starkness with greater drama.
In this context, you might assume Trophy Wife were named after the practice of nailing pretty women’s heads to walls like deer. It actually refers to “the balance between the kitsch and the desolate” that this Oxford three-piece (who expand to four live) strive for in their music, which they have wryly labelled “ambitionless office disco” (it’s nothing of the sort).
Foals are their housemates, and Trophy Wife blatantly share that band’s propulsive verve, especially on their final track, a punk-funk shakedown of Joanna Newsom’s “The Book of Right On“. There’s a soupcon of Hot Chip and a smidgen of Vampire Weekend in their promising makeup. They share an incantatory quality with the headliners, but you get the feeling that Trophy Wife’s grasp of desolation is an altogether different one from Esben and the Witch’s: a modern malady, rather than an ancient ill.
Lucrezia Borgia; CBSO/Nelsons; Ibragimova/Gerhardt/Osborne – review
Coliseum, London; Symphony Hall, Birmingham; Concert Hall, Reading
Even Patience on her monument, faced with another operatic job-swap mismatch, must eventually yield to human nature and yell “Enough”. Poor Mike Figgis. No one blames him, or only partly, for the strange nothingness which is ENO’s new Lucrezia Borgia, his first go at directing opera. He is a sophisticated, Oscar-nominated film-maker as well as a fine trumpeter and composer. His own contributions to the soundtrack of Leaving Las Vegas (1995), his best known film, confirms his musical intelligence. Polite applause and a solitary boo when he took his bow on Monday suggested a warm sympathy mixed with despair.
No doubt if, turning the tables, Hollywood invited an acclaimed, imaginative opera director to try their hand at a low-grade blockbuster, even though that person didn’t much like the cinema and had seen nothing since Ben-Hur as a child, he or she would say “Yes, why not? Sounds fun”. But Hollywood values its professionals as, in certain areas, opera does not. The skilled task of opera directing is in danger of being treated as a free for all. With rare exceptions, the best are those who understand its craft, learned by whatever back or frontdoor means, as well as loving its art. A cross-fertilisation of theatre, film and opera is nothing new, and that friction sometimes ignites fiery results. But there has to be some symbiosis, some sense of urgency on the part of that newcomer.
If only Figgis had opted for a feature-length movie about the Borgias, with all their Italian Renaissance bad bunga bunga habits, and left Donizetti’s equivocal opera alone. He made a start, by creating three sensual, chilling mini films, which were shown before the prologue and two acts. Presumably they were intended to enrich the stock operatic plot and put flesh on – and take clothes off – Donizetti’s cardboard characters.
Instead of acting as counterpoint, however, these cinematic interludes, a separate entity in style and mood, merely undermined the stage action. What could compete with the exquisite horror of the beautiful screen Lucrezia raising her white muslin skirts to create a discreet, pleated awning above her own nakedness while her intacta state was examined by the pope, her father? Yes, it’s that kind of a family.
The films, naturally, were shot by the director himself, with customary visual thrift, though the impact was lavish. Wild rumours were circulating on the Rialto – well, in the Coliseum bar – about the cost of these films, which had a separate cast of actors. Reliable sources claim, on best evidence, they totalled £70k of a £100k production budget. To verify this, I contacted ENO. It appears to be a matter of some sensitivity. A 14-minute phone conversation with a company spokesman elicited only that this production came in at “average” cost and the percentage absorbed by the films was “small”. Jeremy Paxman or MI5 might have got a better result. While anyone understands the delicacy of revealing exact costs, there’s a point at which you feel like saying, hey, it’s only opera, publicly funded at that, why not just tell us?
Were Lucrezia the opera itself stronger, it might have withstood this self-inflicted cinematic competition. But Donizetti’s incest-romp after Victor Hugo, despite a couple of high-emotion hit numbers, is a weedy affair which needs expert handling to nurture its tenuous charms. In matters musical, there is at least a consistency: the high-risk game of casting relies on a gambler’s ability to mix hunch with track record. It paid off here. The talented British soprano Claire Rutter in the title role offered pearly coloratura and top-note precision.
The exciting rising-star tenor Michael Fabiano as her lost son, and ENO-newcomer Elizabeth DeShong as the sexually confused Orsini were outstanding. The English bass Alastair Miles sang with notable elegance as the creepy Mr Lucrezia Borgia (aka Duke d’Este). For the soloists, therefore, we can be grateful. The ENO orchestra, conducted by Paul Daniel, who also made the English translation, couldn’t quite throw off the creakiness of the score to make it sparkle, but did their best. The chorus sounded uncustomarily choppy on first night, but familiarity will sort out any roughness.
