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      The Seven Deadly Sins review – LPO play Brecht and Weill with bite and swing

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 15 March - 12:11 · 1 minute

    Battersea Arts Centre, London
    Danielle de Niese took on twinned roles of dancer and singer Anna with great style, the evening introduced by João Barradas’s fiery accordion

    The cathedral-like space of Battersea Arts Centre’s Grand Hall, with its high ceilings and distressed walls, is an atmospheric place for the London Philharmonic to decamp to for this performance of The Seven Deadly Sins, the 1933 “sung ballet” that was Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht’s last collaboration. That said, prosaically enough it would probably have worked better back home in the Royal Festival Hall. All those unbroken hard surfaces at the BAC make for a cathedral-like acoustic: pitted against a full orchestra, playing with bite and swing for the conductor Edward Gardner, all five singers had to be miked, and the sound system was blunt. Singing the English version by WH Auden and Chester Kallmann, they worked hard but far too much text and nuance got lost.

    At least in Danielle de Niese there was a lead who could carry the show regardless. The role of Anna, who travels round the US losing her Louisiana innocence in order to make money for her family back home, was written to be played by two people, a singer and a dancer: de Niese embodied both. Directed by Dominic Dromgoole, and moving between the front of the stage and platforms to the side and back, de Niese seemed also to play the men who commodify Anna – at least with her hands, which she managed to make seem as if they belonged to someone else. The Greed episode saw her working her way cynically round the men of the orchestra, pocketing tips. Her Greek-chorus family included Adam Gilbert’s clear tenor Father and the resonant bass Callum Thorpe as the drag Mother.

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      Dance Reimagined review – LPO and Wayne McGregor are a dream team, but AI lets them down

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 7 March - 16:08

    Royal Festival Hall, London
    Tonight’s Tania León premiere and reconceptualised Szymanowski ballet made a heady combination, with no need for technical trickery

    Keen to think outside the box, the London Philharmonic Orchestra is presenting a month-long festival exploring the ways humans experience and express themselves though music. On paper, Dance Reimagined was a bright idea: three works with movement at their heart, including a world premiere from LPO composer-in-residence Tania León and Wayne McGregor’s reinvention of a Szymanowski ballet in collaboration with sculptural designer, film-maker and AI developer Ben Cullen Williams.

    Raíces, Spanish for “origins”, is an exploration of León’s heritage which, she explains, is Spanish, Cuban, Chinese and French: “Like a jambalaya.” Opening with wheezy ethereal strings, the music moved in and out of vistas, some urban, one a steamy forest bristling with birdsong. Although there were clear echoes of Latin and jazz, the music was shifty, its syncopations frequently catching the ear off balance. Occasionally pretty but never saccharine, it hinted at mysterious, sun-dappled vistas, holding the attention throughout. Edward Gardner’s definitive beat led a scrupulously prepared performance.

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      Philharmonia/LPO review – brilliant new piano concertos by Dessner and Coll

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 18 February - 13:49 · 1 minute

    Royal Festival Hall, London
    Bryce Dessner’s ebullient concerto, equal parts rock and Reich, was dazzlingly performed by Alice Sara Ott and the Philharmonia, while Francisco Coll’s glinting, flamenco-tinged piece had its world premiere with the LPO and Javier Perianes

    Nowadays orchestras rely much less than they once did on the tried and trusted concert formula of overture-concerto-symphony. But the Philharmonia’s programme with conductor Elim Chan more or less reverted to that archetype. More or less, because the “symphony” in this case was a symphonic suite, Rimsky-Korsakov’s gorgeously coloured Scheherazade, and the piano concerto was not one of the regular romantic showpieces but a new work by Bryce Dessner , co-commissioned by the orchestra, and receiving its British premiere.

    Dessner composed his 20-minute work last year for Alice Sara Ott , who was the soloist here. It is dedicated to his sister, the dancer and choreographer Jessica Reese Dessner, who currently has cancer and whom Dessner describes as his “greatest inspiration since I was very young”. The concerto is a mixture of the exuberantly extrovert and the gently personal. All three of its movements – How to Dance, How to Breathe, How to Feel – have oases of delicate intimacy, but it’s the sheer brilliance and ebullience of the music, with insistent rhythms that seem to owe as much to rock as they do to Steve Reich, that come across most powerfully. Ott was a superb soloist, dazzling in the music’s more extreme virtuoso writing, exquisitely delicate in its moments of tender quietness.

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