Les Arts Florissants/Christie review – austere and exquisitely beautiful Charpentier for Holy Week
William Christie and Les Arts Florissants marked Holy Week at Wigmore Hall with a selection of Tenebrae Lessons and Responsories by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, written for liturgical use on the evenings before Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday. The Lessons take their texts from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, while the Responsories use brief extracts of passion narratives from the gospels. Together they form sombre meditations on man's fallen state and eventual redemption through Christ's atonement.
Charpentier's music can be extraordinary – austere, beautiful, teetering on sensuous. The forces are small: one or two singers, tenor or baritone, and a handful of instruments, violins, recorders, viola da gamba, theorbo and organ. The vocal writing oscillates between syllabic declamation and passages of greater lyricism, melismatic, at times even operatic. Instrumental lines seem to grieve alongside the singers or wrap themselves round the voices in consolation.
A Tenebrae service takes place in gathering darkness as candles are extinguished one by one, and minimal lighting was used for the concert, which gave the music in an unbroken sequence with little to distract from the devotional mood. Credited as directing from the organ, Christie might better be described as the effective anchor of what to all intents and purposes was a chamber ensemble of equals, playing with superb focus, great refinement and real depth of feeling.
The singers were tenor Ilja Aksionov and bass-baritone Padraic Rowan, both immaculate. Aksionov with his slightly reedy tone, admirable liquidity and subtle dynamic control, sounded quietly intense in the Seconde Leçon de Ténèbres du Mercredi Saint, while Rowan proved vividly dramatic in the Troisième Leçon de Ténèbres du Mercredi Saint and attained remarkable depths of fervour in the Responsory Tenebrae Factae Sunt. Their voices blended wonderfully, meanwhile, in the Troisième Leçonde Ténèbres du Vendredi Saint and in the closing Responsorium Tristis Est Anima Mea, among the most beautiful things Charpentier ever wrote, with its chromatic harmonies and exquisitely entwining vocal lines. Breathtaking stuff, every single second of it.
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Metro
30-05-2025
- Metro
11 years on, I'm still mourning comedy legend Rik Mayall
It's been almost exactly 11 years since the death of inimitable comedy genius Rik Mayall. 11 long years (if you read that in Richie's voice, you're my people). I'm not over it. In fact, over a decade on, I miss Rik's irreverent humour more than ever – but I'm so honoured to be a part of the inaugural Rik Mayall Comedy Festival this weekend. In interviews after his recovery from a near-fatal quad bike accident in April 1998, Rik Mayall revealed that his family had dubbed that day 'Crap Thursday'. The crash happened the day before Good Friday, and Rik had remained in a coma until Easter Monday. He often joked that he 'beat Jesus' by being dead five days before coming back to life. Well, June 9, 2014 was definitely 'S**t Monday'. S**tter than the s**ttiest of s**t-smeared s**tty s**t Mondays. I was travelling home from a hen-do and had no idea how bad my hangover was about to get. Upon reading that Rik Mayall had died of a sudden heart attack, I burst into tears and felt sorrow in a way I hadn't thought possible from a celebrity death. Such is my love of 'The Rik', texts started to ping in from friends reassuring that they were thinking about me. Of course, my thoughts were with Rik's friends and family; his wife Barbara and three children Rosie, Sid, and Bonnie. In the years since Rik died, I've lost my own beloved mum and dad – and, while I must not diminish the insurmountable devastation felt when your nearest and dearest are snatched from this earth, the pain of Rik's untimely death at age 56 deeply affected me. British comedy had lost an irreplaceable master of the craft. I've been a fan of Rik Mayall's work for as long as I can remember. Aged seven, Grim Tales was a series of adapted Brothers Grimm stories that Rik brought to life with such hysterical flair, my young mind was indelibly transformed. Soon, Drop Dead Fred became my favourite film with repeated viewings too numerous to count – it remains my go to comfort watch. Then Bottom exploded onto TV screens in 1991. Yes, aged eight, I was too young to be watching the show but you couldn't have stopped me and my older brother from tuning in to the live-action cartoon depicting Richie and Eddie's hilariously depraved existence. It was like nothing we had ever seen before, or since. Bottom formed my funny bone into the best possible shape with its stupendous slapstick, witty wordplay and naughty nob gags – it's comedy dynamite. To say I love it is an understatement. In the years since Rik died, I've been inspired to work in comedy and study Bottom quite a lot ('while I'm alone in the house'). I've waxed lyrical about why it's the best British sitcom, I co-host a podcast Talking Bottom and have even co-authored a Bottom book, due to be published by Unbound on July 3. 