KINGS PLACE SEPTEMBER—DECEMBER 2010
music+art+restaurants
WHAT’S ON SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 2010
SCHUMANN BICENTENARY NATALIE CLEIN AND FRIENDS CELEBRATE A TROUBLED GENIUS Classical Stravinsky Remix Dufay Collective Claire Booth Terry Riley
Jazz Mike Figgis Django Bates John Taylor
NATALIE CLEIN | DJANGO BATES | DAVID BAILEY
Folk Peggy Seeger June Tabor Kevin Burke
Art David Bailey Albert Irvin
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COVER PHOTO RAY BURMISTON
Make Rotunda your local for family and friends’ gatherings. As we have a packed new season in store this autumn, we’ve created this fuller, more detailed publication to help guide you through. You can locate classical, jazz, folk, contemporary, spoken word, comedy and art highlights in the front section, read our in-depth features or follow the day-by-day listings and calendar in the back section. Kings Place is unique in holding weekly ‘mini-festivals’ curated by a wide range of imaginative performing artists. We also have regular classical music on Sunday evenings from the London Chamber Music Society, on Mondays Out Hear contemporary music concerts and a rich range of Spoken Word events (Words on Monday), with lively Thursday night comedy, Off with their Heads! This season we are introducing two new regular series: Folk Union on Friday nights, presenting a whole range of musicians from
Private Dining Room for up to 24 people • Waterside Terrace • Great British Food – we have our own farm in Northumberland • Cocktail Classes traditional folk legends to the exciting new wave that is now in full flow, and, on Saturday nights, a new jazz strand, The Base, heating up Hall Two with leading lights of the global jazz scene. Add to this our Art and Sculpture galleries, and our high quality restaurants and cafés, and it’s no surprise that Kings Place is becoming a dynamic arts venue for this up-and-coming area of London. Before our autumn season kicks off, we have our Kings Place on Sea Family weekend (24–25 July), led by some of the top organisations in children’s arts events, which will include facepainting, boat trips, puppet shows, street ping-pong, a ‘Be a Young DJ’ workshop and contemporary dance. After the summer break we launch the season with our annual Kings Place Festival, (9–12 September) featuring 100 concerts in four days, with tickets priced at just £4.50. Following our own Festival, we’re delighted to be hosting an array of other fabulous festivals here this autumn, including the London Jazz Festival, the London Guitar Festival in the Fall, the DSC Festival of South Asian Literature, Aldeburgh Festival Highlights, LIFEM: London International Festival of Exploratory Music and the Northern Lights Early Music Festival from York. New to the list is the London Restaurant Festival, which has chosen Kings Place for an entertaining debate (12 October). It has always been my aim to give curators a free hand at Kings Place to put on the events they have long dreamed of doing, so it’s rewarding to see projects pioneered here taking off in other spheres. Sky Arts are making documentaries about the Darbar Festival of Indian Music, which was successfully presented here, and about the Spoken Word All Stars, one of the most popular events from Poet in the City (18 October).
Conferences for up to 420 people • Dinners for up to 220 guests • Small meeting rooms available • Event management • Bespoke wedding planning • Birthdays and family parties • Intimate dinners • Barbeques and outdoor events 90 York Way London N1 9AG event bookings: 020 7014 2838 events@kingsplaceevents.co.uk www.kingsplace.co.uk
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03
Welcome to Kings Place! We also want to congratulate the London Sinfonietta, one of our resident ensembles, for winning the Royal Philharmonic Society Ensemble of the Year. Don’t miss Remix, their unique collaboration with fellow residents the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (14–16 October). Looking ahead, we have a stunning programme of Christmas music events to suit every taste (see p48) and we’ll be heralding 2011 with a Mozart concert, broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, which launches a year-long celebration of Mozart’s music. Check out the website for more details (www.kingsplace.co.uk). Enjoy!
Peter Millican
JAZZ
FOLK
Photo David Bailey
Photo Bob Thomas/Popperfoto/Getty Images
Photo Magnus Skrede
Photo JazzSign/Lebrecht Music & Arts
Photo Sven Arnstein
CLASSICAL
CONTEMPORARY
HIGHLIGHTS 08 Stravinsky Remix 09 Thomas Arne’s Alfred 24 COVER FEATURE Soul to Soul Schumann’s bicentenary with Lucy Parham (above) and Natalie Clein 38 FEATURE Eternity in an Hour Transition_projects featuring Claire Booth 48 CHRISTMAS AT KINGS PLACE with the Dufay Collective and many more
HIGHLIGHTS 12 West Side Story Jessie Buckley, new voice in jazz 13 Piano Man John Taylor, a pianist and a gentleman 32 FEATURE Don’t Stop Me Now! Django Bates (above) hits 50 by John Fordham 44 FEATURE The Secrets of Musical Manipulation Mike Figgis in conversation
HIGHLIGHTS 14 Welcome to The Wild Crowd Alistair Anderson on a bumper folk season 40 FEATURE Unbroken Chain Colin Irwin traces the rise of the folk movement. Sigrid Moldestad (above).
10 11 43 82
HIGHLIGHTS Dai Fujikura’s Super-Collider ELISION’s Mission Impossible FEATURE Mikhail Karikis’s (above) exploded opera Xenon FEATURE Q&A: Terry Riley, still exploring at 75
REGULARS
03 WELCOME 06 TICKET INFORMATION 08 HIGHLIGHTS 24 FEATURES 48 CHRISTMAS EVENTS
51 LISTINGS 52 PLAN YOUR WEEK AT KINGS PLACE 53 SEPTEMBER 56 OCTOBER 65 NOVEMBER 72 DECEMBER
79 CALENDAR 82 Q&A
WHAT’S ON SEPTEMBER– DECEMBER 2010
SPOKEN WORD HIGHLIGHTS 16 Poet in the City 17 Twin Dynasties Fatima Bhutto & Nayantara Sahgal 47 Column Mihir Bose on Cricket, Commonwealth and Country. The Nawab of Pataudi (above).
COMEDY 15
HIGHLIGHTS The Wisdom of Peacock & Gamble Two MCs have a chat about audiences
ART
FOOD & DRINK
HIGHLIGHTS 18 Ruth Borchard’s Self-Portrait Collection 19 The art of defying gravity Ann Christopher 28 FEATURE The Skull Beneath the Skin Rachel Campbell-Johnston meets David Bailey. Shoe Tongue by David Bailey (above). 34 FEATURE The Indefatigable Albert Irvin by William Varley
HIGHLIGHTS 20 Solution to the Sunday roast 21 Grape Expectations Meet the man behind the wine list at the Rotunda Restaurant
CONTRIBUTORS AND EDITORIAL TEAM Contributors Mihir Bose is an award-winning sports broadcaster and author. He writes on sport for the London Evening Standard
Rachel CampbellJohnston is the art critic and poetry critic for the Times
Tel +44 (0) 20 7520 1440
Editor-in-Chief Helen Wallace
Designer Ana Acosta
Email mag@kingsplace.co.uk
John Fordham is jazz critic for the Guardian
Web www.kingsplace.co.uk
Editorial Team Michael Green Janie Nicholas Emrah Tokalaç Lowri Williams
Art Direction Deep www.deep.co.uk
Colin Irvin is editor of FRoots
Print St Ives Web Ltd
© Kings Place 2010 All material is strictly copyright and all rights are reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without the written permission of Kings Place is strictly forbidden. The greatest care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of information in this magazine at the time of going to press, but we accept no responsibility for omissions or errors. The views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of Kings Place.
06 TICKETS
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September—December 2010
TICKET INFORMATION www.kingsplace.co.uk Box Office 020 7520 1490
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Photo: Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment – Eric Richmond, Harrison & Co.
Public Transport Visit www.tfl.gov.uk to help plan your Journey, or call London Travel Information 020 7222 1234.
Parking NCP Car Park – Pancras Road. Visit www.ncp.co.uk or call 0845 050 7080 for further details.
access Kings Place aims to be accessible to all and both auditoria offer suitable seating for wheelchair users. Please inform us of any access requirements when booking. There is an induction loop at the Box Office to assist those with hearing aids. An infrared system is installed in Halls One and Two, with hearing advancement headsets for audience members who do not use a hearing aid. Neck loops are available to use with hearing aids switched to the ‘T’ position. All areas of Kings Place are accessible to those with Guide and Hearing Dogs .
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September—December 2010
Fast-forward to the 21st century, and the practice of recycling is alive and well, as Friday’s LS concert Cover Versions will prove, with an array of works in which the composers have used source material, often from the distant past: Tom Adès on Couperin, Birtwistle using Ockeghem, Sciarrino inspired by Machaut, Bussotti by Puccini, and the young composer Anna Clyne with a new arrangement of Britten’s Hymn to the Virgin. It’s telling that living composers are attracted to the more distant, pre-Classical period when seeking inspiration. The title ‘Remix’ might suggest electronics, DJs and decks, but in fact the orchestras are challenging that perception and showing that music has eaten itself since time immemorial.
Remix 14–16 October. London Sinfonietta & Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. See Listings p59 for details.
CLASSICAL
It was Stravinsky who unforgettably said, ‘A good composer does not imitate, he steals’, and that’s the inspiration behind Remix (14– 16 October). The London Sinfonietta (LS) and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE) do not make obvious bedfellows: one is the UK’s foremost contemporary music group, the other a peerless period instrument ensemble. In fact, it’s not the first time they have worked together (composer Heiner Goebbels created Songs of Wars I have Seen for them in 2007), but it is the first time they’ve shared a stage at Kings Place. Says Andrew Burke, Chief Executive of the London Sinfonietta, ‘The earliest music we tend to play is early 20th century, while the latest the OAE play is usually late 19th century, so there’s a potential cross-over period there’ – into which Stravinsky (almost) fits. The final concert will offer a rare opportunity to hear the actual source material for Stravinsky’s delightful burlesque on the Baroque, Pulcinella. For too long it has been wrongly attributed to Pergolesi alone, when in fact Stravinsky was also borrowing ideas from Gallo, Monza and Wassanaer. For the climax of the evening, the OAE will switch to modern instruments and join forces with the LS for the full ballet suite. On 14 October, the OAE present their own 18th-century version of daylight robbery in Baroque Reinventions. As programmer/ violinist Roy Mowatt explains, Handel used 18 of Gottlieb Muffat’s works in 30 of his own: ‘Handel clearly had a lot of respect for Muffat. There’s everything from orchestrations of his keyboard pieces to using Muffat as an initial stimulus with the finished work bearing only a hint of the original.’ Also in this concert there will be some beautiful reworkings of Pergolesi by JS Bach. ‘Bach would have seen nothing odd in transforming a Catholic Italian work into a Protestant German piece,’ explains Mowatt. He is keen to point out that this practice has only been viewed with suspicion relatively recently: ‘The concept of a composition as a definitive art work only arrived in the 19th century. The way 18thcentury composers reworked and arranged their own and others’ compositions shows a different ethic, more akin to jazz: the work is still recognisable even though it may be vastly transformed and subject to improvisation in performance.’
Book tickets now: www.kingsplace.co.uk
CLASSICAL HIGHLIGHTS 27 September– 2 October
Schumann Bicentenary
Featuring Lucy Parham, Natalie Clein, Ann Murray, Jennifer Pike.
3 OctOBER lcms Wihan Quartet
4 OCTOBER
out hear Scarlatti:Cage:Sonatas David Greilsammer
7–9 OctOBER
London Sinfonietta & Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
lcms Sitkovetsky Trio
25 OctOBER out hear
Counterpoise Actaeon by David Matthews
london guitar festival in the fall
David Russell Nigel North 31 October lcms Rosamunde Trio
3–6 November
Photo Eric Richmond, Harrison & Co.
Photo BPK, Berlin / Photo Scala, Florence
lifem
lcms Turner Ensemble
21 NOVEMBER lcms Chilingirian Quartet
25–27 November
Innocence & Experience
1–4 December Quatuor Mosaïques, Felicity Lott, Carolyn Sampson
5 DeCEMBER
lcms Quartet for Peace
12 December lcms Aquinas Piano Trio
15–18 December
northern lights: early music festival Joglaresa, Ensemble Meridiana, Dufay Collective, The Clerks
20–23 December
Ivor Setterfield’s Christmas Concerts Barts Chamber Choir, New London Singers, Orchestra of St John’s
The Classical Opera Company present a unique performance of Thomas Arne’s masque Alfred. Thomas Arne, whose 300th anniversary will be marked in November by the Classical Opera Company, has become something of a historical footnote, known solely for his rousing, innocently jingoistic ‘Rule! Britannia’. This does a very gifted dramatic composer a grave disservice, since this ‘grand ode’ is but one number from the entertaining Alfred, which will be given two unique performances at Kings Place (7, 9 October). Unique, explains conductor Ian Page, because he will be creating a performing edition specifically for Hall One: ‘There are six versions of Alfred in existence, as Arne didn’t quite settle on whether it was a masque or an opera – it’s a minefield!’ – but one he will enjoy picking his way through to create a libretto (to be read by an actor) to link the choruses and arias. ‘The great thing about Arne was his melodic gift,’ enthuses Page, ‘He wrote in a really fluent, charming way, made accessible by the fact it’s in English.’ Written in 1740, Alfred belongs to the world of Handel but ‘has a simplicity and folksiness that’s very appealing. The arias tend to be shorter than Handel’s, swifter dramatically and less
formal.’ They will be sung by a fine cast of young British singers including Thomas Hobbs as King Alfred and Mary Bevan as Queen Eltruda. Sadly, many of Arne’s works were lost, several destroyed by a theatre fire. One that survived in part was his hugely popular opera Artaxerxes, premiered at Covent Garden in 1762, which received a staggering total of 111 performances before 1790. The Classical Opera Company’s 2009 production at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre received rave reviews, and they will be launching the cast recording at Kings Place in an insight evening, with special guest soprano Elizabeth Watts and musicologist Roderick Swanston.
Classical Opera Company 7–9 October. Arne’s Alfred; Artaxerxes; Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. See Listings p58. Scene from Artaxerxes at the Linbury Theatre earlier this year.
31 DecEMBER,
1 JanUARY London New Year Mozart International Orchestra of the Age of Festival of Enlightenment Exploratory Music with Sophie Bevan Terry Riley, George Brooks; Talvin Singh; Gavin Bryars; Wim Mertens; Pascal Comelade
Six Alfreds in search of a performance…
14 NOVEMBER
Italians in Paris
17 OctOBER
Pulcinella by Maurice Sand. Coloured engraving by A Manceau, 1859.