The design team, led by Es Devlin, with costumes by Brigitte Reiffenstuel and stunning chiaroscuro lighting by Peter Mumford, underlined the episodic nature of the opera by creating a series of tableaux, variously framed in gold, in pools of light surrounded by empty blackness. Whatever the truth as to how the budget was spent, this was an inspired piece of economy. It looked traditional, with reference to early Renaissance paintings, specific or generic, from the ornate stepped altarpieces of Crivelli to Leonardo’s Last Supper. Make up your own mind at the first live opera in 3D, broadcast on Sky Arts 2 and in selected cinemas on 23 February.
Gustav Mahler (1850-1911), celebrations for whose birthday last year have neatly segued into those for his death, continues to be on every concert calendar. Andris Nelsons and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, continuing a Mahler cycle, gave two performances of his ninth symphony this week. I heard the first. With good timing, a fortnight before the world premiere of his opera Anna Nicole at Covent Garden, Mark-Anthony Turnage also featured. His 1990 jazz-inspired elegy, Kai, opened the concert, lovingly played by its first creators, the virtuosic Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, most of whose members play in the CBSO, and cellist Ulrich Heinen.
Its cocktail of catchy, demotic idiom and serene grief, together with the ordering of its four-in-one movements, paired well with the Mahler. The ninth, his last complete symphony, opens and closes with slow movements, with the spiky fury and coarse-peasant chaos occurring chiefly in the middle two. Though a long work lasting around 80 minutes, it can seem repetitive and short-breathed, any notion of overall structure occluded. Nelsons squeezed incisive, analytical zest out of each fresh idea with near frenzied intensity. No wonder he needed water as the orchestra retuned halfway through. If this, with its tendency towards heady extremes, is a young man’s high-octane Mahler – and it is, thrillingly – think how it will ripen. The CBSO strings, especially the second violins who launch the raucous ländler and carry the whispered final notes, deserve danger money. Brass and woodwind played for their lives. Hear it on Radio 3 on Tuesday, 7pm.
Despite this aural cataclysm, a small-scale musical tour de force from earlier in the week still echoes in the mind. Three exceptional soloists, violinist Alina Ibragimova, cellist Alban Gerhardt and pianist Steven Osborne, made their UK premiere as a trio – having performed once before, in Brussels – with Schubert’s works for those forces in B flat D 898 and E flat D 929. The Concert Hall, Reading, has a generous acoustic which gave bloom to the as yet discrete nature of their ensemble. Ibragimova, a musician of acumen and versatility, plays with little vibrato and baroque-informed bowing. This injected suppleness into works that can suffer from excess blending. Performances in London and Manchester followed. With the great Beaux Arts trio finally gone after 50 years, could this be the trio for the next half century? If so, they must now find a name.
Ballet Boyz II: The Talent, touring, review
There is something oddly moving about watching very different men with their
fearless, crunching physicality. Rating: * * * *
Los Angeles Philharmonic/ Dudamel; OperaUpClose – review
Barbican; King’s Head, both London
An orchestra reveals much about itself from the way it tunes up: not the mere technicality of fixing the note but the onstage atmosphere in those moments before kick-off. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, fiddling and blowing full out as they warmed up for the first of two London concerts, part of a European tour, communicated exuberance, optimism and a discernible but unshowy Hollywood sheen. This is a big orchestra with, after some thin years in the 1990s, a freshly restored, sumptuous New World sound. Already the mood was high. “Let’s get the measure of this hall,” they seemed to imply. “You’re going to see a lot of us.”
So we will: the Los Angeles Philharmonic and music director cum magician-maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, have just signed to become one of the Barbican’s international associates, a partnership with five world-class orchestras including Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and Leipzig’s Gewandhaus. On the scorching evidence of Thursday’s concert of John Adams, Bernstein and Beethoven, this LA deal is an exciting prospect, with the bonus that Dudamel, whose work with El Sistema and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra is already the stuff of legend, will spend time coaching young players here too.
The orchestra has performed this programme several times, in LA’s Walt Disney concert hall, with live relays to 450 cinemas in the States and Canada, as well as in Lisbon. It’s hardly surprising they delivered it with such aplomb and, in the best sense, swagger. Adams’s high-energy, rhythmically intricate Slonimsky’s Earbox (1995) owes much to Terry Riley’s pivotal In C, as well as to Bernstein. The chance to hear his Symphony No 1 “Jeremiah” (1942) alongside Adams made for satisfying listening, with the mellow but occasionally frail-toned mezzo Kelley O’Connor as soloist. In the work’s compelling opening movement, “Prophecy”, the propulsive, lurching low brass and searing broad string theme pushed forward with the force of a digger churning up the world to expose its molten core.
