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The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
New Music Biennial review – sitars, thorax-quaking bass and vibrators
'Growling through the trombone is a new one for me,' admitted one musician between performances of Ailís Ní Ríain's work Holocene. Bradford Cathedral echoed with squawks, rattles and primordial grumbling as the combined forces of Onyx Brass and Hammonds Band conjured Ní Ríain's vivid soundscape of life on Earth 11,000 years ago (imagine prehistoric megafauna getting the Jaws treatment). But those lower brass growls weren't the score's most daring feature. That honour goes to the four percussionists who teased waves of soft rustling from cymbals with small battery-operated vibrators. All in a day's work at the New Music Biennial – now in its fifth iteration and hosted this year in Bradford, UK City of Culture 2025, before the same lineup of 20 short pieces decamps to London's Southbank Centre in July. Most weren't strictly world premieres (nor is the Biennial strictly biennial) but as a free showcase of activity across the UK music scene, there's nothing quite like it. Folk, jazz and electronic artists appear alongside classical ensembles – though such labels mean little when most of the featured music crosses such boundaries as standard. Composer and violinist Ellie Wilson's haunting Moth x Human, for instance, turned data about night-time moth activity into a beguiling synthesised fabric ('the moths are collaborating') with which her small acoustic ensemble duetted in The Loading Bay, an unused warehouse and building site converted into two intimate performance venues and an art gallery. Xenia Pestova Bennett's Glow was a shimmering, spooky set of movements for magnetic resonator piano and Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble, woven through with spine-tingling recorded narration about weird light phenomena in Danish, Welsh and Turkish. Sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun's Into the Night – bringing together five Indian classical musicians with the BBC Concert Orchestra – was his latest thrilling example of cross-cultural collaboration, the orchestra amplifying and harmonising the two raags on which the Indian classical musicians improvised, nods and smiles passing between them. Less persuasive (despite a fearless performance by the Carice Singers and conductor George Parris) was Daniel Kidane's fiendishly difficult N'dehou, a rambling, pointillistic tapestry of syllables inspired by a Cameroonian single-note bamboo flute. In a longstanding feature of the New Music Biennial, each work is played twice, sandwiching a short interview. 'What's the difference between the piece we just heard and commercial dance music?' asked the presenter between performances of Alex Groves' Dance Suite in a small subterranean nightclub. 'I don't think there is one,' grinned Groves. And it's true that the grimy, thorax-quaking bass, looped vocal melodies and rhythmic prestidigitation of Zubin Kanga's virtuosic performance – on laptop, keyboard and Midi-controlling Roli Seaboard – were obviously at home in the space in a way most of the audience were not. The huge, unnamed difference, however, was the invitation to listen closely and admire how Dance Suite functioned as a 'set of baroque dances for the 21st century' (hardly a conventional description of most electronic dance music): a reminder of the radical impact of how we talk about music – any music – on what we end up hearing. At the Southbank Centre 4-6 July.
Arab News
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab News
Review: The final season of ‘You' is a damp squib
DOHA: One of revered Mexican artist Diego Rivera's best-known paintings is now on display at the National Museum of Qatar. Titled 'Baile en Tehuantepec' ('Dance in Tehuantepec') and completed in 1920, it depicts a group of female Oaxacan dancers dressed in bright costumes poised to begin the Zandunga dance. The painting, like others by Riviera at the time, aimed to depict the social life of Mexico. With time, the work, exhibited a few years later at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, became one of the most expensive paintings in Latin American art. Lam, Wilfredo, Omi Obini, ALTA. (Supplied) Nearly a century after Riviera painted the work, it is on show in Doha in 'LATINOAMERICANO,' a comprehensive exhibition running until July 19. Showcasing over 170 artworks, including paintings, sculptures, installation, video, photographs, films and archival documentation by over 100 artists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Paraguay, Mexico, Venezuela and Uruguay, the exhibition offers an in-depth look at Latin American art from 1900 to the present in what marks the first-ever show of its kind in West Asia and North Africa for the genre. The exhibition, organized in partnership with Qatar Museums, is a pivotal aspect of the Qatar, Argentina and Chile 2025 Year of Culture. It presents modern and contemporary artworks from the collections of Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Eduardo F. Costantini and Qatar Museums institutions like Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and the Future Art Mill Museum, among others. Rivera, Diego, Baile en Tehuantepec, 1928, Colección Eduardo F. Costantini. (Supplied) Curated by Issa Al-Shirawi, a Qatari curator, researcher and head of international exhibitions at Qatar Museums, and Maria Amalia Garcia, curator in chief at Malba, the show ambitiously strives to capture the diverse art and culture of an entire continent. 'The exhibition promotes an exchange of knowledge through art, continuing Qatar Museums' emphasis on showing art histories from underrated and underappreciated art histories,' Al-Shirawi told Arab News, underlining how Latin American artists have consistently challenged narratives, readapted local traditions and influenced artistic movements across the world. There are several pieces Al-Shirawi notes that highlight the artistic exchange between the Middle East and Latin America. Candido Portinari. Festa de Sao Joao, 1936. (Supplied) One is by Uruguayan-born artist Gonzalo Fonseca who traveled to the Middle East during the 1950s where he visited archaeological sites that made a lasting impact on his sculptural work, highly conceptual with great references to architectural forms. Another is a vibrant painting by Lebanese-born artist Bibi Zogbe, who emigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina and became known throughout South America as 'la pintura de flores' ('the flower painter'). These works are displayed alongside those of both globally renowned artists from the continent, like Colombian artist Fernando Botero, Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam, Belkis Ayon, also from Cuba, known for her work on African influences in the Caribbean island, and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, among many others. Candido Portinari. Festa de Sao Joao, 1936. (Supplied) The exhibition's in-depth thematic sections provide a first taste for those new to Latin American art. 'At first, we thought we would organize the show chronologically, but then we realized that it was crucial to show the connections between traditional art and various modern and contemporary movements and what influenced these,' Al-Shirawi aid. 'How does the traditional translate back into the contemporary? And how does the contemporary go back to the traditional? A poignant multisensory installation that demonstrates this and that, in Al-Shirawi's opinion, serves as one of the 'anchor' works for the exhibition is by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuna. Titled 'Quipu desparecido' ('Disappeared Quipu,' 2018), it refers to the Andean civilization's quipus — knotted strings made of colored and spun or plied wood or llama hair — used to record information. The practice was crucial to societal organization across the ancient Incan Empire but was decimated by the Spanish colonization. Vicuna's artwork pays homage to these important threads to reactivate the memory of the quipus, which she refers to as a 'poem in space, a way to remember, involving the body and the cosmos at once.'