Britten and Beyond, incl. Hebrides Ensemble
Focus on Arne
Remix
REMIX: A CASE OF MUSICAL RECYCLING
Aldeburgh Highlights
Transition_projects
14–16 OctOBER
HIGHLIGHTS
11–13 November
Classical Opera Company
28,29 OctOBER
Stravinsky’s Pulcinella forms the centrepiece of a unique collaboration between Kings Place’s two resident orchestras, as Helen Wallace discovers.
September—December 2010
Lisa Beznosiuk
Arne is only known for writing ‘rule! britannia’ but he was a gifted opera composer
Photo STEPHEN PAGE
08 HIGHLIGHTS
HIGHLIGHTS ClASSICAL
09
Book tickets now: 020 7520 1490
September—December 2010
A super-collision of EAST & WEST Tim Rutherford-Johnson meets up-and-coming composer Dai Fujikura, who’s collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto and OKEANOS for his Out Hear event this autumn.
If Kings Place’s Out Hear series is designed to unite different audiences for new and exploratory music, then Dai Fujikura’s curated concert on 8 November is an Out Hear season in miniature. The British-Japanese composer is bringing together a variety of the best new music performers for an evening of contrasts and unexpected connections. The concert has been conceived theatrically. Apart from chamber group OKEANOS, who will play the five movements of Fujikura’s newlycompleted OKEANOS Cycle, and a video collaboration with the pop and film composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (who is not appearing in person), each musician will play from memory. They will be individually spot-lit and most will be dispersed to the edges or corners of the auditorium, except violinist James Widden, who will bring the fragile sounds of Lachenmann’s Toccatina into the centre of the audience. Fujikura explains that all the performers are playing pieces with which they have a close personal relationship. ‘Either it was written for them or they have been playing it for a long time. The musicians can really play these pieces, they are not learning new things. So each one
should be played with as much comfort and love as possible.’ Bassoonist Pascal Gallois, who will play Berio’s Sequenza XII, exemplifies this goal. Based in Paris, he is taking full advantage of Kings Place’s location to make a quick return home on the Eurostar, but the Sequenza, written specially for him, is so much a part of his personal fabric that he is able to travel light – no score, just his instrument. The final ensemble piece was written by Fujikura for OKEANOS, with whom he has worked for some years: the group is notable for combining Western instruments with Japanese koto (zither) and sho (mouth organ). As the composer explains, ‘It’s a completely multicultural ensemble, which is actually not something I aim for, but it’s a mixture that is naturally in myself.’ In fact, Fujikura’s first encounter with Japanese instruments did not come until he was 20 at, of all places, the German summer school of Darmstadt. ‘I’m opposed to the idea that Japanese composers should write Japanese music. With this piece I focused on the sonorities of the instruments – it just happened to be Japanese instruments. I had to work
closely with OKEANOS because I was not familiar with koto or sho. I was curious because I didn’t know how to write for them!’ Fujikura is keen to emphasise that his thinking behind this concert is not only to present each work in its best possible light, with the best performers and as few distractions as possible, but also to connect opposite points on the musical map: the title Super-Collider highlights his goal of finding unexpected results in unusual combinations. ‘Lachenmann and Toop, say, are complete opposites. But then Lachenmann’s music – especially this piece – is more noise than conventional playing. And maybe that’s not so far, sonority-wise, from Toop. So there is some similarity on one level but a complete contrast on another. Personally, I can’t wait to go to this interesting concert – it’s on my playlist!’
20 September out hear
Ensemble Plus Minus Stockhausen, Mark Knoop
27 September This is a group renowned for its fearless advocacy of contemporary music’s most difficult corners. Isn’t this going to be a little scary? A forbidding display of technique and impenetrable intellectualism? Far from it. What really characterises ELISION is a unique energy that comes from a combination of absolute integrity to the music and the larger-than-life personalities of the players. The group works almost like a family, fostering long-term relationships and capitalising on the unique skills and interests of each performer. In November, Deborah Kayser (voice) and Yang Chunwei (Chinese qin) will perform Liza Lim’s The Quickening, written at a time when all three women had young children, so the piece – the title of which is an allusion to the first time a mother feels her baby moving in the womb – carries a deep emotional resonance for the players. December’s concert features music by two young composers – Robert Dahm and Timothy McCormack – whose radical musical explorations exemplify the benefits of such close relationships. The result for every ELISION performance is a unique culture of invention and customisation in which the unpredictable personalities of the
HIGHLIGHTS
players are held in balance with the certainties of the score. Extreme difficulty is transformed into an opportunity to journey beyond the purely technical. The players are absorbed in the questions of music-making; nothing is taken for granted, they’re prepared – eager – to submit their instruments, bodies, training and habits to complete de- and reconstruction. Every ELISION performance distils such stories of self-discovery into one-off musical moments at the boundaries of what you thought possible. Scary can be good.
out hear
Ed Hughes The New Music Players
4 October out hear
Scarlatti:Cage: Sonatas David Greilsammer
11 October out hear
Peter Gregson listen.to.my.world
Elision 15 November, 6 December, Hall Two See Listings p69 & p74 for details.
18 October out hear
Max de Wardener
every elision performance distils stories of self-discovery into music
22-23 October
Mikhail Karikis Love Songs for Broken Machines juice; Scratch the Surface Xenon: An Exploded Opera
25 October Peter Veale & Peter Neville, ELISION Melbourne 2007
HIGHLIGHTS CONTEMPORARY
CONTEMPORARY HIGHLIGHTS
The players of ELISION relish the chance to cook up new, extreme challenges with composers.
out hear
Counterpoise David Matthews Actaeon
1 November out hear
Chroma Ensemble Crumb, Cashian
Dai Fujikura’s Tokyo 11 October. Hall Two, 8pm (Peter Gregson’s Out Hear event). See Listings p59 for details. Super-Collider 8 November. Hall Two, 8pm. See Listings p68 for details.
September—December 2010
Mission impossible made to measure
CONTEMPORARY
Dai Fujikura
Book tickets now: www.kingsplace.co.uk
Photo Justin Nicholas
HIGHLIGHTS CONTEMPORARY
Photo Ai Ueda
10
3-6 November
LIFEM Terry Riley, Talvin Singh, George Brooks, Wim Mertens, Pascal Comelade, Svjata Vatra, Gavin Bryars, Fernanda Takai
8 November out hear
Super-Collider Dai Fujikura
15 November out hear
ELISION Liza Lim; Michael Finnissy
22 November out hear
Mark Knoop Shlomowitz & Finnissy
29 November out hear
Sargasso:C Jim Cuomo and the 8-BIT REtroVOLUTION
6 December out hear
ELISION Map of Impossibilities Hall Two
13 December out hear
Blank Canvas London Sinfonietta
17 December
Arctic Circle
Christmas Concert
11
HIGHLIGHTS JAZZ
September—December 2010
Book tickets now: 020 7520 1490
Book tickets now: www.kingsplace.co.uk
JAZZ
JAZZ HIGHLIGHTS 23,24 SeptemBer samuel joseph presents... solo jazz piano
John Taylor, Zoe Rahman 25 SeptemBer
samuel joseph presents... solo jazz piano
HIGHLIGHTS
Gwylim Simcock, Jessie Buckley, Joe Thompson 2 October the base
Django Bates
Jessie Buckley
Jessie Buckley & Joe Thompson Saturday 25 September, Hall Two. See Listings p55 for details.
A west side story...
50th Birthday Gala
9 October
This autumn Kings Place welcomes two visits from a British jazz legend, pianist John Taylor.
Photo C Forbes
A few years back Jessie Buckley was commuting from Kerry to Dublin for harp lessons. Now she’s the hot new voice in jazz.
She’s a twenty-year-old harpist from Ireland being hailed as the new Ella Fitzgerald. Kerry-born Jessie Buckley is a phenomenal singer with no formal jazz or dramatic training, who first hit our screens as the runner-up (but the judges’ favourite) on BBC1’s I’d Do Anything, and went on to shine in Trevor Nunn’s production of A Little Night Music. It was while she was performing in this show that she met the resident pianist and music director of the Ivy Club, Joe Thompson, with whom she’ll appear at Kings Place. ‘The cast were given membership of the club, and we’d go off there for a nightcap after the show and sometimes I’d end up singing with him. The last few months have been very exciting, we’ve been touring with classics from the Great American Song Book; they are such a pleasure to sing, so well-written, you just don’t find songs like that any more. I’ve learnt so much from working with Joe – he’s a wonderful, hidden talent.’ Buckley grew up in a musical household: ‘My mother was a singer and my father loved jazz, which is why I got to hear so much on the radio. I always adored Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, Jonny Mercer and Duke Ellington – never pop music, I was really born in the wrong era!’ When Jessie sold out at Pizza on the Park earlier this year, The Stage’s Mark Shenton declared he had ‘never seen a cabaret debut as accomplished, daring and confident before’, yet this was a girl who had no plans for such a career. When I ask what she was doing a few years ago, she replies, ‘probably playing football as I was a tomboy!’ She learnt piano, clarinet and harp from an early age: ‘I was kind of my own one-man band, but I was also very disciplined, there was no hardship in practising hard, or travelling to Dublin for harp lessons.’ Singing only came into the picture at her boarding school, when she joined in the ‘fantastic productions. My first show was Chess, and I was the only one tall enough to play the man!’ Catch this charismatic future star with Joe Thompson as part of the Samuel Joseph presents... Solo Jazz Piano series.
The sweepingly skilful jazz pianist John Taylor has been a star on the European scene for 40 years, but perhaps it’s taken that long for his unique talent to be fully appreciated. His career stretches back to the early Seventies when he accompanied Cleo Laine and jammed with John Surman. Successive decades saw the slow-burning development of countless creative collaborations with, among others, his famous group Azimuth, Norma Winstone and Peter Erskine, Lee Konitz, Julian Arguelles, Jan Garbarek, Marc Johnson, and now Kenny Wheeler and his current trio members Palle Danielsson and Martin France. His most recent album featured Italian scat singer Diana Torto and bassist Anders Jormin, with whom he’s working on a new project with the German WDR Big Band. He can be spoken of in the same breath as his hero, Bill Evans, and as an artist who has never stopped evolving, but just gets better and better, as his recent solo album Phases (2009) reveals. John Fordham of the Guardian gave an apt summary of his unique qualities when he reviewed Taylor’s highly successful Angel of the Presence album recorded by his current trio: ‘Taylor’s proximity to the status of the
HIGHLIGHTS JAZZ
September—December 2010
A pianist AND A Gentleman
Photo Vincenzo Photography
12
Jarretts and Mehldaus has been a long time coming… the broadening of the pianist’s vision and the further blossoming of his awesome technique has been a genuine middle-years breakthrough. Taylor doesn’t convolute pop tunes like Brad Mehldau, reawaken standards like Keith Jarrett, or play with Herbie Hancock’s swollen-river imperiousness. But he rebalances elements of all those qualities.’ His good influence has spread to a new generation of players through his teaching posts in Cologne and at York University, and the fact that the young F-IRE Collective have chosen him as their guest to celebrate the tenth birthday of their organisation is telling. He’s a great example of someone who has never rested on his laurels but keeps on developing with inexhaustible creativity. His commitment is an inspiration for those struggling up through the ranks of a notoriously insecure profession.
the base
United Vibrations Jazz meets punk, with influences from Fela Kuti to Bob Marley.
16 October the base
F-IRE Collective Large Ensemble UK premieres of Hear, O Israel and Four pieces for peace.
23 October the base
Abram Wilson Mo’ Better Blues Dune Music marks the 20th anniversary of the monumental Spike Lee film Mo’ Better Blues.
30 October
london guitar festival in the fall
Mike Outram Guitarist and composer with world-class credentials.
6 NOVEMBER lifem
Fernanda Takai Samuel Joseph presents… Solo Jazz Piano John Taylor 23 September, Hall One, 7.30pm. The Base, John Taylor and friends 4 December, Hall Two, 8pm.
First UK appearance of Brazilian singer from pop band Pato Fu.
13 NOVEMBER the base
Denys Baptiste Quartet Saxophone colossus Denys Baptiste and co.
18–20 November london jazz festival
The Bad Plus The Bad Plus with Wendy Lewis, The Plus with Django Bates, The Plus plus Club night.
27 November the base
Jim Mullen Spitz brings together some of London’s finest jazz musicians to celebrate Mullen’s 65th birthday,
4 December the base
John Taylor The F-IRE Collective celebrate ten years by inviting John Taylor and friends to play.
11 December the base
Aquarium Led by pianist/composer Sam Leak, features James Allsopp (sax), Josh Blackmore (drums) and Calum Gourlay (bass).
18 December the base
A Dune Jazz Christmas Featuring Abram Wilson, Gary Crosby OBE, Jason Yarde, and members of Rhythmica.
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autumn folk highlights 24 September folk union Songdog
1 October
folk union Heidi Talbot & Co.
