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      Beyoncé: Cowboy Carter review – from hoedown to full-blown genre throwdown

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 20:08

    (Parkwood/Columbia)
    Straying far beyond its original country concept, the musician’s eighth album straddles the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the blues – and Becky with the Good Hair via Dolly Parton’s Jolene

    American Requiem, the opening track of Beyoncé’s eighth studio album, is many things. It offers a touch of state-of-the-nation address – “Can we stand for something? Now is the time to face the wind” – and a sprinkling of the kind of vague but apparently personal lyrics that send social media into a frenzy of decoding: what are her “father’s sins” that Beyoncé has apparently “cleansed” herself of? Who are the “fairweather friends” for whom she claims to be planning “a funeral”?

    It’s also a loud statement of what you might call Beyoncé’s bona fides. She is, she avers, “the grandbaby of a moonshine man [from] Gadsden, Alabama” who furthermore has roots in Louisiana. “They used to say I spoke too country,” she protests, adding: “What could be more country than that?”

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      Queer artists call on Olly Alexander to boycott Eurovision over Israel participation

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 18:32

    Maxine Peake and Sarah Schulman among signatories of open letter asking singer to withdraw from contest

    More than 450 queer artists, individuals and organisations have called on the UK’s Eurovision contestant, Olly Alexander, to boycott this year’s competition in solidarity with Palestine.

    The actor, Maxine Peake, and Sarah Schulman, the novelist and playwright, are among the signatories of the open letter calling on the singer to withdraw from the contest in May due to the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

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      Timo Andres: The Blind Banister album review – original, arresting and eclectic

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 16:22

    Andres/Segev/Metropolis Ensemble/Cyr
    (Nonesuch)
    These three works showcase the US composer’s distinctive and accomplished musical language

    Like a number of US composers of the thirtysomething generation, Timo Andres takes the minimalism of John Adams and Philip Glass as the starting point for his eclectic musical language. But as shown by the solo piano Colorful History, which Andres himself plays as the centrepiece to this collection, his music explores a much broader musical landscape.

    The solo piece, a chaconne of increasing complexity, is framed by two concertos: The Blind Banister for piano from 2017 (composed for Jonathan Biss, but with Andres as the soloist here) and Upstate Obscura for cello. The piano concerto (Andres’s third for the instrument) was commissioned as part of a series inspired by Beethoven’s five examples: for Andres, the pairing was with the second piano concerto, but there’s no hint of Beethovenian pastiche or allusion in his music. Instead the work begins almost like one of Glass’s piano studies, though when the orchestra enters it quickly veers off into territory that is very much Andres’s own.

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      Fauré: Complete Piano Music album review – fresh and revealing insights into a quiet radical

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 14:50 · 1 minute

    Lucas Debargue
    (Sony Classical, four CDs)

    Marking the centenary of the composer’s death, Debargue’s comprehensive survey of his piano music contains discoveries even for confirmed Fauré fans

    With the exception of just a handful of pieces, as well as the famous Dolly Suite for two pianos, Gabriel Fauré’s quietly expressive yet sometimes startlingly radical piano music remains unexplored territory for many. But significant musical anniversaries provide opportunities to extend and deepen appreciation of all but the most familiar composers, and even confirmed Fauré fans are likely to make some discoveries in this comprehensive survey of his piano music from Lucas Debargue, released to mark the centenary of the composer’s death.

    Debargue presents the works in opus-number order on the four discs, beginning with the three Romances Without Words Op 17, composed in 1863 when Fauré was 18, and ending with the 13th Nocturne Op 119 from 1921, three years before his death. This makes it easy to trace the development of Fauré’s increasingly personal style, whose starting point was obviously the music of Chopin and Schumann. Several musical forms associated with Chopin especially were thoroughly explored by Fauré: he composed ballades, impromptus and a set of preludes, but it was his series of nocturnes and barcarolles, 13 of each, that formed the spine of his piano output.

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      Sex, Mozart and chanting monks … the 20 best Euro-pop UK hits – ranked!

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 14:23


    As Nena’s 99 Red Balloons turns 40, we look back at the best continental foreign-language songs that achieved cross-Channel success

    Shuffling French Euro-disco with vocals in Spanish and a melody line worthy of a John Barry spy thriller theme, El Bimbo might be the apotheosis of the 70s “holiday hit”, brought back from the continent as a souvenir like the musical equivalent of a straw donkey. Still, far better than 1974’s other big holiday hit, Y Viva España.