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Following their anarchic live performances at The Comic Strip club, Rik co-created and starred in The Young Ones and changed the face of British comedy in its wake. Rik went on to steal the show in sitcoms including Filthy Rich & Catflap, The New Statesman, Blackadder, Believe Nothing and Man Down. In sharp contrast to the public persona Rik cultivated – an effervescently confident ego-maniac – at his core, he struck me as someone humble. Grateful to be sharing laughter. As far as I'm concerned, it's the most wonderful gift you can bestow on your fellow humans, and Rik dished it out in custardy pants-filled bucketloads. It's often said that you shouldn't meet your heroes but I had the honour of meeting Rik on several occasions (one of the many 'ordinaries' he nicknamed fans with mocking affection), and he never disappointed. Rik was generous with his time. 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The Independent
07-05-2025
- The Independent
William Christie is busy as ever at 80 and putting his imprint on the period-instrument movement
William Christie, a conductor renowned for Baroque performances, thought back to a 2014 phone call from Nikolaus Lehnhoff, a year before the German director's death. "'I think a 'Tristan' with Christie would be really a great thing,'' Christie recalled Lehnhoff referencing Wagner's opera. 'I said: `That's a bad joke.′ I said: `I'd be coming into an arena as a puny little boxer who doesn't know sort of how to sort of box, someone who has no idea what all this is about. I'd be sliced to ribbons.′' In a season celebrating his 80th birthday this past Dec. 14, Christie has no Wagner plans. He is as busy as ever as a leader of the period-instrument movement, conducting, playing the harpsichord, administering his Les Arts Florissants ensemble and teaching at The Juilliard School. 'He's always brought his flair and say-so,' director Peter Sellars said. 'He was the chef de cuisine at a certain moment in history. You look at the personnel on all of his early recordings, and anybody who's done anything came through the apprentissage in his kitchen.' Christie's 2024-25 season included a striking Robert Carsen staging of Rameau's 'Les Fêtes d'Hébé (The Festivities of Hebe)' at Paris' Opéra-Comique. It moved the action from 1739 to the contemporary Élysée Palace and featured the French national soccer team celebrating during a ballet, followed by a closing scene on a Seine tourist boat passing a sparkling Eiffel Tower. 'I like mixing epochs visually and musically,' Christie said. 'I can remain I think true and faithful to the things that I think make my music eloquent: old instruments and being faithful I think to performance practice.' Teaching the next generation Christie has become an elder statesman of the movement highlighting 17th and 18th century performance practice. Since 2007, he's offered to Juilliard students his knowledge of Baroque articulation, subdued vibrato and lower pitch. 'They eat through maybe eight to 15 different conductors a year and some of them I admire, and some of them I think are on the merry-go-round just because it's fashionable and I wouldn't have hired them,' he said. 'Some of them have, well, sort of very perverse ideas about French music, for example. And so I try to say to them, first of all, I'm here because for certain repertory I have at least better ideas than you individually, and I think I can sell them to you.' He founded Les Arts Florissants in 1979 to impart knowledge he felt was getting ignored. He used his own orchestra when he led Charpentier's 'Médée' at the Palais Garnier last spring. 'I worked with orchestras that have made me feel so awful and so low and so mean and miserable,' he said. 'Baroque orchestras are not (Sergei) Prokofiev or (Dmitri) Shostakovich orchestras. They're not Ravel orchestras. They're not Korngold orchestras. But then modern orchestras playing Mozart sometimes are hideous.' He adds that one 'dug holes 6 feet under and buried Mozart.' Emmanuel Resche-Caserta, Les Arts Florissants' concertmaster since 2017, was uncertain whether to stay with music, pursue political science or switch to art history before he encountered Christie at Juilliard. 