15 October folk union Parkbench
September—December 2010
WARM WELCOME FOR A WILD CROWD Concertina player Alistair Anderson, who has played a key role in producing a new generation of folk musicians, welcomes folk legends and young artists alike at Kings Place this autumn
Book tickets now: 020 7520 1490
Book tickets now: www.kingsplace.co.uk
COMEDY
HIGHLIGHTS FOLK
FOLK HIGHLIGHTS
22 October folk union Peggy Seeger
29 October
folk union The Carrivick Sisters
5 November lifem Svjata Vatra
12 November folk union Sigrid Moldestad
19 November folk union Kris Drever
26 November folk union Jonny Kearney and Lucy Farrell
3 December folk union Celloman
17 December folk union The Arctic Circle Christmas Concert
9–11 December
Feast of Folk
Legends of Irish Music Kevin Burke, Máire Ní Chathasaigh and Chris Newman Alistair Anderson: Steel Skies Emily & Sophy Ball, Lillias Kinsman Blake, Andy Watt June Tabor with Huw Warren, Andy Cutting, Tim Harries, Mark Emerson
‘It’s fantastic that there’s going to be a new regular folk strand [Folk Union] at Kings Place,’ enthuses Anderson, ‘That will help to put it on the map as a folk venue.’ He points out that there are some really big names this season, opportunities to see artists like the soulful British folk-singer June Tabor, who rarely plays in London, and who is coming with a wonderful group of collaborators, including violinist Mark Emerson and pianist Huw Warren. Then there’s the legendary Peggy Seeger, who has been such a huge influence on a generation of singers. Married to Ewan McColl, she was at the heart of the British folk scene for many years, and this autumn returns to the UK after 15 years in America: ‘She’s always engaging and thought-provoking,’ says Anderson. He’s also thrilled to welcome three legendary Irish musicians to his own Feast of Folk in December, ‘Kevin Burke has been in several of the most important Irish bands, he’s a huge talent. Virtuoso harpist and singer Máire Ní Chathasaigh and guitarist Chris Newman (who toured with Grappelli) will really set you back on your heels. You think a harp and guitar are going to be gentle but Wham! What a big sound they make, it’s spectacular.’ Just before this, in November, the Orkadian guitarist and singer Kris Drever
makes an appearance. He has had such success with his trio Lau: ‘Don’t miss that, he’s always interesting.’ Of the younger generation of performers, he picks out the artistry of Heidi Talbot whose 2008 album Love and Light was so wellreceived: ‘She’s a fine singer, with quite a reflective style. She’s coming with John McCusker who’s a superb fiddler.’ Anderson has also enjoyed the young band Parkbench – ‘dynamic and upfront, very much a good-time band’. No doubt he has a soft-spot for Lucy Farrell and Jonny Kearney, former students of his on the Newcastle University Folk and Traditional Music degree course: ‘They are quirky and delightful and have done very well. They are two
HIGHLIGHTS
very different characters, but they started to collaborate towards the end of their time at uni and they have gone from strength to strength. Jonny is a very original songwriter.’ Coming full circle, he remarks that his former students playing with him in Steel Skies remember the piece from their parents’ LPs when they were children, 20 years ago: ‘Emily and Sophy Ball grew up with that album. Steel Skies (1982) was ground-breaking in its way, setting music rooted in the tradition in a new context, and it appealed to a wide audience, including many new to folk music. The album was recently reissued on CD and has had great reviews again… so we’re introducing it to a new generation.’ See sidebar, left.
OFF WITH THEIR HEADS! Dan Antopolski
7 October Andy Zaltzman
14 October Carl Donnelly
21 October Rob Rouse
28 October Special headliner
4 November Paul Sinha
11 November Phil Nichol
18 November Zoe Lyons
25 November Frisky and Mannish
2 December
Alistair Anderson (right): ‘Folk Union will help put Kings Place on the map as a folk venue.’
Steve Hall
9 December Terry Alderton
16 December Special headliner For support acts, see listings
HIGHLIGHTS COMEDY
September—December 2010
THE WISDOM OF
v
PEACOCK
GAMBLE Ray Peacock and Ed Gamble, regular MCs at Kings Place Off With Their Heads! comedy nights, reflect on a thorny problem – the behaviour of stand-up audiences...
30 September
Photo Bradley Creswick
14
Ray: Hello, I’m Ray Peacock and I’m one of the regular MCs at the Kings Place comedy night, Off With Their Heads! Ed: Hello, I’m Ed Gamble; I’m one of them as well. Ray: Anyway, Kings Place have asked us to write a thing, and this is that thing. It’s about audiences. Now, the stand-up audience is an odd beast... Ed: Like a cow with tentacles that can speak French. Ray: Yep, that is an odd beast, but concentrate. If we were to go to our secret underground lab (which all comedians have) and create the perfect audience member, what would they be like? Ed: I like this idea; it’s sort of a fun approach to eugenics. Ray: We should probably be serious about it though, just so they let us still do the gig. Ed: Good point, I like playing Kings Place too much to get fired. Shall we hop on the Mature Train to Sensibletown?
Ray: Already on it. I think our perfect audience member should have the ability to engage their ears, and disengage their mouths. Apart from laughing, obviously. There is nothing more annoying for the rest of the audience and the comedian if someone insists on chatting throughout the night. So I think they should be a mute but one who can laugh. And listen. Ed: What hair should they have? Ray: This isn’t The Sims. It doesn’t matter what hair they have – any type is allowed. You think of one now. Ed: Well as a compere, it’s always frustrating when you ask someone what they do for a living, and they make something up. I think they’re just trying to join in, but there are only so many times you can hear someone tell you they’re a gynaecologist. People say that to me loads. Ray: You’re right, our supersoldier should be honest. It’s
more fun that way and everyone will get along better. Now, I’d like to return to what you said about the audience ‘joining in’. Ed: Why are you speaking all official? I don’t like it. You sound like you’re a sergeant. Ray: Sorry, but just listen for this bit and then we can get back to our cartoons. Some audiences seem to think that they’re being helpful by shouting out and being disruptive. A lot of people claim they’re giving us ‘ammunition’. Ed: Yeah, but the ammunition is faulty. If I fired a gun with one of their bullets in it, it would probably fly off in the wrong direction, go to the bar and chat. So you’re right, our Audience Legend 2.0 wouldn’t heckle or be disruptive. Just laugh, clap and have a lovely time. Ray: What if they aren’t shouting because they think it’s helpful – but because they’re drunk? Ed: Alcohol is a dangerous balance to strike with an audience. It can help loosen the inhibitions and actually get them laughing a bit more. But too much and it can turn someone into the worst audience member ever. Inattentive, insensitive and intensely annoying. Ray: Maybe we should breathalyse people after the interval then make them drink or sober up accordingly? Ed: There’s probably something legally wrong with that... it sounds like we’re creating a Police State. We’ll probably just need to trust our perfect punter not to act like a wally. Ray: I think what we have built is essentially a nice human. Ed: I’m still worried about the hair... Ray: OK, a Mohican. They would have a Mohican. Ed: Perfect.
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25 October
Thomas Hardy
Guardian Book Club
Hosted by Claire Tomalin, acclaimed biographer of Hardy, this special event will feature readings of Hardy’s poetry, and new work inspired by him.
27 September words on monday
Schumann Bicentennary Professor Lord Robert Winston with Stephen Johnson
1 November
Oxfam Debate 8 November
words on monday
Guardian Debate An evening with the Guardian’s cult columnists Zoe Williams, Ben Goldacre and Tanya Gold.
15 November
4 October
A celebration of the life and work of two of North America’s greatest 20th-century poets.
Rock ’n’ Roll Politics Hosted by Steve Richards
18 October poet in the city
Spoken Word All Stars Featuring Charlie Dark, Kate Tempest, Kat Francois and El Crisis, accompanied by saxplayer Jason Yarde.
poet in the city
Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell
22 November words on monday
Guardian Book Club 29 November words on monday
Guardian Debate 6 December
words on monday
Winter Words
20–21 October
Ian McMillan & Luke Carver Goss
Bhakti & the Blues; Cricket, Commonwealth & Country; Twin Dynasties
A forecast blizzard of songs, poems & wordflakes from poet, comedian & broadcaster Ian McMillan, and composer Luke Carver Goss.
DSC South Asian Literature Festival
Graham Henderson, director of Poet in the City, anticipates another sell-out season of spoken word events at Kings Place this autumn.
words on monday
A medical and musical discussion on Schumann’s creativity and mental state. words on monday
THIS CITY LOVES POETS!
words on monday
13 December
words on monday
Dark Fairytales Written and performed by Dzifa Benson. Film and design by Al Livingstone.
Luke Carver Goss & Ian Mcmillan
‘I can’t remember the number of times I’ve been told that the poetry audience in the UK could fit into one room,’ says Graham Henderson, director of Poet in the City, who has curated a highly successful event series. ‘But we have proved them wrong here time and time again. I think our event in January this year with Seamus Heaney was one of the biggest ever, with both Halls packed out, and the audience in Hall Two receiving a video link.’ A quarter of the audience so far has been first-timers, which shows the reach is still growing. Owing to lack of commercial clout, Henderson feels this great art form has been side-lined: ‘but at all the important transitions in life – births, marriages, deaths – poetry storms back into people’s consciousness’, and it finds its transcendent place once again. ‘Real poetry sits in your hand like a polished stone,’ says Henderson, ‘You wonder how something so simple, so perfect and gleaming can contain so much meaning.’ Henderson’s chief aim has been to change the ‘terminally unglamorous’ reputation of the poetry reading. ‘I wanted to get away from the “woolly jumper” image, of a few people in a dingy basement reading their own interminable verse to each other for hours on end. Our evenings are short, sharp, high-quality, in a magazine format – poetry interlaced with biography, context and comment – and no interval.’ Poet in the City alternate events exploring classic poetry, the ‘late, great poets’, hosted by leading experts, with those featuring living poets reading their own verse. This season there will be an event on
Thomas Hardy led by Claire Tomalin and a fascinating one on the corresponding American poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Of the contemporary poetry events, the Spoken Word All Stars will be one not to miss. They begin their tour at Latitude Festival and will arrive at Kings Place on 18 October with a keenly honed set, featuring saxophonist Jason Yarde. ‘He rehearses carefully to synchronise with the poets, it’s all about rap, rhythm and beat, he creates a great synergy.’ Henderson is particularly proud that the All Stars launched and developed the event at Kings Place: it’s now not only on a national tour, but has become the subject of a Sky Arts documentary. ‘Our work at Kings Place has become a springboard for all sorts of ideas. My favourite audience response is, “I didn’t think I was going to enjoy that – but I did!”’
Twin Dynasties As part of the DSC Festival of South Asian Literature at Kings Place, two remarkable women from two of the region’s most prominent political families come together. When Nayantara Sahgal and Fatima Bhutto come on stage in Hall One on 21 October, it will be a symbolic meeting of the two great dynasties of India and Pakistan. Both are talented writers who have given voice to the experience of inheriting a loaded, often violent political legacy from close family. Novelist Nayantara descends from the Nehru family, arguably the world’s oldest democratic political dynasty. Now spanning four generations and producing the only team of father-daughter-grandson prime ministers, the Nehrus have ruled for 37 of India’s 53 years in independence. Sahgal’s fiction deals with the response of India’s elite to the crises engendered by political change and her novels are often set against the backdrop of pivotal events in Indian history. She was one of the first female Indo-Anglian writers to receive wide recognition. Fatima Bhutto was born in Pakistan, the granddaughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, prime minister from 1971 until his execution in 1977. His daughter, Benazir, was elected for two stints as prime minister during the 1990s, the first woman from a Muslim state to head a government, before she was assassinated in 2007. Fatima, Benazir’s niece, is a fearless poet and writer, who came to fame after the appearance of her first collection of poems, Whispers of the Desert. Her new book, Songs of Blood and the Sword has caused controversy by focusing on the murder of her father and her negative view of her aunt, Benazir. It follows the story of her own family, who became powerbrokers when Pakistan was liberated from colonial British forces after the Second World War. This unusual evening, moderated by Maya Jaggi, will draw on relevant imagery and music during which both speakers will talk about their personal experiences of growing up in such powerful and turbulent families.
HIGHLIGHTS
Poet in the City For events see sidebar, left. For further details see Listings section.
Robert Lowell
HIGHLIGHTS SPOKEN WORD
Fatima Bhutto
Photo AMEAN J
20 September
Book tickets now: www.kingsplace.co.uk
SPOKEN WORD
SPOKEN WORD HIGHLIGHTS poet in the city
Book tickets now: 020 7520 1490
September—December 2010
Photo ALFRED EISENSTAEDT
HIGHLIGHTS SPOKEN WORD
Photo JOHN DUNNE
16
DSC South Asian Literature Festival Twin Dynasties 21 October, Hall One, 7pm. See Listings p62 for details Bhakti & the Blues with Vayu Naidu & Cleveland Watkiss 20 October, Hall Two, 9pm. Cricket, Commonwealth & Country 20 October, Hall One, 7pm. See Mihir Bose’s column p47.
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HIGHLIGHTS ART
Book tickets now: 020 7520 1490
September—December 2010
Book tickets now: www.kingsplace.co.uk
ART
Airy and elegant, Ann Christopher’s new sculptures will be shown at Pangolin London in October
HIGHLIGHTS
Royal Academician, Ann Christopher is a sculptor whose elegant and intricate works seem to evade gravity to rise gracefully into space. Taking its inspiration from a wide range of sources, including ancient standing stones and soaring skyscrapers on an urban skyline, Christopher’s work is recognisable for its intimate attention to detail and surface texture. Despite their subtle surfaces and slender forms, Christopher’s sculptures in bronze, steel or silver have great strength and presence and her delicate works on paper also have immense impact, regardless of their fragile nature. It is this remarkable ability to balance power and grace that sets her aside from the bolder, more brutal principles of the avant-garde sculptors of the
1970s who initially inspired Christopher, such as Richard Serra and Eduardo Chillida. This exhibition at Pangolin London focuses on a brand-new body of work in a variety of media and is Christopher’s first major solo show in London since her exhibition at the Royal Academy. Christopher’s public and private commissions can be found across the globe and her work is held in numerous public collections. Ann Christopher will be talking about her exhibition and work in general as part of the Talking Art series on Monday 22 November.
Ann Christopher RA: New Work 27 October—4 December Pangolin London
ART HIGHLIGHTS 20 August–2 October
1 –26 NOVEMber
Kings Place Gallery
Concert Level
Unfold: Art from Cape Farewell 2007-2009
Jazz Legends
UNFOLD presents work in a variety of media by leading international artists in response to climate change.
Sefton spent a lifetime capturing the biggest names in jazz.
20 August – 8 October Kings Place Gallery
When Ruth Borchard made the daring decision to collect self-portraits, she created an enduring vision of Britain’s post-war art world. The collection, now housed at the Kings Place Gallery, goes on show on 15 October.
Ruth Borchard Jean Cooke
See listings p60
It is this remarkable ability to balance power and grace that sets her aside
Albert Irvin RA The first major retrospective of Irvin’s printmaking career, organised in Association with Advanced Graphics.
Whishaw’s complex meditations upon and representations of Nature culminate in ‘an image in the process of making itself visible’.
8 September – 16 October Pangolin London
David Bailey
Spoilt for Choice: Prints from Advanced Graphics London Running concurrently with the Irvin, work by fellow Academicians.
TALKING ART
Sculpture and Photography
Pangolin London
The first public exhibition of Bailey’s sculpture, challenging the boundaries between art forms.
4 OCTOBER
15 October – 26 November Kings Place Gallery
A unique collection of 100 selfportraits spanning the period from 1921 to 1971.