The second half contained Beethoven’s seventh symphony, obligingly in the Oscars spotlight since the “Allegretto” features on the soundtrack to The King’s Speech. Here Dudamel showed a new maturity – he did, after all, reach the grand age of 30 this week – and avoided any excessive conductorly intervention. Tempi were brisk, which proved a breathtaking challenge for the orchestra’s large forces: they rose to it with unanimous adrenalin and finesse. Above all, musicians and Dudamel alike allowed Beethoven’s genius to speak for itself, with ferocious vitality. It sounds easy, but that is the hardest task of all. This concert will be broadcast on Classic FM on 16 February. The Adams and Bernstein, recorded live in LA, are already available via iTunes.
A small revolution shook the opera world this week, low-key and apparently local but likely to have a lasting impact. London’s Little Opera House at the King’s Head, Islington, north London, has announced the first ever fringe opera rep season, with performances by OperaUpClose of its celebrated La bohème, together with Cinderella, Madam Butterfly, The Barber of Seville and a new staging of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. Future plans include Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse, Mark Ravenhill’s first foray into directing opera.
Currently resident at the King’s Head under the entrepreneurial artistic directorship of Adam Spreadbury-Maher, the company is a tiny nomadic outfit, camping between the Soho theatre, the Cock Tavern or wherever there’s cheap, available space, with ambitions to venture south of the river, and even into the wilds beyond the M25. New programmes will be announced every two months. Performances are in English and treble-cast with professional singers. Madam Butterfly has been updated to Bangkok Butterfly to chilling effect. The rewritten libretto removes the story to a sleazy, high-rise penthouse where underage girls are on sale and the electrics are dodgy. Pinkerton (Randy Nichol) the yank pilot says “awesome” and Butterfly (Margaret Cooper) kills herself by putting a gun to her mouth. It fits the original without distortion. If not all the voices sound beautiful in such startlingly raw proximity – just a few metres away from anyone in the audience – they are none the less strong, full of promise and musically intelligent. Danyal Dhondy’s chamber-scale rescoring, for clarinet, viola and piano, is inspired.
OperaUpClose’s mission is to appeal to novices or experts, and to “bring opera to audiences who ordinarily might avoid it”. Having read this week that the “opera singer” Gio Compario of the price-comparison website TV ads has signed a mega deal with Warner Music with his first CD out in March, all I can say is: Go Compare. For £15, not to mention amazing quality and passion, OperaUpClose is the clear winner.
Carmen; Juan Diego Flórez – review
Grand Theatre, Leeds; Royal Festival Hall, London
You may have heard about the tomato ketchup. Or the muzzled killer dog named Molly. Or the transposition of Bizet’s masterpiece from Seville, a noble city in the Spanish south, to Seville, Ohio, a hick town in the American midwest. Forget flamenco ruffles and mantillas and the toreador’s gold-embroidered suit of lights. Think, instead, of khaki army drill and fat rubberneckers in screechy Hawaiian shirts; of skinny blonde cheerleaders in itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny Lycra-stretchy short bikinis; of baseball, bare bums and American pizza. Think of ingrained, incoherent, inbred small-town violence from cradle to grave.
Opera North’s new Carmen, the company’s first for a dozen years, produced by Daniel Kramer and conducted by Andreas Delfs, waves a red rag at a pitbull with such flamboyance, attitude and venom that many will come out yelling for an antidote. You need not worry that the tedious Act III smugglers will tiptoe in, as so often, in black masks carrying bags marked “swag”: they, along with a few other ponderous elements and an ensemble or two, have been cut – hardly the first time in an opera which has spawned more reinterpretations, from Liszt transcriptions to tens of films to hip-hopera and Xhosa versions. This speeds up the action no end but leaves jaws hanging.
These sensational trappings, no more nor less controversial than the lavatories in Calixto Bieito’s “dirty” Don Giovanni at ENO or the rats in Bayreuth’s recent Lohengrin, are mere buttons and bows on the more serious approach which this team, together with designers Soutra Gilmour, Gabrielle Dalton and Charles Balfour, have attempted. Even if, inevitably, the production is the talking point, let us first put on record that musical standards are high, with the excellent Opera North orchestra full of vitality and brio, bringing out vivid detail in this revolutionary score with some excellent solo playing. Not all the singers quite hit the mark, but performances were at least secure and at best, especially in the case of Peter Auty’s Don José and Kostas Smoriginas’s glowering Escamillo, fine indeed. Heather Shipp’s highly physical Carmen has dark allure though her voice showed signs of fatigue on first night.