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      Wigmore Hall launches £10m fund in bid to be self-sustaining

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 14:11

    The London classical music venue announces plan against a background of arts funding cuts and in ‘an uncertain public environment for classical music’

    London classical music venue Wigmore Hall has announced a £10m fund with the aim to be self-sustaining without need for public funds. It is believed to be the first major concert hall to take such a step in what a statement described as “an uncertain public environment for classical music in the UK”.

    The venue has an annual grant of £344,206 from Arts Council England (ACE) but John Gilhooly, Wigmore Hall’s artistic and executive director, says that it is “already 97% self-funded”. He added that £7m had already been pledged for the new fund, called the Director’s Fund, and that the venue hoped to raise £10m by 2027, and £20m within a decade.

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      How can we save British nightlife from collapse? Look to Germany – and its football | Gilles Peterson

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 13:22 · 1 minute

    Small venues are the heart of our musical culture. Here’s my two-pronged plan to keep that heart beating

    Grassroots venues are the foundation upon which the mighty British music industry has been built, fuelling the phenomenal level of talent this small island has produced. Yet while successive governments have shouted about how they are a shining demonstration of the country’s creativity, the very same people have cut funding and opened the cultural sector to the most brutal market logic. Alongside government neglect, small venues across the country also face rising trade costs, pressure on disposable incomes, greedy property developers, post-pandemic changes in attitudes to communal experiences and the continuing shift towards an increasingly screen-based lifestyle.

    I cut my teeth DJing and dancing in small venues up and down the country, from my earliest experiences at Christie’s, in Sutton – when I’d head home after Carl Cox finished up as I had to be at school the next day – to a 10-year weekly Monday residency at Bar Rumba in Soho and many formative nights at the Hare & Hounds in Birmingham. There are countless more – far too many to list them all. If it weren’t for these backrooms, I would not be where I am today as a DJ. Nor would I have encountered (and still do!) those voices that push the culture forward and bring energy and positive momentum to our world.

    Gilles Peterson is a DJ, broadcaster and founder of Brownswood Recordings

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      Nico: The Marble Index/Desertshore review – an unforgettable trip to a very dark place

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 12:00 · 1 minute

    (Domino)
    These two reissued solo albums from the German singer have a fearsome reputation – but they offer an experience like no other

    To say Nico is an artist more talked about than listened to is putting it mildly. In recent years, her life has been the subject of two plays, two autobiographies, a biopic and at least four songs, Low’s Those Girls (Song for Nico) and Beach House’s Last Ride among them. But Spotify’s list of her 10 most popular tracks contains two of her three contributions to the first Velvet Underground album – These Days and The Fairest of the Seasons – the two Jackson Browne covers from her debut solo album that were featured in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, and … five Velvet Underground songs that don’t actually feature Nico: she does appear on the No 1, Sunday Morning, but only as a spectral presence, her few backing vocals buried deep in the mix. It’s hard to think of another artist so tangentially attached to their most-streamed song – Milli Vanilli, perhaps.

    Perhaps this is rooted in the fact that Nico’s slender solo oeuvre is preceded by its reputation, or rather reputations plural. In the popular imagination, her solo work falls into three categories: unrepresentative (jaunty debut single I’m Not Sayin’ and Chelsea Girls, which the singer hated so much, she burst into tears the first time she played it); cobbled together to fund her heroin habit (1981’s Drama of Exile, 1985’s Camera Obscura); and famously unlistenable, including the two albums reissued here. Indeed, the fearsome reputation of 1968’s The Marble Index was burgeoning before it was even completed. Supposedly it lasts only half an hour because that’s as much as its putative producer, Frazer Mohawk, could stand to listen to before being overwhelmed by despair.

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      Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus review – a stark, emotional finale from master musician

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 07:00 · 1 minute

    In his last weeks of life, the Oscar-winning composer is filmed at the piano by his son. It is an almost wordless paean to a remarkable career

    Short of presenting nothing more than music and a blank screen, this documentary about the late Japanese composer-performer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s last appearances is as stark and minimal as a concert film can get. And yet it’s a work suffused with emotional tones and shades, surprisingly not all of them sad even though the subject knew at the time of filming he had mere weeks left before he’d die of cancer.

    There are moments when director Neo Sora, Sakamoto’s son, turns up the lighting for the more upbeat songs and we can see the master smile, pleased with his own performance, or the composition, or … we know not what, as there is almost no dialogue, no nattering about the life. We had all that in an earlier documentary, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda . In Opus it is the music, played by the man himself, that is completely sufficient to the moment and all that remains, with the occasional very human stumbles and missed notes. When he says he needs a break for a while, exhausted by a performance, the strain is painfully visible, audible, practically palpable.

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