15 OCTOBER – 26 NOVEMBER
An Evening with David Bailey
1 NOVEMBER William Pye Water Sculptures
22 NOVEMBER Ann Christopher in conversation
20 DECEMBER Pangolin Christmas Show: An Introduction
TALKING ART SERIES By Dr Gail-Nina Anderson
Kings Place Gallery
11 October
From Sickert to Riley:
The Colour Yellow
Developments in Modern British Art
18 October
From the post-Impressionist exhibitions to the post-war generation still working today.
25 October
Pangolin London
Ann Christopher Shadow of Light
Kings Place Gallery
Images on the Edge of Perception
27 OCTOBER – 4 NOVEMBER Photo STEVE RUSSELL
FACE TO FACE WITH THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
3–24 december 2010 (4–11 February 2011)
The Complete Prints
British Self-Portraits of the 20th Century: Selected works from the Ruth Borchard Collection
academicism, Camden Town, Expressionism, the Euston Road School and Kitchen Sink. Among young artists spotted by Ruth Borchard in their student days were Mario Dubsky, Peter Phillips and Patrick Procktor, along with Antony Eyton, Antony Green, Ken Howard, David Tindle and Euan Uglow. As the collection and her confidence grew, she approached artists at the height of their careers: many, such as Michael Ayrton, Roger Hilton, Felix Topolski and Keith Vaughan, co-operated. This year a national self-portrait prize will be launched, so that her legacy will continue to grow.
Sefton Samuels
Anthony Whishaw RA
Face To Face
Ruth Borchard, who came to London as a German-Jewish refugee in 1939, started collecting British self-portraits in the late 1950s. With astonishing bravado, she set herself a ceiling of 21 guineas for any one picture, irrespective of the artist’s fame, and usually succeeded, accumulating more than 100 portraits. The earliest in this remarkable collection of British self-portraits includes work by Raymond Coxon, Ithell Colquhoun, Carel Weight and Anne Redpath from the inter-war years, but most are from the 1950s and 1960s, helping to evoke an entire period in British art and its myriad developing strands. All kinds of artistic influences are evident – art school
HIGHLIGHTS ART
September—December 2010
THE ART OF DEFYING GRAVITY
Photo Ruth Borchard Collection
18
Victoria and Albert as Collectors
Mona Lisa and Her Sisters
8 November Mirrors and Reflections
Ann Christopher RA
15 November
New Work
Portraits of the Working Class
A brand new body of work in a variety of media.
13 December The Colour Gold
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HighLIGHTS FOOD & DRINK
at one table and 24 at three, for a sitdown meal. It provides a relaxed environment for friends and family and has a stunning terrace running alongside the canal which is perfectly suited to inviting larger groups should you want to try a barbecue or hog roast with some great British beer to wash it down. There is no hire charge for the space and three-course menus start at £27.00 per head. The suggested menus for the private dining room are hugely flexible and Norman Harkness, the Rotunda head chef, is always happy to sit down and discuss any ideas you might have to make the occasion as special and personal as you would like it. If you’re in search of an intimate dining space, with excellent travel links for all your guests and menus to suit all tastes then the Rotunda can offer you exactly what you’re looking for, as Liz says, ‘As far as our private dining is concerned, it is all about taking the menu to the person, not taking the person to the menu’.
THE DEMISE OF FRENCH CUISINE? The London Restaurant Festival arrives at Kings Place on 12 October with a lively debate on the state of French cuisine. The motion is: This House Believes that French Cuisine is a Spent Force. Debating this contentious issue will be author and broadcaster Jonathan Meades, who has made his home in France, the acerbically witty critic AA Gill and the feisty editor-cum-smallholder Rosie Boycott, who is now an active campaigner for home-grown produce and works for the mayoralty as Chair of London Food. The event will kick off with drinks at 6.15pm and the debate will start at 7pm in Hall One.
The London Restaurant Festival 2010 Culinary Debate 12 October, Hall One, 6.15pm for 7pm For bookings: Rotunda Bar & Restaurant Tel: 020 7014 2840
Rosie Boycott, Chair of London Food, joins the London Restaurant Festival debate
Photo Joakim Blockström
Photo JILL CHEN
JOIN ROSIE BOYCOTT AND AA GILL TO DEBATE WHETHER FRENCH CUISINE IS A SPENT FORCE
FOOD & DRINK
Solution to the Sunday Roast There’s something about preparing the Sunday roast which wars against a relaxed, sociable family time – little wonder it sometimes only happens on Christmas day. You start the process early in the morning and by the time the guests arrive, you’re sweating over the stove, the meat has dried to a crisp, the vegetables have boiled to a pulp and the roast potatoes are still hard. You never get to talk to anyone. Liz Reece, manager of the Rotunda, has the answer: ‘We create the roast dinner you always wanted under the eyes of a professional chef. We’ll serve our amazing quality beef or lamb from our linked farm up in Northumbria, you bring your family in and we leave you to carve and serve yourselves, or we’ll serve unobtrusively if you’d prefer.’ Vegetables come in big bowls, and the whole idea is about people getting together and enjoying some uninterrupted quality time. The Rotunda private dining room can be booked from 9am to 11pm seven days a week. It seats up to 16
Book tickets now: 020 7520 1490
September—December 2010
HIGHLIGHTS
Book tickets now: www.kingsplace.co.uk
September—December 2010
GRAPE EXPECTATIONS Robin Davis, owner of SWIG, is an independent wine importer and consultant who helped put together the wine list at the Kings Place Rotunda restaurant. We asked him how he chooses wines and for his seasonal recommendations.
Swig is an interesting name – how did it come about? The Serious Wine Imbibers Group (SWIG) was a newsletter-style guide to buying wines written by my late mentor, James Rogers. He imported wines for his family’s chain of quality grocers, Cullens, from California, Argentina, New Zealand and Australia long before anyone else was bringing them in. He got the famous wine journalists of today to taste blind and showed them that without using this method, you would never choose the best-value wine for the customer or get innovation in wine. I always wanted to carry on SWIG, in honour of him. How did you become involved with Kings Place and the Rotunda? Kings Place owner Peter Millican is a wine enthusiast. He told us about Kings Place three years before it was built and hoped one day we could be involved. He introduced John Nugent (Managing Director of Green & Fortune) over dinner and wines from small producers which I import, and we all agreed it would be a positive thing to work together. On what principles do you put a wine list together for a restaurant like the Rotunda? Peter and John told me they’d like to have a wine list with interesting and quirky wines, as well as classics at great prices. We agreed to purchase a cellar from which we
could draw off stock for the top end of the list. The Bordeaux have been carefully chosen as being over-achievers but under-priced in their respective vintages. The most expensive wine on the list is Lynch-Bages 1961 at £225. I’ve just seen it on another retailer’s list at £495 per bottle. Peter and John are very keen to work with smaller suppliers who have something interesting to offer. For the ‘wines by the glass’ section we taste everything blind against three or four times as many wines as we actually list, and these are very reasonably priced.
very collectable and at £42 this most gorgeous of wines is a steal. Clos Erasmus 1988 came from a private cellar. We tasted three vintages of this wine before settling on the 1988 and if you want to drink one of Spain’s most collectable reds with over 20 years’ bottle age this is one not to miss. What’s the best way to enjoy a glass of wine? Always take the time to smell it. As much of the magic of a wine is in its aroma as in its taste. Most importantly take your time, drink less of a quality wine, make it last over two or three nights. What’s your favourite wineproducing country and why? It has to be Italy, the array of grape varieties make for some memorable flavours and aromas. The whole country is just awash with greatly improved producers – a big change from 20 years ago – but it’s hard to get people to try some of the lesser-known grape varieties – they stick to the big names.
Tell us about one of your great wine finds? Two Terraces 2003 from Waipara, New Zealand. It’s a Merlot/ Cabernet blend which the trade have by-passed each year for three years, during which time we’ve been the only people importing this gorgeous leafy, blackcurranty, Bordeaux-like wine. It’s as good as any of the more famous names in the room that cost twice as much, and what’s more, it’s more pleasurable to drink. It’s £25 on the restaurant list. What should people be trying this autumn from the Rotunda wine list? If you buy any bottle that costs £40 or more you will be drinking something extraordinary and rare for the price on which just a modest cash mark-up has been applied. Amon Ra from Australia is
Robin & Son Lachlan
HighLIGHTS FOOD & DRINK
If you could only take one bottle of wine to a desert island, what would it be? A fine bottle of New Zealand Pinot Noir! But I wouldn’t wait till I got to the desert island. Like Miles in the film Sideways waiting for the perfect moment to drink his several hundred dollars a bottle of Château Cheval Blanc, it’s rare that it comes, and when it does the wine might be too old or let you down. It’s better to grab the moment… Monday nights are as good as any to drink something special.
For wine tasting events this autumn look on www.kingsplace.co.uk There will be a September tasting with Mike Weersing of Pyramid Valley, organic wine-maker of the moment in New Zealand; October sees a tasting of South Africa’s top 20 producers, and in November we welcome Domaine Serene, Oregon’s top Pinot Noir producer.
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January—April 2010
Book tickets now: www.kingsplace.co.uk
Book tickets now: www.kingsplace.co.uk/tickets
September—December 2010
Robert Schumann (1810–1856) and wife Clara Schumann (1819–1896).
Photo Sven Arnstein
Photo Tully potter collection
Robert Schumann’s music exerts a unique power over musicians. Pianist Lucy Parham (pictured below), who curates a week of Schumann events at Kings Place in honour of his bicentenary, discusses his genius and the most famous love triangle in music with Helen Wallace.
Pianist Lucy Parham who is curating the week and performing.
‘I have a strange feeling when playing Schumann of coming home: I think, deep down, his is a language I understand. I suppose there is something very personal about his music, a troubled soul that comes shining through.’ Schumann is very much on the mind of pianist Lucy Parham, in this, his 200th-anniversary year, which he shares with Chopin. Performing the music of both, she’s had plenty of time to explore two utterly different Romantic voices: ‘Technically, Schumann’s music is not very pianistic, and doesn’t fit well under the hand. Chopin was primarily a pianist, and a much better pianist than Schumann, while Schumann thinks in a more orchestral, vocal or instrumental way. But while Chopin is more comfortable to play, Schumann makes special demands on your imagination, to go right into the depths of his soul. I love the fact that you have the very introverted, shy character and then you suddenly have this mad, mercurial personality that explodes on to the scene – it’s hard to understand at first. Take a piece like Kreisleriana, which in many respects is an impulsive whirlwind, but underneath it there’s an agony, a passion – a voice crying out.’ It’s this human voice that seems to take a hold on certain musicians, and causes them to speak of Schumann as if he were an intimate friend, flawed but lovable: ‘There’s something
COVER FEATURE 25
about Chopin’s music which is exquisite – a perfection which is almost inhuman. That’s not the case with Schumann, sometimes you feel it could be edited, but it’s so human, there’s the imprint of the man there – I’m not sure you ever truly know Chopin through his music.’ Parham’s programme for the week includes not only some great works for solo piano, chamber ensembles, the Cello Concerto, and a Lieder recital by Ann Murray, but a concert of Schumann’s piano miniatures. For one of the special aspects of Schumann must surely be his accessibility: there are pieces for instruments, short songs and the incomparably tender Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) through which children and amateur pianists can discover the essence of this extraordinary composer. ‘I loved playing all the Schumann pieces you learn as a child, I thought they were completely magical,’ explains Lucy, ‘So I’ve invited all sorts of pianists to each play one for our gala concert to support the National Youth Orchestra.’ She has persuaded a host of amateur pianists well known in other fields to perform, from the Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger, (a pupil of Parham’s), actor Edward Fox, comic Sue Perkins, BBC presenter Katie Derham to Richard Ingrams of The Oldie and Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster: ‘I think they’re very brave, but I’m hoping it will also be great fun, and attract a crowd.’ A centrepiece of the week will be a presentation of Beloved Clara, Parham’s dramatisation of the relationship between Robert, his wife the pianist Clara Schumann, and Johannes Brahms, as told through their letters and music. It must be the most famous love-triangle in the history of music, and has exerted a fascination over creative minds ever since. Katherine Hepburn played Clara in Love Song, Hollywood’s 1947 version of the story, where a handsome young Brahms woos the married Clara, who mourns her increasingly ‘lunatic’ husband. Author Janice Galloway explored the painful practical and physical realities of the life of a travelling virtuoso with an unstable husband and seven children in her searing book Clara. Sting and Trudie Styler are the latest to try out the roles of Robert and Clara in Twin Spirits (Opus Arte) with Derek Jacobi narrating a story that focuses on Robert’s battle with Clara’s father for her hand. Lucy, who created her drama with writer Jessica Duchen, sees Clara as the key figure: ‘At the centre is Clara, this astonishing virtuoso pianist and composer, who managed, against all odds, to break free from her controlling pianist father. The fact that these two great composers formed relationships with her, were inspired by her and wrote all this extraordinary music for her – well, there’s no story in music quite like it.’
Book tickets now: 020 7520 1490
September—December 2010
Photo Steve Ullathorne
Left: Cellist Raphael Wallfisch. Above: comic Sue Perkins and Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger try their hand at playing Schumann too on 2 October.
Her own words-and-music presentation, Beloved Clara, takes its title from a letter of Schumann’s, as does a recent German film of the story, which will receive its UK premiere at Kings Place in this week. The film stars actress Maria Gedeck, known to British audiences through her performance in the acclaimed film about life in the DDR, The Lives of Others. Lucy is thrilled that Gedeck is taking up the role again, with her co-star Sebastian Koch playing Robert Schumann and Brahms. ‘To have two German voices, who know how to lift those letters off the page, and bring those people alive, is very special. And the letters are such a direct way into their world – they were brilliant writers, and corresponded in a way unknown to us now. It starts when the Schumanns marry, and ends with Brahms taking leave of the dying Clara.’ She confesses that sometimes when she hears Träumerei, she finds it impossible not to cry. Having read the script, I can see what she means. One of Clara’s great achievements was a radical overhaul of the concert piano repertoire which had become virtuosic and showy to a fault, and she was largely responsible for introducing the world to the compositions of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms. The evening interleaves
pieces by them and Clara herself. Perhaps most poignant are the moments in which we glimpse the sacrifice she made as a creative artist in order that Robert could compose: his writing had to take precedence over her practising and often her composing, despite Schumann’s admiration for her gift: ‘Clara has written a series of small pieces, more delicate and richly musical in their invention than she’s ever achieved before … I’m often disturbed to think how many brilliant ideas are lost because she hasn’t the time to work them out.’ One of the reasons Clara’s father objected to the marriage was his perception that Schumann was mentally unstable. His condition deteriorated after the ecstatic first years of the marriage, though recent biographers have interpreted his tragic mental decline as far from inevitable, but caused by the effects of mercury treatment for syphilis, probably picked up in his student days. He confesses in one letter that he had ‘auditory illusions’ and Lucy has asked Professor Lord Robert Winston and broadcaster Stephen Johnson, who has explored mental illness in other composers too, to discuss the medical realities of the composer’s possibly bi-polar condition, and how it affected his music.