Inevitably, given the comprehen–siveness of the enterprise, some ideas work coruscatingly while others flail. Some performers are better at enacting them with the necessary conviction. Certain decisions, such as the over-frequent crowd whoops in chorus scenes, when Bizet’s music has already jangled the nerves to high-pitched distraction, could be reduced for greater impact. Theatre previews are invaluable for giving performers a chance to adjust such tonal imbalances: for brightening this colour and damping that. Would that opera could afford the same. Too often the nervous skirmishes of opening night obscure a production’s bigger ambitions, for the benefit of those racing to dismiss it all out of hand.
The Anglo-American Kramer is certainly unafraid of ideas. He has no interest in the kind of uniformly gleaming, intelligent but finally equable kind of production which Anglo-Saxon opera audiences, despite their best efforts, tend to crave. He pursues awkward truths in the most uncompromising and often volatile fashion. His ENO Punch and Judy hit hard in all senses and won awards. His Bluebeard’s Castle is now enjoying critical success in Russia, championed by Valery Gergiev. But when it was seen in London in 2008, it was condemned for daring to compare the Duke, a man who has incarcerated seven wives but is unaccountably usually cast as a man of dignity, with Josef Fritzl and his Austrian cellar. It was regarded as beyond bad taste, though since when was the Bluebeard story in good taste?
This production, too, insinuates itself in a troubling, uncomfortable, at times maddening way. I’ve always, I admit, found Carmen – girl, not opera – a detestable creature, that ultimate, alluring, bitchy product of the male gaze. Men may adore her. Don’t all women hate her? Kramer forces you to rethink. She’s not just a sexy tart but a broken woman who knows only violence and abuse. The unpromising love of Don José – usually cast as a squidgy, unattractive doughnut but riddled with his own violent past – offers an escape which inevitably fails.
It may not be a revolutionary view; rather, a shift in emphasis, but it feels raw and credible. As the drama unfolds and the crowds fall away, so the production, moving from twinkling coloured lights and the benign shelter of a buckeye tree – the sets look good – in Acts III and IV come into far sharper focus. From the card scene to the end, Kramer and his cast are at their most assured. Carmen yields to her death in an almost suicidal act of self-sacrifice.
True, there’s a way to go. The dialogue, awkward in French but still preferable to English, is as yet bumpy and hesitant. The silent pause is surprisingly difficult in opera, compared with spoken theatre: you always wonder when the music will start. Anne Sophie Duprels’s big-haired Micaëla is, for once, an independent hussy, not the usual virginal nun. You can be loyal without being a doe-eyed sop, she seems to say, not unreasonably. A new cast takes over later in the run, with promising American mezzo Sandra Piques Eddy making her Opera North debut. Try it. Don’t expect to sit back while the old familiar tunes bubble over you. Go prepared for combat.
On Thursday all was progressing well, with just a jot too much mellifluous charm at Juan Diego Flórez‘s Rosenblatt recital, with pianist Vincenzo Scalera, at a packed Festival Hall. This Peruvian megastar is still the only leggiero tenor who can take on the Pavarotti mantle – without the excess baggage or white-handkerchief fuss – in terms of natural resonance, unforced musical expressivity and purity of tone, from unforced bottom and middle range up to top C (and above) brilliance. His naturally sympathetic manner and clean looks, together with his own refusal to stray too far from French-Italian bel canto territory, have set him apart as a musician of rare intelligence and self-discipline.
So when, after some noble but slightly tight-throated Mozart and a charming barcarole, he launched into the magnificent “Qui tollis peccata mundi” from Rossini’s Messa di Gloria, voice now fully opened and relaxed, and suddenly muttered “Shit!”, in impeccably accented English, we were all alarmed. What was this collision of sacred and profane? He had jumped a line and this momentary lapse won him applause and laughter, after which the whole recital, including some powerful tango-inspired songs by Luis Prado (b 1970), passed off in genial mood. Before a muezzin-like Zarzuela encore, “Adios, Granada”, he apologised for his bad language. “Federer does it too,” he said in defence. “But in singing, unlike tennis, there are no penalties.” There are, of course. Ask Rolando Villazón, to name only one of Flórez’s struggling tenorial colleagues. But a loving audience can be the overriding umpire.