'If I can do music with this intensity that he is asking for, I can dedicate my life to it,' he said. 'I was very impressed by his natural charisma. He enters the concert hall or the rehearsal room. and we play differently because we want to please him.' Christie founded Le Jardin des Voix (Garden of Voices) in 2002. Lea Desandre joined the academy in 2015 and has blossomed into a star mezzo-soprano. 'He is a wonderful teacher because he knows so much, he reads so much,' she said. 'I feel like I have someone who's going to put me in a very comfortable place, even if maybe was not a comfortable role for me.' First encounter as child Christie grew up in Williamsville, near Buffalo, New York, and then South Wales. His mom, Ida, arranged piano lessons when he was 5 and conducted the choir at St. Paul's Lutheran Church. 'And so when I was 7 or 8 years old, I heard Bach and I heard Handel and I heard Purcell and I heard Orlando Gibbons, and we sang 19th century hymns,' he said. 'It was a curious kind of childhood because I was playing sports, and summer vacations were down at the lake. But I already had this extraordinary idea of a different world.' Christie first heard the harpsichord when he was 9 or 10 and his mom and her mother, Julia, took him to Handel's 'Messiah' at the Buffalo Philharmonic's Kleinhans Music Hall with conductor Josef Krips and Squire Haskin at the keyboard. 'He (Haskin) was part of this funny groupings of cultural people in cultural boondocks like rural New York, upstate New York,' Christie said. 'That was a great moment for me to hear this instrument that was going to be the center of my life.' Christie took piano lessons from age 12 with Laura Kelsey. His mom worked at the music store Denton, Cottier & Daniels, and in 1952, he became fascinated by an Erato recording with French harpsichordist Laurence Boulay and soprano Nadine Sautereau of music by François Couperin. 'It sort of changed my life,' he said. Moving to Europe Christie received a Harvard undergraduate degree in 1966 and a Yale master's in 1969, then taught at Dartmouth. He moved to Europe in the fall of 1970 to avoid the U.S. military draft, and in 1985 bought a house in the Loire village of Thiré -- where he has created a grand garden and launched a vocal academy. He gained French citizenship in 1995. Christie does like music he isn't known for. He calls 'my secret life' playing Liszt's 'Transcendental Études' or Schubert. But those are not for public listening. 'I think myself what I would do differently,' he reflected, 'but I'm not courageous enough to say, all right, in the 2028 season William Christie is going to recycle and is going to start with Haydn and finish off with, I don't know, how about Dvorak? How about Bruckner motets?'
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- The Guardian
How Kneecap became most controversial band in the UK
Kneecap are no strangers to controversy. They rap about drugs – and are named for the notorious punishment meted out by the IRA at the height of the Troubles to drug dealers, while one of the trio wears a tricolour balaclava. But for their fans – especially those 'ceasefire babies' who, like them, grew up in the aftermath of the Good Friday agreement – they are a breath of fresh air. They play with Republican imagery – often mocking it – but are staunch in their nationalism, explains the Guardian's Ireland correspondent, Rory Carroll. A semi-fictionalised film about their origins won a Bafta. And they have won more praise and fans for their unusual and political choice to rap in Irish. The Irish writer and editor Roisin Lanigan tells Michael Safi what that means. 'Irish has always been so denigrated,' she says, that hearing it used in hip-hop 'does feel important and just cool – I didn't realise that Irish could sound like that'. But this year Kneecap have found themselves in a storm more intense than any they have weathered before. Last month the trio played Coachella and led the US crowd in chants of 'Free Palestine', making clear their view that Israel is committing genocide. Afterwards older clips from concerts emerged of band members appearing to shout out support of Hamas and Hezbollah, and call for the deaths of Conservative MPs. Counter-terrorism police have confirmed they are now investigating the band. Now politicians have condemned the band and even called for them to be dropped from festivals. In response, musicians from Pulp to Massive Attack have written a furious response saying politicians should not be interfering in musical expression. Meanwhile the hip-hop stars and their manager have said the attacks are confected by those who want to demonise them, and that this is a deliberate distraction from the plight of people in Gaza.