Book tickets now: www.kingsplace.co.uk
September—December 2010
MUSIC SOUL TO SOUL
SCHUMANN bicentenary
NATALIE CLEIN on schumann
Monday 27 September
Music & Madness
Professor Lord Robert Winston and Stephen Johnson discuss Schumann’s creativity and mental state. Hall One 7pm
‘Schumann for me is unique: I once heard the composer Heinz Holliger say that you have to find colours on the cello for Schumann that you never have to find for any other composer, and that’s so true. It’s always a joy and huge challenge to perform his music. We cellists are lucky in that he wrote us such substantial pieces. He was an amateur cellist himself, which can be the most dangerous combination – he was familiar with the cello but didn’t know quite how difficult his music was to play! Although the wonderful Fantasiestücke (originally for clarinet) works brilliantly on the cello, I particularly love the Stücke im Volkston (Pieces in a Folk Style) for cello. They are very obsessive: those themes get under your skin, they can take you over, but they conjure up the fairy-tale world he was immersed in. I’ve included the noble Adagio and Allegro as I feel the two movements perfectly capture the contrasting spirits of Florestan and Eusebius, the two characters he felt were warring within him. Schumann was such a gifted writer as well as composer that a portrait including words and music is an ideal way of presenting him, as Lucy’s evening Beloved Clara will show. It’s incredibly touching to read their letters to each other because the love was so intense on both sides. While she is not as great a composer as Schumann, she did have a gift for very beautiful melodies.’
Wednesday 29 September
Schumann on Piano and Violin
Lucy Parham piano Jennifer Pike violin Martin Roscoe piano Hall One 7.30pm
Thursday 30 September
Schumann with Natalie Clein & Friends Images from left: violinist Jennifer Pike, who performs during the week; actress Martina Gedeck.
Natalie Clein cello Katya Apekisheva piano Alexander Sitkovetsky violin Krzysztof Chorzelski viola Hall One 7.30pm
Friday 1 October
Beloved Clara
Lucy Parham piano with Sebastian Koch & Martina Gedeck actors Hall One 7.30pm
Schumann makes special demands on your imagination, to go right into the depths of his soul.
Photo Daniela Mueller-Brunke
MUSIC SOUL TO SOUL
Photo Benjamin Ealovega
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After attempting suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine, Robert was committed to a mental asylum in the spookily-named Endenich and suffered an agonising two years of isolation before his death. During that time Brahms, a loyal friend to the couple who early on recognised his talent, became Clara’s greatest ally, and later declared she was the only woman he ever truly loved. There is no evidence the two had more than a platonic relationship, though it was creatively fruitful. He wrote some of his finest piano pieces and chamber works expressly for
her, and Clara established his two piano concertos in the repertoire. Parham pays tribute to her dedication to her husband’s music: ‘I think the fact that she never married Brahms is because her whole life was dedicated to Schumann, even after his death. She worked tirelessly to promote his works, many of which had been dismissed by critics and other composers.’ She’s delighted to be joined by a mix of fine musicians, young and old. As a laureate of the BBC Young Musician of the Year herself, Lucy has always supported those who came after her. She has invited former winners cellist Natalie Clein and violinist Jennifer Pike to perform whole programmes of chamber music. ‘I’ve always loved Natalie’s playing and I’ve followed Jennifer with great interest since she won at the age of 12; it’s wonderful to see a major talent developing.’ Of the more established names, she welcomes cellist Raphael Wallfisch to play the Cello Concerto, and mezzo Ann Murray to give a song recital and masterclass: ‘Ann is a wonderful singer and teacher. She’s immediately engaging and inspirational, and has such a wealth of experience to bring to this. And we couldn’t explore Schumann without hearing his songs – they take you to the heart of the man.’
Saturday 2 October
Schumann Gala
Scenes from Childhood Kinderszenen Op.15 as played by Alan Rusbridger, Richard Ingrams, Katie Derham, Sue Perkins, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor and others. Hall One 11.30am
Lieder Masterclass with Ann Murray/Iain Burnside Hall One 1.30pm Film: Geliebte Clara (2008/Germany) UK Premiere St Pancras Room 4pm
Schumann and the Voice Ann Murray mezzo-soprano Iain Burnside piano Hall One 7pm
The Cello Concerto Raphael Wallfisch cello Orchestra of St John’s/John Lubbock Hall One 8.15pm See Listings p55–7 for full details.
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Photo DAVID BAILEY
Bailey: ‘I don’t take photographs, I make images’
September—December 2010
September—December 2010
Photo DAVID BAILEY
28 ART
ART THE SKULL BENEATH THE SKIN
David Bailey Shoe Tongue Sterling Silver
Celebrated photographer David Bailey has taken up sculpture, and Pangolin London will be the first gallery to show his work. Rachel Campbell-Johnston went to his studio to meet an outspoken creator who revels in ‘messing with materials’.
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September—December 2010
David Bailey – or just Bailey as he is always called (even by his wife) – is the photographer who first became famous because he clicked with the Sixties, with its world of legs and lips and long sleek hair, of eyelashes hanging like bats upon cheekbones and mini-skirts hiking up startlingly high. But now, in his seventies, he is presenting a very different sort of picture. In a show of his sculpture which opens at Pangolin London this autumn, Bailey looks straight through the fripperies of fashion. He focuses on the skull that lies beneath that perfect skin. ‘I’m not saying I’m a sculptor,’ Bailey insists. ‘I just make images. I don’t take photographs, I make them. And now I’m making something else. I’ve always messed around with stuff like this. When I was a kid I used to make cabinets of curiosity. I’d put things in crisp boxes and write little labels on them. The whole of life is a cabinet of curiosities,’ he says, casting his gaze restlessly around his London mews studio. It flits across a huge butterfly painting by Damien Hirst, a poster-sized print of the Beatles as kids, and comes to rest for a few moments on a canvas which he has just finished painting. It shows his mother being raped by Hitler, he says. ‘I paint Hitler all the time,’ he explains. ‘I always thought that he killed Mickey Mouse because when I was a boy he bombed the cinema at Upton Park.’ Jumping up from his chair, a small, plump, unshaven figure, he rummages about on his shelves. ‘This is called the The Rite of Spring,’ he says, showing me an assemblage in a glassfronted, shoe-box-sized cabinet which involves a graphic sex toy, a picture of an (understandably round-eyed) owl and a bird’s nest woven from twigs. ‘It’s exciting to make something you haven’t seen before,’ he says. ‘Curiosity is everything. If you’re not curious, you’re finished.’ Bailey is inspired by the primitive, by the tribal carvings and fetishistic assemblages of African and Oceanic culture which he first encountered through Picasso, an artist whose work he adores. It is hardly surprising. They have much in common: a relentless inventiveness, a tireless determination, a bellicose disposition, an irreverent outlook – and a taste for beautiful women. Bailey may have settled down with age – the only things he now cares about, he says, are his work, his wife Catherine, his children ... and his Jack Russell dog, Pig. But once, like the great pioneer of Modernism, he was as famous for bedding the world’s most beautiful women as for making pictures of them. ‘Primitive is the wrong word,’ Bailey says. ‘This art is so sophisticated. And yet it’s so basic.’ He has always set out to simplify, he says. Even in photography, he prefers black and white: colour gets in the way of the image pure and direct. The first sculpture he ever made was a
‘Have you ever been to a foundry?’ he asks, his eyes heating up like molten grey metal; ‘it’s fantastic, the silver falls like silver rain’
Photo DAVID BAILEY
ART THe skull beneath the skin
David Bailey Comfortable Skull Sterling silver
carved wooden fetish. ‘But then I met the guy who owns the Pangolin foundry [Rungwe Kingdon] (‘Have you ever been to a foundry?’ he asks, his eyes heating up like molten grey metal; ‘it’s fantastic, the silver falls like silver rain’) and I began mucking around with plaster and clay.’ He revels in the hands-on immediacy of the process. He deplores digital technology. ‘Chimpanzees can take pictures,’ he says. He still prints all his photographs himself. He loves messing with the materials of sculpture. ‘I don’t know how to do it and that’s why I do it,’ he says. Skulls seemed to him the obvious subject matter. They have always obsessed him. Over the years he has assembled quite a collection. The craniums of a gorilla, a hippo, a tiger (which he extracted himself from an old moth-eaten head) lie about his studio. Sometimes he will bury dead animals to dig them up a few months later. ‘The skull is nature’s sculpture,’ he says. ‘The old ones get this lovely patina,’ he says. His new sculpture exhibition will display pieces that range from a tiny grinning memento mori cast in pure silver and set on a fashion-catwalk chair to a huge five-foot bronze in which death looms very large. ‘Here is Shoe Tongue,’ he says: showing me a skull with a boot-leather tongue poking impudently from its gape. He was inspired to make it by an old shoe which he found on a burnt-out fire in Dartmoor (where he has a second
home). ‘Everything in my life is found,’ he says, ‘whether it’s something that I find in the person I’m taking a picture of or some farmer’s old boot that I find on a bonfire.’ The tongue intrigues him. ‘It’s the only sexual part of your body that everybody sees. You do as much sex with your tongue as anything else’, he says. And yet, right behind all this exuberant sensuality, lies the brute fact of death. ‘The skull is our destiny,’ says Bailey. ‘All those beautiful girls: that’s all they are in the end. When Picasso painted Gertrude Stein she complained that she didn’t look like that. “You will”, Picasso said.’ ‘I don’t believe in the afterlife,’ Bailey says. ‘I don’t want people to come to my funeral. I never go to theirs. I just want to be put into an old cardboard box and then burnt – then people can smoke me, I suppose. But if art can do anything’, he says (and he insists that it does not serve a practical purpose – design does that) ‘if it serves anything, it would serve the soul... if we had one... by showing us how to look at the world in a different way.’
David Bailey: Sculpture & Photographs 8 September – 16 October. Pangolin London. See Listings p53. An Evening with David Bailey 4 October. See Listings p57.
Pangolin london sculPture, Prints & drawings
until 3 July Fallis in wonderland Pangolin london sculPtor in residence, abigail fallis
13 july - 21 august Michael cooper stone carvings & bronzes
8 september - 16 october david bailey
PANGOLIN
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sculPture & PhotograPhs
9 september - 24 december williaM pye water sculPtures clockwise from top left: abigail fallis Looking Glass; Michael cooper Seated Gorilla; david bailey Shoe Tongue; Jon buck Drawn In; ann christopher Shadow of Light ; william Pye Scylla
27 october - 4 december ann christopher new work
9 december - 24 december pangolin london christMas show
Kings Place 90 York Way London N1 9AG T: 020 7520 1480
32 JAZZ
September—December 2010
Book tickets now: 020 7520 1490
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DON’T 5TOP ME NOW! Django Bates, jazz dynamo, band-leader and composer, has chosen to celebrate his 50th birthday at Kings Place. John Fordham looks back on an idiosyncratic career that’s still on a creative rollercoaster.
Django Bates with colleagues from his current Danish big band StoRMChaser
Schnittke viola concerto. I really had no idea about musical boundaries at all.’ Django Bates is 50 this year. He’s released a rare covers album with the Charlie Parker tribute Beloved Bird, but there’s nothing studiously respectful about this piano-trio tour de force. Parker’s usually straight-swinging ‘Scrapple From The Apple’ constantly switches tempos, ‘My Little Suede Shoes’ deconstructs post-Parker Latin-jazz clichés, and the normally brisk ‘A-leu-cha’ is turned into a tender reverie. Bates is also busy applying his creative mischievousness to the Rhythmic Music Conservatory’s StoRMChaser big band, whose members defy traditional ensemble principles by playing as many different things as possible at the same time, and frequently at odds to the beat as well. Django Bates’s first regular gig was as a house-pianist for some of the biggest names in UK jazz, at promoter Jonny Edgecombe’s Waterside Theatre in Rotherhithe in the late 1970s. Out of that gig came the pianist’s band, Human Chain, with saxophonist Iain Ballamy – and between 1984 and 1990, they were both swept into the collective energies of Loose Tubes. The unruly young orchestra (mainly
playing its members’ compositions) took even the world-famous Ronnie Scott’s Club by storm, and at one point engaged the services of an admiring Teo Macero, the legendary Miles Davis producer. In 1991, Django Bates formed his postTubes big band, Delightful Precipice. The enthusiasm for its surreal rearrangement of ‘New York, New York’ at the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (Bates used to announce it by saying ‘we’d now like to play a lovely, lovely, lovely, LOVELY old song, in a horrible new way’) led to the prestigious 1997 Jazzpar Prize, which Bates was only the second non-American to receive. The 1990s also saw an increase in adventurous classical ensembles seeking unconventional composers. Django Bates wrote for the London Sinfonietta, the Britten Sinfonia, and the Smith and Brodsky String Quartets, though these adventures sometimes divided the classical critics, who struggled to categorise his eccentric and ebullient take on tradition. The last two decades have also seen Django Bates compose for theatre director Lucy Bailey, collaborate with former Yes and King Crimson rock drummer Bill Bruford in the Earthworks quartet, and record with artists
as different as the atmospheric Norwegians Sidsel Endresen and Nils Petter Molvaer, and the edgily innovative New York pairing of cellist Hank Roberts and saxophonist/composer Tim Berne. In 2004, he was the inaugural Artistic Director of the FuseLeeds new music festival, commissioning sixty composers from Adnitt (Tim) to Zorn (John) to write one bar each in celebration of saxophone revolutionary Evan Parker’s 60th birthday, quilted together so that the recipient could improvise over it.