Cheikh Lô – review
Scala, London
The mind boggles at what a blazing row – over musical differences, say – in the thick of Cheikh Lô’s six-strong band might sound like. Tall, lanky, dreadlocked, clad in a pair of giant shades and sporting a beret that, cumulatively, make him a dead ringer for Don Letts, Lô himself speaks French, Wolof, Bambara and enough English to charm. His bass player, Washington “Pito” Rosas Pintos, meanwhile, is Uruguayan.
Not only that – the feted Senegalese singer’s music begins with his national groove, the ticklish polyrhythms of mbalax. This postcolonial fusion of funk, jazz and indigenous sounds is also indelibly tinged with the rhythms and plaintiveness of the music of Cuba, and saturated in other west and central African traditions. It makes you want to pat indie-rock bands on the head fondly when they say they are eclectic.
Tonight there are no less than three different drummers in the band: fierce conga player Samba N’Dokh, who even goes at it with his elbows; the wiry, aloof Khadim M’Baye, who swaps between congas, sabar and the tama – or “talking drum” – which is lodged in his armpit; and Cheikh Lô himself.
Four albums into a successful international career, the 50-something singer – C-Lô, perhaps? – started his musical life behind the kit. He spends a distressing amount of time at the back of the stage, unshowily keeping time, because there was supposed to be a fourth, official drummer here as well.
An intra-band row on the eve of this tour has meant that Lô’s fluent, laid-back, largely devotional music comes to Europe without its appointed kit-man or, indeed, its keyboard player. An outfit this fluent and diverse ought to be able to aqueously remorph itself around any doctrinal blip. So it must have been quite a spat.
At the risk of sounding disrespectful, the keyboards are no great loss here. It’s hard to hear what they might have added to a busy sound already embellished by Baye Diop’s impeccable guitar, played light and high, and Wilfrid Zinsou’s considerably less subtle saxophone.
Perhaps it’s a northern hemisphere hang-up, but Lô’s songs are best when parsimony and space reign. His debut, 1996′s Ne La Thiass, was an instant classic in world music. Lô’s latest, the Grammy-nominated Jamm (2010), returns to a more acoustic, discrete sound after a couple of albums in which Lô’s gentle way became slightly lost in a tangle of influences, over‑weening production and field trips to Brazil.
For the first third of the set, Lô’s band feel like they might just be warming up, playing fluently but without fireworks. “Jamm”, the title track of Lô’s latest, passes in a gentle blur.
“Il N’est Jamais Trop Tard” is a treat for Francophones, who at least get to grasp at the edges of Lô’s lyrics. Honeyed but a little meandering, the song is addressed to young Africans who would brave the perilous voyage to reach Europe illegally, arguing that perhaps staying put and building something bit by bit might be better (“Petit à petit/ L’oiseau fait son nid“).
When Lô finally comes out from behind the kit, the evening comes alive. Clad in a kind of technicolour dreamcoat approved by the Sufist subsect to which Lô adheres, he takes control of a pair of timbales, and the microphone, grinning. Soon, during a particularly joyous workout, a woman appears stage right, clutching a Senegalese flag and dancing up a storm. You would assume she was a plant, there to make plain the links between the emphatic thwack of the sabar and the jointless human body, but the band seem genuinely surprised to see her.
The most invigorating passages of music tonight involve intense instinctual exchanges between the three percussionists, laced with guitar filigree. Kicking at his flowing robes and tossing his hair, M’Baye, the sabar player, gets to steal the show every time Lô ducks back behind the kit. By the end, though, you want to stuff a sock in the alto sax.
What you really want more of is Lô: his physical presence at the lip of the stage, playing a little guitar or playing a breathless conga solo. Moreover, you want more of his mournful yet serene voice, one that seems be stern in its admonishments on how one should live one’s life, but consolatory too, implying that as long as you are patient and moderate, and generally don’t go around being an arse, everything will probably be OK. Despite the fierce appearance of an ideologue, Lô’s output is exceedingly sweet, conciliatory and easy on the ear. His willingness to take a backseat is admirably egoless for a lead musician. But it’s also a little self-defeating.
Drake/ J Cole – review
O2 Academy Glasgow
Drake is on his knees at the front of the stage, describing with words and pelvic notation what having sex with the most extraordinary hip-hop success story of 2010 might be like. The 24-year-old rapper makes no bones about being young, single, famous and – apparently – not short on technique.
He certainly ravishes the crowd with skill. Drake whips up the adoration of a screeching, bra-throwing, word-perfect mob of young Glaswegians before soothing the 60% female crowd with a selection of mid-paced jams. His foreplay leads into “What’s My Name”, a single fronted by Rihanna, currently riding high in the UK charts. It is just one of Drake’s haul of hits.