Photo MARTIN MUNCH
When Django Bates was growing up in Beckenham in the 1970s, he dreamed of making friends with someone who knew what jazz was. Classmates at his local comprehensive were into reggae, Mud, or Showaddywaddy, and one or two were discovering punk – but jazz was nowhere to be heard. The teenage pianist took to whistling Charlie Parker bebop tunes on railway platforms, hoping somebody would get the message. Bates found a fellow bop obsessive (the saxophonist Steve Buckley) that way, and the partnership became his first jazz band. He went on to co-found one of the UK’s most innovative jazz orchestras (Loose Tubes), compose for jazz, classical and theatre ensembles, collect Europe’s jazz equivalent of the Nobel prize (Denmark’s £20,000 Jazzpar), and become a professor at Copenhagen’s unique Rhythmic Music Conservatory. It’s been a long ride from the platform at Beckenham Junction – and from his father Ralf’s remarkable record collection, which, as Bates says, ‘embraced everything from Romanian folk orchestras to Zulu choirs. He’d tape snatches of weirdness from the radio, and we’d listen to it all through. You’d get ten seconds of calypso smashing straight into a
Being outside the establishment has always seemed important to me, because creatively it’s where you have to be.
Five years ago, in the Guardian, Bates and the young F-IRE Collective guitarist David Okumu animatedly discussed the practicalities and economics of unorthodox music-making in what they both saw as a lowest-common-denominator culture. Okumu pointed out that the 1980s example of Loose Tubes, and the unflinching independence of Django Bates’s work since, had been a major inspiration to the F-IRE Collective, and other young organisations like it. Bates remarked on how heartened he was ‘that somehow these people with a common musical purpose seem to find each other in this huge city’. He also put his finger on the motivation that drove him back to when he was whistling bebop on railway stations, and which drives him still. ‘Being outside the establishment has always seemed important to me, because creatively it’s where you have to be.’
Django Bates & Human Chain, 50th Birthday Gala 2 October, Hall Two. See Listings p57. The Bad Plus with Evan Parker and Django Bates 20 November, Hall One. See Listings p70.
34 ART
September—December 2010
September—December 2010
THE INDEFATIGABLE ALBERT IRVIN As a new exhibition opens at the Kings Place Gallery, William Varley celebrates the life and work of a painter engaged in the physical and emotional dynamics of existence.
an enthusiasm for classical music so that it comes as no surprise to learn that as a young artist during World War II he attended Dame Myra Hess’s lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery. He possesses a vast hinterland of cultural knowledge which is simply taken for granted and never paraded as exceptional or exclusive. His reverence for high culture and its spiritually enriching power utterly separates him from those nowadays who are driven by the ‘Anxiety of Cool’. Moreover, throughout his youth he had encountered inspirational teachers, first at Holloway County Grammar School, then at Towcester when he was evacuated to Northamptonshire, and later at Northampton College of Art. While there he also met the Reverend Walter Hussey, patron of the arts, whose collection included work by Graham Sutherland and Matthew Smith, and who had commissioned Henry Moore’s Madonna and Child for St Matthew’s church. This direct experience of a serious engagement with culture fired him up, and it is small wonder that after his wartime service in the RAF, he renewed his education at Goldsmith’s College in
London and, for a while, joined the committee of the Poetry Society. If his adventure in self-development is perhaps not unique amongst former grammar school boys of his generation, his development as an artist almost provides a rehearsal of the history of post-war British Modernism. From his early essays in figuration (radically flattened-out vignettes of workingclass life) to his first forays in abstraction which were informed by his cartographical and spatial expertise as an RAF navigator, he moved inexorably towards ‘painting which aspires to the condition of music’. Abstract painting, devoid of any mimetic purpose, would for him articulate ‘the physical and emotional dynamics of existence’. Forming a friendship with the painter Peter Lanyon in 1957 was in this respect a meeting of minds. Lanyon often flew a glider (he was eventually killed in a crash), and used that activity to inform his painting. The sensations of swooping and diving in a contingent space were sensory experiences that he recreated in the movement of paint. Furthermore, Lanyon
The discovery of Matisse’s colour had freed him so that today the blazing contrasts and burning red/violet harmonies have a lifeaffirming optimism.
Photo Paul Tozer
There is a marvellous book by Professor Jonathan Rose called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. The outcome of scrupulous research, it documents the rise of the self-education movement in the Victorian age, through the 20th century to its decline in the 1980s. Bert Irvin, now 88, is the quintessential autodidact, though he was not, strictly speaking, of a working-class background, his father having run a small grocery business in Bermondsey until it failed, whereupon he was forced to take a succession of jobs. If the young Bert was neither economically nor culturally privileged, he was still imbued with aspirational values, largely inculcated by his mother, who was a Sunday School teacher. The pursuit of material success, celebrity and the casual acceptance of consumerism have never been part of Bert Irvin’s make-up. The details of his intellectual odyssey are vividly reconstructed in Paul Moorhouse’s splendid biography, an enthralling account of one exciting discovery for him after another. From early in his life, for example, he developed
Albert Irvin in his studio
ART THE INDEFATIGABLE ALBERT IRVIN
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ART THE INDEFATIGABLE ALBERT IRVIN
September—December 2010
September—December 2010
ART THE INDEFATIGABLE ALBERT IRVIN
Albert Irvin at Kings Place in 2008: his work was the first to be exhibited in the new gallery
had exhibited in New York and had shared ideas with some of the leading Abstract Expressionist painters. By this time Irvin had seen their work in landmark exhibitions in the mid-fifties at the Tate and the Whitechapel Gallery. De Kooning, Kline and Pollock were especially important to him. The mural scale and the environmental presence of many of these paintings which often loomed over the spectator threatening to engulf him, like Gordale Scar, James Ward’s romantic exercise in the Sublime (in the sense of ominous and threatening), made a lasting impression upon him. Again, the notion of the canvas as an arena of activity wherein a drama of brushstrokes unfolds, rather than as a composition of fictive references, became increasingly important. As his work developed, his abstract language became more complex. The canvas would be rotated so that the topography of marks became even more ambivalent and with the adoption of acrylics rather than oils he could pour paint onto the canvas or even use a squeegee to create tides of overlapping colour. It takes little imagination to see in these vast pictorial improvisations seismic shifts of
tectonic plates or manifestations of pure energy. His repertoire of shapes and marks increased too, and with their feints, jabs and sweeps, echo a boxer’s armoury, but it would be wrong to align him with proponents of painterly machismo. As a passionate admirer of Turner, he is more often preoccupied with the ineffable and the numinous. Those marks and shapes, incidentally, don’t form a nexus that the spectator must decode, but rather present one that might be sensed or apprehended. Collectively they might engender sensations of the bustle of urban life or hint at inner conflicts. Colour too had been developed from the subfusc tonalities and khaki fogs that were the common currency of British painting in the ’50s. The discovery of Matisse’s colour had freed him so that today the blazing contrasts of complementaries and burning red/violet harmonies have a life-affirming optimism. In her introduction to his Retrospective at Kings Place (2008), Alice Correia aptly defined him as ‘a painter of hope’. This is not to suggest that he is of Panglossian innocence: anyone who has endured the ‘terrifying’ experience of being a wartime navigator in a Beaufighter bomber, not
to mention being a streetwise Londoner for years, knows a good deal about the darker sides of life. In his painting though, rather than yield to them, he defiantly and exuberantly transcends them. That Retrospective included a large painting titled Nicholson. Nothing to do with Sir William, or Ben, it refers in fact to the maiden name of Betty, his wife and constant supporter, to whom he has been married for over 60 years. It’s good, too, to see his long-term friend Basil Beattie showing in Spoilt for Choice, the accompanying Advanced Graphics show. As for his own prints, most frequently a combination of screenprint and woodblock, one marvels at the deftness with which he edits the activity of his paintings to preserve their vigour at smaller scale. By the way, his favourite colour is red, but then it would be, given that he’s been a lifelong Arsenal supporter.
Albert Irvin, The Complete Prints In association with Advanced Graphics. 3–24 December. Kings Place Gallery. See Listings p73.
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38 CLASSICAL
September—December 2010
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ETERNITY N AN H0UR… Netia Jones, founder and artistic director of Transition_projects, is well known for presenting staged concerts and performances with integrated film, creating a richly visual narrative. Here she personally introduces ‘Innocence and Experience’, three evenings of extraordinary music by masters of vocal writing, staged with Transition’s unique projected visuals.
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Transition_ Projects Innocence and Experience 25 November Poulenc La Voix humaine Berio Sequenza III Claire Booth soprano
26 November Britten Winter Words Tippett Boyhood’s End James Gilchrist tenor
27 November Jacopo Peri/ Monteverdi O miei giorni Fflur Wyn soprano See Listings p71,72
‘Taking our theme, Innocence and Experience, I’ll start with the most innocent, the radiant arias of Jacopo Peri (1561–1633) and his contemporary Monteverdi, because this show is all about youth and hope. The young heroine (here played by the young soprano Fflur Wyn) is an adolescent character who hurls herself into love, abandoning herself to emotion, and opening her soul in the absolute way of the first-time lover. The setting is a long August vacation, which stretches before you as a teenager; this artistic, romantic young girl is stuck in prosaic suburbia and she fills the hours with thoughts and dreams of love. I’m always struck by the freshness, spontaneity and contemporary immediacy of these 16th-century songs; they remind me of the work of singer-songwriters today. We’re using a mix of animation and live footage in the staging; animation is ideal for this story, with its nascent adult values. The medium uses the tools of childhood and I love working with animators, they are such extraordinarily creative and dedicated people. From the idealism of youth to the crushing blow of rejection. We turn to two portraits
of women on the edge: La Voix humaine, Poulenc’s astonishing setting of Jean Cocteau’s monologue by a lone female on the telephone, combined with Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III, which pushes the female voice to extreme virtuoso feats. Berio wrote his piece for the singer Cathy Berberian in the year following their divorce, and it is fragmentary and fraught with extreme emotion, a real coup de théâtre For this, Claire Booth’s vocalisation will trigger live video. We’ll do La Voix humaine more like a film, showing the back story, starring the heroine and her former lover. That will mean the audience are sometimes complicit in her version of events, and sometimes in the story from her ex-lover’s point of view. As she goes through the gamut of her guiles, bullying, threatening, cajoling and pleading, the truth slowly dawns – on her and us – that she has been replaced, she is powerless. The screen will project the image she is trying to project to him, while on stage we see the dishevelled reality. Claire’s performance is quite extraordinary for its restraint: she plays this hysterical woman but is completely still throughout. There are
not many performers who could bring that off, but Claire can. After the turmoil of a relationship breaking up, we come to Winter Words, a reflective piece, where an older person is looking back on life and the loss of innocence. A chance meeting with a nightwatchman at an abandoned set of buildings threatened by vandalism presented the ideal setting for these two sets of stunning songs, Britten’s Hardy-settings, Winter Words, and Tippett’s Boyhood’s End. He described to me how he spent all night in this entirely empty, semiderelict set of buildings. The nocturnal aspect, the absolute solitude struck me, and will give depth, another reflective layer, to these songs which deal with an idealised memory of youth and the melancholy conclusions of old age. I know that tenor James Gilchrist will respond amazingly to these poems which are so rich with life, resonance and narrative, and giving him this context should provide a heightened sense of drama, another emotional dimension not possible in a straight concert performance – that’s what Transition_projects is all about.’
THIS ROMANTIC YOUNG GIRL IS STUCK IN PROSAIC SUBURBIA AND FILLS THE HOURS WITH DREAMS OF LOVE.
September—December 2010
CLASSICAL ETERNITY IN AN HOUR
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40 FOLK
September—December 2010
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September—December 2010
FOLK UNBROKEN CHAIN
Sigrid Moldestad
FOLK UNION, FRIDAY, SEPT–DEC 24 September Songdog
1 October Heidi Talbot with John McCusker & Boo Hewerdine
15 October Parkbench
22 October Peggy Seeger
29 October The Carrivick Sisters
The UK folk music scene has never been so vibrant and so richly diverse. Colin Irwin lays some tired clichés to rest and follows the folk story from the Fifties revival to a talented new generation performing today.
5 November Svjata Vatra
12 November Sigrid Moldestad
19 November Kris Drever
26 November Jonny Kearney & Lucy Farrell
3 December Celloman
17 December
The Arctic Circle Christmas Concert about introverted singer-songwriters or ridiculously long ballads with laughably convoluted narratives. The British, it seemed, reviled their own music, and outing yourself as a fan of folk music was a quick route to becoming a social outcast. Long had it been thus. While doing invaluable work annotating the old songs, Victorian collectors were largely geared towards reflecting an unreal idyllic vision of rural England, and many of the traditional singers who kept traditional songs alive through much of the 20th century did so covertly, conditioned to believing their songs were outdated, worthless and an invitation to scorn were they ever to sing them in public. Few of them recognised themselves as the keepers of a dying tradition or thought of the songs handed down to them were considered folk songs. It took the British folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s to redress the balance. Its two main protagonists, Ewan MacColl and AL Lloyd, had their own agendas, shaping folk music politically as an expression of working-class values and struggles. It was successful, too, for a while, igniting a formidable network of folk
clubs that still survive in lesser numbers today, spurring on a new generation of artists and inspiring not only an explosion of earnest, socially conscious songwriters, but interest in and respect for the old traditional songs and singers. A few of those working at the coalface of those trailblazing early days continue to fight the good fight and remain influential figures. A member of a famous American folk music dynasty, a fresh-faced Peggy Seeger and her banjo originally came to England in the 1950s, teaming up with Ewan MacColl to establish a revered and hugely influential partnership that continued until his death in 1989. Their groundbreaking BBC Radio Ballads series effectively changed the way radio programmes were made, and Seeger – a superb interpreter of old folk songs and an intelligent composer of vibrant new ones – remains as passionate and committed as she ever was to the role of song in political struggle. Northumbrian Louis Killen, too, is a seminal figure, whose career has spanned almost the entirety of the folk revival with many adventures in between, but he is still able to deliver a ballad with richness and grace. The likes of
Christmas concert featuring Emily Barker, Ted Barnes, Dom Coyote, Dale Grundle (The Sleeping Years) and composer/arranger Harry Escott.