Drake had a brief relationship with the star in 2009, a year in which the success of his mixtape (the self-released mini-albums pivotal to hip-hop) So Far Gone turned Drake into the hottest young rapper around. That year, he also tore his anterior cruciate ligament: his knee got its own, hugely popular, Twitter feed.
Urban lovermen have always played to the ladies. But in 21st-century hip-hop, where the barriers between hip-hop, R&B, pop and beyond have gone, along with a great many old music industry certainties, Drake is that novel thing: a rapper for the girls, whose credibility with the cognoscenti remains largely undiminished.
His flows are never quite brilliant, but they are of a consistent high quality. Early in the set, “The Resistance” is a searching confessional in which Drake’s rhymes deliver potted biography, braggadocio, girl trouble, abortion regret and a line about moving his grandmother into a nursing home. “Will I blow all of this money baby/ Hammertime?” he wonders, much like Kanye West used to, before West’s ego overwrote his more appealing insecurities.
Drake has become famous rhyming about his desire for fame (and girls) and his concomitant fear of getting lucky. But he has got lucky. Like his onstage pillow talk, Drake’s second album – Take Care, due in spring – has a great deal to live up to.
This second night of his European tour features a live band and a lead violinist, an unnecessary affectation that has also been made possible by Kanye West. The lovely “Fireworks” comes lit with real on-stage fireworks. More impressive, though, is the percussive production, which deftly mirrors a Fourth of July soundscape.
Like “Fireworks”, most of Drake’s set comes from his debut album proper, Thank Me Later, an anxious, unconventionally produced, club-unfriendly record that none the less went straight to No 1 in the US on its June release. It has since sold 1.25 million copies Stateside. All told, it’s not bad going for a Jewish former child actor who was raised by his mum on the distinctly un-mean streets of suburban Toronto.
“I avoided the coke game,” the man born Aubrey Drake Graham notes. “Took the Sprite route instead” (a reference to the soft drink advert he fronted). Take out Drake’s paternal African-American lineage – Memphis musicians who played with Jerry Lee Lewis and Sly and the Family Stone – and it’s as if Sacha Baron Cohen really did make it as a rapper from Staines.
Like many significant rhymers – Kanye, Jay-Z – Drake is a mama’s boy. This tour was meant to happen last summer, but was cancelled when Drake’s mother, who suffers from severe rheumatoid arthritis, had to have surgery. Patently, this is a rapper who cannot invoke the danger of drugs or guns, so he sources his street cred from his bedside manner and by the company he keeps.
Two fairy godfathers aided his rise. The young Canadian’s verbal promise was spotted early on by Lil Wayne, one of the acclaimed rappers of the past decade. Plucked from obscurity and thrown on to the Atlanta-based hard man’s touring circus in 2008, the “scared” Drake became part of Lil Wayne’s salon of apprentices, a gilded collective called Young Money. Drake’s fellow Young Money alumnus is the more mercurial Nicki Minaj, whom he frequently asks to marry. Even Drake’s mother was, apparently, fooled into thinking he was serious.
Another hip-hop kingmaker, Jay-Z (who still just about holds the crown of greatest living rapper) has furnished Drake with a series of live and recorded collaborations, and has publicly handed Drake the baton (“Drake is up next”) on “A Star Is Born”, a track on his Blueprint 3 album.
Jay’s protege, J Cole, supports tonight. Cole could hit it big when his debut drops in the spring. Tonight, though, there is no contest. Cole’s flow is deft enough – rhyming “cafeteria” with “Presbyterian” – but the man from North Carolina lacks the stardust twinkle that makes Drake such an easy sell (and makes up for his wearisome libidinousness).
But alongside Cole, Drake might well be spearheading a fresh crop of post-thug rap artists who may continue the trend set by Kanye West: commercially outplaying the gangstas. Certainly, 50 Cent is no longer the rapper to beat.
Handel’s Messiah/ The Sixteen; Messiah: 500 Voices, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – review
Barbican, London; Royal Albert Hall, London
“Ladies, for one night only, no hoops; gentlemen, leave your swords at home.” No history of Handel’s Messiah is complete without mention of this vital instruction, issued in June 1742 following the sell-out Dublin premiere. Nothing new there, you may think, given the way handbags are checked at some of our more authoritarian concert venues. Hooped skirts would certainly arouse suspicion and even male critics do not carry a sword.
But this was health and safety Hanoverian style, or rather a space-saving device to shoehorn more people into the next performance of this new oratorio by the famous German musician, George Frideric Handel, brought over by the king decades earlier but still barely fluent in English, except when it came to cursing.