FEAST OF FOLK WEEK 9 December
Legends of Irish Music Kevin Burke fiddle Máire Ní Chathasaigh harp and voice and Chris Newman guitar
10 December
Steel Skies
Alistair Anderson concertina & Northumbrian pipes Emily Ball fiddle Sophy Ball fiddle Lillias Kinsman Blake flute Andy Watt mandolin
11 December Photo Magnus Skrede
Invited to present a gong at the 2003 BBC Folk Awards, the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro made a stirring speech on behalf of a much-maligned national heritage. ‘There is this treasure chest you have sitting in front of you,’ he told the guests, ‘and if you were American or perhaps Irish you might have opened it by now, but because you live here it probably hasn’t occurred to you to do so yet. Well, I would urge you to open that thing up and delve inside because I believe you’ll find there a sublime vision of life in the British Isles as it has been lived over the last few centuries; and it’s the kind of vision that you can’t readily get from the works of Dickens or Shakespeare or Elgar or Sir Christopher Wren. If you don’t open that treasure chest you are going to miss a whole dimension of cultural life in this country.’ Ishiguro’s empowering words said plenty not only about the richness and importance of our folk music traditions, but about the ignorant clichés and stereotypes that had smothered it for so long to the point that ridicule and denigration almost became a national sport. If it wasn’t jokes about fingers in ears, long beards, Aran jumpers and pewter tankards, it was quips
June Tabor with Huw Warren piano Andy Cutting accordion Tim Harries double bass Mark Emerson viola, violin
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September—December 2010 September—December 2010
Photo Louis Decarlo
UNBROKEN CHAIN FOLK DATE UNBROKEN CHAIN
Photo David Angel
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born to it, raised by families deeply immersed in the folk revival. Yet others were drawn to it anew, alienated by the predictable crassness of pop music and the suffocating banality of the reality TV show phenomenon, keen to discover something much more honest, real and exciting in the folk world, whether in a dramatic ballad from the 1800s or the new songs emerging within the highly flexible framework of a genre that, despite widespread popular belief, has always been geared to embrace new visions. As Martin Carthy – one of folk music’s most venerable figures – is fond of saying, the only way you can damage a folk song is by not singing it. And, with a formidable influx of youth blending in with the proud, hardy survivors of an earlier era, the folk scene is thriving again with various hotbeds around the country, not least in Newcastle, where the brilliant concertina player Alistair Anderson has played a massive role in developing young talent with his work at various Folkworks initiatives and the Newcastle University Folk and Traditional Music degree
11 DATE 43 CONTEMPORARY
XENON Others were drawn to it, alienated by the predictable crassness of pop music, to discover something much more honest, real and exciting
Mikhail Karikis brings two unique theatrical events to Hall One this autumn. Helen Wallace caught up with a composer and artist of daring originality.
Images from top left: Kevin Burke, Kris Drever, Heidi Talbot.
Seeger and Killen in turn inspired a committed generation of revival singers, like the magnificent Chris Coe, a mainstay of the grassroots scene for three decades and a walking masterclass in how to inhabit the skin of a great song. She would be a national treasure, but the folk world doesn’t work like that. By the mid-1970s, interest had faded and, while the legacy of that 1950s/60s revival remains profound, the rise of other more fashionable musical styles drove it underground to be widely dismissed as either irrelevant or an unwelcome reminder of an embarrassing empirical history. A kind of bunker mentality prevailed for two decades, but detachment from the mainstream brought its own strengths as it established itself as an alternative culture, which proved to be fertile ground for honest music-making, free from commercial pressures, with its own DIY cottage industry. By the mid-1990s an exciting new, young generation of musicians had started to emerge to change antiquated perceptions of folk song. Some – like Eliza Carthy and Kate Rusby – were
ARTICLE TITLE
January—April2010 2010 September—December
course, now regularly producing a diverse selection of prodigious young talents. Among these are the duo Jonny Kearney and Lucy Farrell, who met on the course and came to national attention on a lengthy support tour with The Unthanks. The partnership seems odd – Kearney is a Northumbrian guitar player who writes extraordinary songs and claims to know little of the folk tradition, while Farrell is the singing/fiddle-playing daughter of a Kent morris dancer weaned on the tradition. Yet that contrast is itself almost a microcosm of the folk world’s diversity, and most of the surviving early revivalists eagerly agree the quality of the modern performers vastly outstrips their own standards at the same stage. They are talking about artists like the sublime Irish singer Heidi Talbot; and Orcadian guitarist/singer Kris Drever, who juggles his career in award-winning trio Lau with solo work; and another Scotsman, Alasdair Roberts, whose own highly-distinctive and imaginative writing blurs the lines between tradition and contemporary song to make a seamless link in a vital cultural chain.
Mikhail Karikis singing in Act 1 of Xenon his ‘exploded opera’
Karikis took his inspiration for Xenon: An Exploded Opera, from Pierre Boulez’s infamous suggestion that ‘the most elegant solution to the problem of opera is to blow up all the opera houses’. The show contains operatic elements, such as singing (classical, improvisational, rap), costume and set design, dance and recitative, without assuming that these elements exist simultaneously. ‘Costume, for example’, says Karikis, ‘is not used as an additional element to complement the performance, but is of equal value to the music.’ Staging an ‘opera’ in Hall One is no mean feat, but Karikis is endlessly resourceful: ‘I use the entire space of the auditorium and stage as a performance area. Act 1 has a character who duets with the stars and emerges as a shadow out of a big blue circle of light at the very back of the auditorium, before performing a slow promenade toward the stage, reaching for the sky. A big bouquet of balloons opens up a vertical dimension to the audience. Act 2 has soldiers sectioning off parts of the auditorium and stage using barrier tape. These acts transform the way the space is perceived by the audience.’ Besides Boulez, John Cage and his desire to dissociate music from traditional narrative has influenced Karikis. ‘Xenon has no one narrative, but many. The title means ‘stranger’ and the opera stages encounters between strangers. Each one has their own story and set of difficulties to overcome.’ Karikis recalls that he drew his first costume collection when he was five, and created a two-note composition to accompany it. ‘I took a chair, threw a piece of cloth and some Christmas lights over it, placed my Playmobil figures on the seat and invited my sister and mum to my room for the premiere of my first show.’ As a promising pianist, he had a classical career mapped out for him, but early on he knew he had to create his own world, and left Greece to study architecture in London, and begin the process of becoming composer, performer and artist. ‘I always thought of music in a material way, as something to sculpt.’ He admires the ‘devastating drama’ of the music of his compatriot Iannis Xenakis, also an architect in sound, and counts Laurie Anderson, Ingmar Bergman and Alexander McQueen as influences. Karikis’s second event, Love Songs for Broken Machines, features the vocal group juice. What can we expect? ‘Beautiful singing from this contemporary female voice trio, who have commissioned the songs from influential living composers, and a series of fascinating theatrical actions using DJ decks and low-tech machines. I’m exploring the fact that we’ve built a vast number of machines with a shorter and shorter life span, for the sake of fuelling consumption to maintain the capitalist status quo: many of our technologies are made redundant, when in fact we can reinvent their function.’ If anyone can reinvent, it’s Karikis, the ‘sound alchemist’.
Love Songs for Broken Machines 22 October, Hall One. Xenon: An Exploded Opera 23 October, Hall One. See Listings p53.
44 JAZZ
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September—December 2010
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THE SECRETS OF MUSICAL MANIP– ULATION Mike Figgis is one of the UK’s most visionary and successful film directors. But he’s never lost his roots as a jazz musician and composer, as his week at Kings Place will reveal. He discusses the programme with Helen Wallace.
Mike Figgis today: ‘I started off as a musician and remain one.’
Mike Figgis’s first major feature, Stormy Monday (1987), seems to signpost every important element in his career and make-up: set in the north east, where he has roots, it was a highly original film noir starring major Hollywood stars – Melanie Griffiths and Tommy Lee Jones – and involved a musician, Sting, playing a jazz club owner. Like all his films – think Leaving Las Vegas, Internal Affairs, One Night Stand, Hotel – it had a subtle but utterly effective soundtrack: surely Figgis is unique in being a major film director who is also practising performer and composer? ‘I was first and foremost a musician,’ he says over coffee in the Rotunda, from where he can look out across the Battlebridge Basin towards his home (he ‘loves the building, even though it’s robbed me of my view of north London!’). ‘My father was a huge
September—December 2010
THE SLOW MOVEMENT OF MAHLEr’s fifth symphony will transform the most banal scene into a tragedy
classical jazz fan. I started trumpet when I was 12, then I realised that it just doesn’t attract girls, like Eddie Izzard said about the clarinet – it doesn’t cut the mustard! So I switched to guitar, taught myself classical guitar, and then conned my way into music college by pretending I could read. They said they’d let me in if I studied piano, so I jumped at the chance.’ He ‘painfully’ taught himself to read and write music, played trumpet with Bryan Ferry, and joined the experimental free improvisation group The People Band, who were collaborating with the The People Show, a performance art ensemble. He became part of The People Show and toured with them for ten years. Performance art led to big mixed-media events (some to be re-staged at Kings Place during this week) which in turn led him into film-making for live theatre events. ‘I tried to get into the National Film School, and they knocked me back, because I was from a performance art background, so I thought, f*** you, I’ll make films anyway.’ The rest is history. But, he reminds me, he remains a musician. And so he kicks off his week at Kings Place with an examination of the relationship between music and film. It promises to be a fascinating masterclass: ‘I’ll do some live demonstrations – take a piece of film without music and show how different kinds of music psychologically alter
your perception. I do a little demo with the slow movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Here’s a piece of music that will work with any scene in a film and immediately transform it into a great tragedy regardless of what is happening. A dog can be having a pee against a lamp-post – it will become a tragic pee!’ He plans to make Timecode (1999) central to this event. The radical, four-screen comedy thriller was an experimental and commercial success, in which Figgis showed four separate takes on the same series of events through a quartered screen. Emphasis on one or more of the soundtracks guides the audience as to what to watch when. It’s the ultimate ‘eavesdropping’ experience in cinema, but, more crucially, a masterclass in musical manipulation. ‘I can radically change the music and I can remix the dialogue: it’s the best tangible demonstration of what can be done.’ No one gets a radical film like Timecode distributed without a fight, and the laid-back man in the battered hat before me has a reputation for being, shall we say, no walkover. Not surprisingly, he has trenchant views on the role of music in the majority of films: ‘Music has always been the whore of the film industry, the domain of the producer rather than the director: “prostituted” music in certain generic films can work well, but it’s not authentic: it might have a Stravinsky feel, a Bartókian feel, it’s not the real thing. The Rite of Spring has had a huge influence on
JAZZ MIKE FIGGIS WEEK
the thriller genre, you couldn’t have had Psycho without Stravinsky. But there’s an anaesthetising of people’s ability to respond: musical clichés are so lazy. All music is interesting, all music is powerful, depending on where you choose to put it.’ Figgis eludes categorisation because he has worked in so many different genres: film noir, classical stage adaptations, Hollywood block-busters, experimental films and a thriller for Disney (Cold Creek Manor) for which he composed a 12-tone score. He likes to confound expectations: some wouldn’t dream of putting a jazz score to a drama about the Wars of the Roses, but, he says, ‘You have to ask why? Why wouldn’t a funky double bass work for Elizabeth I as she’s seducing one of the courtiers? Anachronicity can be a problem when you are dealing with very specific pieces of music, but when it’s radically out, it can work.’ Radical is a word that has attached itself to Figgis over a long career, and we’ll be able to see an early incarnation of his creative work when he revives three mixed-media events at Kings Place once staged by the Mike Figgis Company, which he describes as involving ‘semi-operatic live music film-crossover’. They will be performed in Hall One as stripped-down, essentially music theatre pieces. The first, Redheugh, is named after the house he grew up in and where his father died. ‘The songs, in German, centre around transition and death, and they describe the effect the Second World War had on that generation.’ The second work, Slow Fade, is a ‘political fantasy’ that eventually became his first film, The House, for Channel 4, starring Stephen Rea. In it, he imagines England as a land-locked country in 1890, about to be invaded by Russia and Latvia. ‘In this version I have an opera singer, a jazz singer and a string quartet.’ The third piece, Animals in the City, is about New York. Musically, he says it’s in a Brechtian style, with an almost formal jazz structure. He’s invited pianist Rosey Chan to perform on Friday night. She’s a classically trained pianist who went into jazz and performance art, and has just released an album One, produced by Sting. She will be playing a mixture of classical and improvisation, and Figgis will sit in on bass and trumpet, which he’s managed to keep up despite its physical challenges: ‘I’ve developed a new technique as a result of playing with an acoustic pianist,
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Figgis at work on set: ‘As a director I adopt a cooler approach, as a musician I participate.’
Mike Figgis Week: 15–19 September
Photo MOVING PICTURE CO/BR SCREEN/ FILM 4 INT’L / THE KOBAL COLLECTION
16 September Theatre songs Stormy Monday 1987 (above) Internal Affairs 1990
Photo NEW LINE / THE KOBAL COLLECTION / HANOVER, SUZANNE
18 September The People Band
Photo UNITED ARTISTS / THE KOBAL COLLECTION
One Night Stand 1991 (above) Liebestraum 1992 Mr Jones 1993 The Browning Version 1994
and it was amazing, so we’re going to do an epic performance here on the Saturday night, utilising both halls, and the escalator and part of the lobby and we’re video and soundlinking a two–three hour improvisation with about 30 musicians moving around. We want each hall to influence the other in a completely spontaneous way. There will be no separation, the audience are part of the event.’ You have been warned… Free jazz on the escalators seems a far cry from eye-watering budgets and ruthless studio bosses in Hollywood: how does Mike Figgis bridge that divide? Am I looking at his doppelgänger? ‘As a film director I have to maintain a cooler approach, to watch and judge and adjust whilst keeping in mind the end result. As a musician/composer I get to participate – and there is no feeling quite like that of playing music, especially live with an audience to respond and relate to.’
For details of all the Mike Figgis Events see listings p53-54
Leaving Las Vegas 1995 (above) One night stand 1997
Photo RED MULLET PROD / THE KOBAL COLLECTION
I now use a Harmon mute, and I’ve found a beautiful Danish microphone, a tiny pick-up. I put it through an amplifier, which means I can play very quietly and improvise for a fairly long time without a standard embouchure.’ He’s still actively composing, both at the keyboard and in his head. ‘I wrote a little fugue on Eurostar the other day, and it was one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had in a long time. I’d forgotten that you can write music just based on the patterns you know. I couldn’t play it, it was far too complicated, but Rosey made it sound good!’ From a train carriage to the Coliseum, he’s currently ‘up to his neck’ preparing to direct a production of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia for English National Opera, opening in January 2011. Here is a man unusually at ease in every corner of the arts. One minute he is talking about working with conductor Paul Daniel, the next he’s enthusing about the revival of his ‘crazy ensemble’ The People Band. ‘We’re a free jazz group, who came out of the People Show and first recorded in 1968. Three years ago we got together at the Vortex
Timecode 1999 (above) Miss Julie 2000 Hotel 2001
Cold Creek Manor 2003 (above)
September—December 2010
A MATCH MADE IN MUMBAI
The Films of Mike Figgis
15 September Sound, Music and Film
17 September Past Present Future: Rosey Chan and Friends
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India took over a quintessentially English game and created an inimitably Indian phenomenon, says Mihir Bose, who chairs ‘Cricket, Commonwealth and Country’ for the DSC South Asian Literature Festival. Cricket, brought to India by English sailors in the 18th century, took off as a result of rivalry between various Indian religious groups. The Parsees, descendants of the Zoroastrians who had fled Iran as it fell to Islam, were the first to take to the game. Not to be outdone, the Hindus, Muslims and Christians followed their lead and for much of the early 20th century the greatest Indian cricket tournament pitted teams along religious lines. In the wider Indian world religious tensions tore the country apart. Yet, on the cricket field, a Hindu played a Muslim team with no fear of violence. Even today, the essentially religious origins of Indian cricket can be seen along Mumbai’s sea front. Here stand clubs in whose names Hindus, Muslims and Parsees broadcast their religious allegiances. The game would never have really got off the ground but for the patronage of the Indian princes. Contrary to popular belief, the British did not rule the whole of India. A third was ruled by native rulers, many of whom had helped the British conquer the country. Their reward was autonomy in their own lands as long as they
recognised the overall supremacy of the British Raj. These Indian-ruled states were seen as a useful safety valve, but the princes knew they had to curry favour with the Raj. And in the early 20th century they discovered how useful cricket could be, lavishing money and no little time on the game. Yet even in 1947, when a free India emerged, it was by no means certain cricket would become the supreme national game: football was hugely popular. Cricket won because Jawaharlal Nehru, the Harrow- and Cambridge-educated Prime Minister, promoted it, and Indian businessmen, like the Maharajahs, discovered the game’s promotional value. Cricket brought together the aspiring middle classes and urban poor in one setting, with immense marketing potential. Cricket became a status symbol and almost every businessman seeking to advertise his worth had a cricket team. Indeed in Mumbai, the financial centre of India, the local paper runs a hugely successful cricket tournament for business teams which at one stage outrivalled the domestic cricket tournament. In the modern nation that has
emerged following economic liberalisation, cricket advertises India’s growing economic power. With a well-off middle class of 400 million, the game generates a fortune from television, so much so that India now provides 80% of world cricket’s income. The country has long been an underachieving sporting nation (India’s first individual Olympic gold wasn’t won until 2008) but cricket is the one sport in which it takes on the world and wins. The current Test team is No 1 in the international rankings, and in Sachin Tendulkar it has the world’s most successful batsman, who could well prove to be the greatest in the history of the game. In his wake other stars have emerged, the most fascinating being the current Indian captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni. He hails from Ranchi, once shunned as a hick town full of mental asylums. Now growing in prosperity, it has used his influence and achievements to advertise its new status. Culturally, the most significant development must be the formal marriage of Bollywood to the domestic 20-20 tournament (each team bats for 20 overs), which provides just the sort of instant cricket the Indian urban masses love. The film stars finance cricket
Photo Kulwant Roy Collection/Aditya Arya Archives
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September—December 2010
Photo Rex Features
JAZZ MIKE FIGGIS WEEK
Photo TOUCHSTONE PICTURES / THE KOBAL COLLECTION / SEIDA, TAKASHI
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SPOKEN WORD 47 teams, and their presence at the matches attracts a huge mixed fan base. The stars’ waves generate as much noise as the deeds of the cricketers. Pom pom girls perform during the matches, creating what Indians call tamasha, meaning fun, frolic and excitement rolled into one very appetising package. The whole thing lasts about three hours – the duration of a Bollywood film. 600 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day. On a recent visit to Kolkata I saw poor Indian kids playing cricket with a plank of wood and a ball made of rags, begging for money. Yet less than two miles away under floodlights thousands had gathered to watch an IPL match. Some of the world’s best players were on display, earning more money than they’ve ever earned before, being watched by some of Bollywood’s biggest stars. It showed that India had, in its own classic style, absorbed English cricket and then converted it into something very much its own. Cricket, Commonwealth & Country featuring Mihir Bose and guests. Wednesday 20 October, Hall One, 7pm. For full Listings of the DSC South Asian Literature Festival, see p62
48 CHRISTMAS EVENTS
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September—December 2010
Septem
CHRISTMAS AT KINGS PLACE IN HOARY WINTER’S NIGHT
MOZART
xmas listings 15-18 December Northern Lights: Early Music Festival
We’re serving up a seasonal cornucopia this December to suit every taste. Amid the crowds and the chaos in the weeks running up to Christmas, Kings Place will be a haven of seasonal good cheer, dishing up a feast of musical treats from early music to jazz, feisty folk to Messiah. First up will be the Northern Lights Early Music Festival (15–18 December) on tour from York, bringing top international performers to Hall One. In Hoary Winter’s Night with Joglaresa promises an effervescent Anglo-Irish collaboration of spellbinding songs, while the
lively Dufay Collective recreate toe-tapping Christmas revels from Renaissance England. For those looking for a more contemporary edge to their Christmas, try the ever-inventive Arctic Circle Christmas Concert (17 December). The Circle promise to conjure up some wintry magic in their now legendary event, featuring Emily Barker, Ted Barnes, Dom Coyote and Dale Grundle (of the Sleeping Years). The following night we welcome an all-star line-up for A Dune Jazz Christmas, including Gary Crosby, Abram Wilson, Jason Yarde and Rhythmica. Be entertained by a night of elaborate reinventions of traditional favourites by masters suh as Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Wynton Marsalis. For those looking for a big
traditional carol concert, Ivor Setterfield presents two stonking Noel choral events (20–21 December) featuring carols new and old from Barts Chamber Choir and the New London Singers The season reaches a crescendo with a must-see Handel’s Messiah from the Orchestra of St John’s (22 December), followed by a Christmas Orchestral Concert (23 December) featuring rarely heard songs by Sibelius. We welcome the New Year in with two chances to hear a stunning Mozart concert by the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment (31 December, 1 January) that launches our Mozart Unwrapped year at Kings Place and will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.
17 December The Arctic Circle Christmas Concert
18 December A Dune Jazz Christmas
20, 21 December Ivor Setterfield’s Noel Christmas Concerts
22 December Handel’s Messiah Orchestra of St John’s
23 December Christmas Orchestral Concert Orchestra of St John’s
31 December, 1 January 2011 Mozart New Year Concert Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment featuring soprano Sophie Bevan.
Book tickets now: www.kingsplace.co.uk/tickets
LISTINGS APRIL
January—April 2010
9
LISTINGS To help guide you through our fantastic Autumn Season, here’s your comprehensive Listing section. With so many things to choose from and tickets going quickly, book early to avoid disappointment!
BOOK NOW Tickets from £9.50 online www.kingsplace.co.uk
SEPTEMBER p53 OCTOBER p56 NOVEMBER p65 DECEMBER p72 CALENDAR p79-81
Box Office: 020 7520 1490
Photo: Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment – Eric Richmond, Harrison & Co. Details for Remix: London Sinfonietta & Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment on pp. 59-61.
52 Listings
Plan your
Week Embracing the arts like no other venue in the capital, Kings Place offers a rich mix of spoken word, contemporary music, comedy, folk, jazz and classical. The outstanding programming and world-class concerthall acoustics attract a diverse audience seven nights a week.
The FirsT london arTs venue To geT The aTmosPhere righT. CreaTive WriTing ConsulTanCy
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September—December 2010
Weekly Themes
From Wednesday to Saturday each week, Kings Place is given over to one artist, group or organisation to present whatever they feel most appropriate within the available spaces. See listings for more information.
Weekly sTrands mondays
WORDs On MOnDAY ‘artsculturepoliticsscience’ Start your week by joining in a celebration of literature and spoken word with speakers such as Tanya Gold, Fatima Bhutto, Ian McMillan and Claire Tomalin, with regular curators Poet in the City and the Guardian.
OUt HEAR Break Your sound Barrier Grainy electronics and textured sounds collide with complex beats through waves of genre-twisting, boundary-blurring sonic exploration. See the leading promoters and musicians from the world of contemporary experimental music and multi-media performance.
Thursdays
OFF WITH THEIR HEADS! Comedy at Kings Place
Fridays
FOLK UniOn Folk at Kings Place
saTurdays
tHE BAsE Jazz at Kings Place
sundays
Brought to you in association with Avalon Promotions Ltd, Kings Place presents big names and sharp delivery from the comedy circuit. Past headliners include: Jenny Éclair (Grumpy Old Women, Perrier Award Winner), Isy Suttie (Peep Show) and Greg Davies (The Inbetweeners and We are Klang).
A new addition to the week, Folk Union will be a regular event from September 2010. Bring a warm glow to your weekend and explore future traditions and contemporary songwriting with the leading proponents of folk. The autumn programme includes Songdog, Balladeers, Parkbench, June Tabor, Peggy Seeger and Alistair Anderson.
Another new regular event. From September 2010, Saturday night belongs to The Base as Kings Place heats up with leading lights of the global jazz scene. This season’s highlights include: Django Bates’s Human Chain celebrating Django’s 50th birthday, Nina Ferro with her beautiful Waiting for the Sunset project, Abram Wilson and Mo’ Better Blues, John Taylor and the UK debut of Brazilian singer Fernanda Takai.
London Chamber Music Society
tHE LOnDOn CHAMBER MUsiC sERiEs The London Chamber Music Society continue their Sunday residency throughout the autumn with the Wihan Quartet, Fibonacci Sequence, Chilingirian Quartet, Sitkovetsky Trio, Turner Ensemble, Allegri Quartet and many more.
Vayu Naidu
Chroma Emsemble
Snape Maltings Concert Hall
82 CONTEMPORARY
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September—December 2010
Q&A TERRY RILEY Make Rotunda your local for family and friends’ gatherings.
the visionary father of american minimalism, Terry Riley has influenced musicians from John adams to the Who. On a rare visit to London in his 75th year, he performs at Kings Place.
Terry Riley: a Western pioneer in Indian music
What inspired you to study Indian classical music so deeply? I had always had an interest in Indian traditions but it was only when I heard Pandit Pran Nath, who embodied that tradition, that I started to realise how incredible it was. Fate threw us together and I knew he was the one person that could explain everything to me; I’m not sure I would have embarked on that road with anyone else. Saxophonist George Brooks studied with Pran Nath too; is that shared understanding significant to you both today? It’s been very important that George shared that same experience with me. When we work together there is always that strong reference point, alongside our shared love of jazz, those two distinct elements working together.
about this collaboration. But we all have knowledge of the raga forms in common. I like these kinds of challenges – they almost invariably result in artistic growth. How does the California of today compare to the California you grew up in? Is it still where your heart lies? Since the days of my youth, California has changed dramatically compared to somewhere like New York. the population here has exploded and with it a great expansion of the music scene, especially in contemporary music. one of the biggest changes is that the State has lost its wealth and is mired in economic problems of a seemingly insurmountable nature. It’s still where I want to live, though.
give new meaning. of course not every piece is revolutionary, but hopefully some works chart out a new adventure. Where would you advise a young listener to start getting to know your music? I think my String Quartets would be a good place: I really like them all. G Song is relatively easy for a young quartet to play. Requiem for Adam, [written after the death of David harrington’s 16-year-old son], is the most difficult and the most moving quartet I have written. of course, the Kronos Quartet was a vital inspiration to me. the string quartet is a form that is never exhausted, and there are so many wonderful string players around today who can meet any challenge a composer throws at them.
You spent a lot of time on the road as a pianist in the late 60s and 70s – what do you Do you feel you have arrived as remember of your time in a composer, or are you still on London? Interview by Helen Wallace an exploration? How are you approaching this I started off in Paris, and then came I am still an explorer, but not just new project to work with Brooks to England. I made friends with Private Dining Room people • WatersideTerry Terrace • Brooks for the sake of experimentation. and Talvin Singh? for up to 24 Robert Wyatt and he introduced Riley, George I am always looking for new George nor I have met me to lots of pop musicians in & Talvin Singh Great British Food Neither – we have our own farm in Northumberland • Cocktail Classes ways to compose and perform. talvin so we have the exciting London and, of course, all the 3 November, Hall One. I don’t want to just paste on the prospect of not knowing what players in Soft Machine. I was 19th-century forms to a modern to expect when we actually sit living in their house, and we were Part of LIFEM, London International palette but look instead at finding down to play. there will be some jamming away. I witnessed a Festival of Exploratory Music. ways to deconstruct the musical/ necessary exploring to find out merger between the rock musicians Also appearing: Wim Mertens, dramatic forms and reassemble what our roles are and what and the new music people; it was Svjata Vatra, Gavin Bryars. them in ways to free them up to is the most meaningful thing a very fluid time. See Listings p66 for details.
Photo Betty Freeman/LeBrecht music & arts
Perhaps your best-known piece is In C (1964). It’s been performed in hundreds of ways – have you a favourite? Nothing can touch the performance at Carnegie hall in 2009 for the 45th anniversary of the piece. the event was organised by David harrington of the Kronos Quartet and he hand-picked all the musicians, many of whom were in the premiere, including Morton Subotnick and Stuart Dempster, plus a host of collaborators, like Bang on a Can, Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan, Philip Glass, osvaldo Golijov, Wu Man, So Percussion and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City. It was amazing – outstanding!
Conferences for up to 420 people • Dinners for up to 220 guests • Small meeting rooms available • Event management • Bespoke wedding planning • Birthdays and family parties • Intimate dinners • Barbeques and outdoor events 90 York Way London N1 9AG event bookings: 020 7014 2838 events@kingsplaceevents.co.uk www.kingsplace.co.uk
KINGS PLACE SEPTEMBER—DECEMBER 2010
music+art+restaurants
WHAT’S ON SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 2010
SCHUMANN BICENTENARY NATALIE CLEIN AND FRIENDS CELEBRATE A TROUBLED GENIUS Classical Stravinsky Remix Dufay Collective Claire Booth Terry Riley
Jazz Mike Figgis Django Bates John Taylor
NATALIE CLEIN | DJANGO BATES | DAVID BAILEY
Folk Peggy Seeger June Tabor Kevin Burke
Art David Bailey Albert Irvin
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