With only occasional lapses in popularity since, Messiah has retained its appeal, not exclusively but particularly in these islands. All round the UK this month, from Bournemouth to Glasgow, Belfast to Huddersfield, with piano or organ or full orchestra, amateurs and professionals have given their own interpretations, each version authentic in its own way.
Snow and geography determined my choice. I struck lucky. The Barbican was full for the Sixteen’s vigorous, small-scale account conducted by the choir’s founder, Harry Christophers. The following night the Royal Albert Hall, too, was packed out for a performance promoted by Raymond Gubbay in which three well-established amateur choral societies – Goldsmiths Choral Union, Highgate Choral Society and the English Concert Chorus – joined to make a massed choir of 500.
The Victorian tradition of 4,000 performers and audiences of more than 80,000, as seen at Crystal Palace in the 1850s, cannot be recreated. And as the cultural historian Richard Hoggart (born 1918) recalled of his Yorkshire childhood, the days when “any moderate-sized working-class crowd” could boast a good 50 people who could “take up the Hallelujah Chorus” have long gone.
Today you need a flash mob to help you along, as anyone with access to the amazing YouTube Christmas Food shopping mall “Hallelujah” can see. Jaws drop and hamburgers grow cold as a girl stands on a chair and sings the opening line into her mobile. By the end, all hands are waving. If the 26 million viewing figure is correct, Crystal Palace has been outdone.
At the other end of the scale, the Sixteen, in fact 18 professional singers, are persuasive exponents, having performed it countless times and produced a CD (Coro) with two of this month’s soloists, the fiercely graceful mezzo Catherine Wyn-Rogers and bass Christopher Purves, a former Sixteen member now enjoying an operatic career as a scurrilous Falstaff or Beckmesser.
With soprano Sophie Bevan – ardent and fearful in “And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them”, when the poor shepherds suddenly wonder at the multitude of flying aliens – and tenor James Gilchrist living each syllable of the biblical text, you could not ask for better. The Sixteen’s chamber-sized ensemble had extra bloom thanks to the delicate colouring of theorbo and violone. The clean, zestful sound of the choir never sounds effete, though the Barbican is just a touch too large and dry to support the big choruses. Even Richard Dawkins might have preferred a church on this occasion.
At the Albert Hall, I envied a teenager and his friend nearby (with nephews and nieces out to support cousins and aunts, there were plenty of young faces) who somehow sneaked in not a sword but a bottle of vodka. The atmosphere was festive, communal, familial. But immediately the opening notes sounded, under the baton of experienced choir director Brian Wright, the crowd listened, stock still. The fortissimo swell and heave of the massed choirs, especially for the upstanding “Hallelujah”s, had exciting impact.
With so many voices to coordinate, tempi were slower than the Sixteen’s but Wright kept them moving. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, not at full numerical strength but still a good size, played with generous but reined-in vibrato and at big moments enjoyed the bonus of the Albert Hall’s grand organ. I’m not saying I know how many of the 147 stops were out, or how many of the 9,997 speaking pipes spoke. But it made a lot of noise.
The classy female soloists, soprano Emma Bell – a renowned Handelian – and the versatile mezzo Christine Rice, easily filled the hall while remaining faithful to the music’s intention. They used their knowledge of period-performance practice, adapting it skilfully to the needs of larger forces. Both men, tenor Christopher Gillett and bass Brindley Sherratt, sounded as if fighting throat infections. After the interval we were told Sherratt had been taken ill. I assumed they might have to cut the bass arias.
Wrong. After the chorus, “Lift Up Your Heads”, all but the basses sat down. Surely not? But yes! All 200 or so of them stood firm as the violins played the rapid, rocketing intro to the virtuosic bass aria “Why do the nations”. To a man, they launched in, negotiating the 12-to-a-breath shuddering triplets on the word “rage” as if they had trained for months. Had they even had time for a run-through? Moments later they were back with “The trumpet shall sound”. No doubt every choral bass secretly dreams of delivering this hit number to a capacity Albert Hall. Wish upon a star. Sing-along Handel doesn’t come more authentic.
JLS – review
Wembley Arena, London; and touring
As the boyband-loaded silver Mercedes convertible dangles precariously above Wembley’s crowd, consensus below is divided. There are the parents who mutter “health and safety”, shielding their tweens from its chassis, and those whose squeals surge accordingly as Aston’s gaze (possibly) meets theirs. “Down here,” one girl screams, decked out in her JLS-emblazoned hoody, sucking a ream of candyfloss. “Marvin I love you,” cries another, tossing her glow stick at the bonnet. It’s uncomfortable yet beguiling to watch, a bit like an attempted club snog minus the knockback. Cynicism suspended, I question any woman who leaves without a sliver of unrequited lust for Britain’s foremost all-black boyband.
In ascending order of fitness, JLS are: Oritsé, JB, Marvin and Aston. Or maybe Aston then Marvin. Aston does the back flips, Marvin does the brooding, and the other two smile, sing and wear silly hats. Remarkably, this is their first headlining arena tour since they emerged on series five of the X Factor, slap bang at a point when boybands had reached saturation point. Stool-tours have since become the stuff of parodies, disbanded groups are re-grouping and one (Backstreet Boys) has joined forces with one long-gone (New Kids on the Block) to create a middle-aged acronymical army (BSBNKOTB) of smulch. Boy bands are considered old hat. Even a decent one like JLS were unlikely to win over Simon Cowell.
Coming second to Alexandra Burke in 2008, as is tradition JLS left the show unsigned before being snapped up by Epic then Jive. Two years on, it’s all change. JLS have a clutch of urban music awards, two decent albums co-written, in part, by them, and several million sales. Demonstrating a rare volte face, Cowell subsequently poured an unprecedented amount of emotion into One Direction, the “cute” but unremarkable boyband he mentored this year. Yet despite huge support, they only came third. It’s conceivable they were too young, demonstrated by their lack of toplessness on TV: you’re not allowed to fancy teenage boys.
JLS, all in their early twenties, have no problem with top-removal. They open with two tracks from their near-proficient second album, “Outta This World” and “That’s My Girl”, both barely audible over the screams. The crowd settles, allowing the quartet, donning rhinestone-embellished black tie, to slip into an accomplished dance routine for “Eyes Wide Shut”, complete with stage invasion from X Factor-phile Tinie Tempah. He pops on stage for some high fives, grins and ad-libbed rap, leaning nonchalantly at the back before disappearing.
The first costume change sees JLS emerge as vampires. This gets an ear-piercing validation and they launch into the unknockable “Beat Again”, surely the “Hey Ya” of the Twitter generation. Comparing the indignity of being dumped to a cardiac arrest, this song sat triumphantly atop their eponymous first album, an otherwise anaemic record drowned by over-production. Without the auto-tune, though, it’s perfectly realised.
“Work” is improved by its mashing with Rihanna’s “Rude Boy”, allowing them to segue into an ace “Umbrella” (cue actual JLS umbrellas being opened by the crowd.) A belting “Wem-ber-ley we love you, you’re all fit and sexy” from JB, and there they go again, diving behind the curtain and reappearing in those now hateful/infamous deep V tees: T-shirts slashed naval-deep, allowing the wearer’s ideally hairless saucer-shaped pecs to spill out.
It’s warming (read: exhausting) to witness a proper pop spectacle, reasonably priced, all high-camp theatrics and glitz. The fan forums promised a circus theme but tonight, aside from the car, we get a mix of pyrotechnics, smoke, glittery explosions and steel walkways. However, it’s their on-stage routines which demonstrate their ability. X Factor contestants can, of course, sing. And those that can dance, like JLS, dance well. Aston flips around on his wrists like a hyperactive child and instigates their vaguely cute, faux-homoerotic banter which results in a scramble to remove each other’s clothing.
There are some lows. Amid staging better suited to the set of the film Tron, a medley of Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync songs dumbfounds the younger fans and reveals a little too much about the lack of boyband progress. Pointless, really, the medley’s sole use is to please their shared record label, Jive. Equally weak is a cover of Justin Bieber’s “Somebody to Love” which seems highly unnecessary. However its simplicity allows the four of them to clamber up the steel walkway without duress. Plus it sounds a lot better coming from them. Meandering along at eye-level on the walkway, this sort of staging comes into its own. All the pointing, waving, near-hand grasping and eye-contact eclipses the song itself. As a precursor to “I Know What She Like”, singleton Aston announces to us that he knows what women want: “DVD nights”. Apparently.
Ninety minutes in the company of this group raises some questions: How young is too young to love a boyband; how much man-cleavage is too much, and why, in God’s name, did Simon Cowell not sign them? JLS are very good, very popular and refreshingly grateful to the fans who, through the medium of televoting, made them. Sure they seem to overlook the fact that much of their audience is underage by declaring them “the sexiest girls we’ve seen on tour”, but it’s odd that for the first time, Cowell signed the top four X Factor acts this year, One Direction included. Does he regret not signing JLS? Wembley’s sea of merch-wielding teens suggests he must be kicking himself.
