Latest news with #DeutscheGrammophon
Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Max Richter Announces New Album Sleep Circle and All-Night London Shows
All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by Pitchfork editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Condé Nast may earn an affiliate commission. Max Richter, photo by Rory van Millingen Max Richter is celebrating the 10th anniversary of his landmark album Sleep with a sequel of sorts, Sleep Circle, and two London shows. The record returns to the hypnagogia of its eight-hour predecessor, presenting music composed to enhance the drifting consciousness of drowsy and dozing listeners. This one lasts 90 minutes, the length of a typical REM cycle. A song from the suite, 'Dream 11 / Moth-Like Stars (Pt. 2),' is out now; check it out below. Sleep Circle is out September 5 via Deutsche Grammophon. Richter's London shows take place at Alexandra Palace on September 5 and 6, reviving the all-night format that he debuted around the original album's 2015 release. These are his largest Sleep shows to date. Read the 5-10-15-20 feature 'Max Richter on the Music That Made Him.' $55.00, Amazon Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
ABC News
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Pokey LaFarge takes us to Rhumba Country, and the radical spirituality of Sofia Gubaidulina
Credited with 'making riverboat chic cool again', Pokey LaFarge brings his band in live to the Music Show studio. Pokey talks to Andy about how old Black gospel, his Christian faith and working on a farm have all influenced him on his latest album, Rhumba Country. Oľga Smetanová joins Andy to remember the composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who has died at the age of 93. Gubaidulina's music has been described as 'holy modernism', which was a powerful provocation in the Soviet Union of her early career. The theological and musicological throughlines of her composition paint a dramatic picture, which Ol'ga reflects on with her knowledge of the woman herself. Pokey LaFarge is on tour around Australia in May: 8 - The Croxton, Melbourne, VIC 9 - Barwon Heads Hotel, Barwon Heads, VIC 10 - Meeniyan Town Hall, Meeniyan, VIC 13 - Princess Theatre, Brisbane, QLD 14 - A & I Hall, Bangalow, NSW 15 - Liberty Hall, Sydney, NSW 16 - The Gov, Adelaide, SA 17 - Freo Social, Perth, WA Music played live in The Music Show studio by Pokey LaFarge: Fine to Me (from In the Blossom of Their Shade) So Long Chicago (From Rhumba Country) In the interview with Ol'ga Smetanova: Title: Offertorium Artist: Gidon Kremer (violin), Boston Symphony Orchestra/Charles Dutoit Composer: Sofia Gubaidulina Album: Offertorium Label: Deutsche Grammophon Title: Seven Words; iv. 'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?' Artist: Maria Kliegel (cello), Elsbeth Moser (bayan), Camerata Transsylvanica Composer: Sofia Gubaidulina Album: Seven words/Silencio/In Croce Label: Naxos Title: Am Rande des Abgrunds (At the Edge of the Abyss) Artist: Julius Berger, Sofia Gubaidulina, Viktor Suslin, Niklas Eppinger, Aleksandra Ohar, Diego Garcia, Yoonha Choi, Yoon-Jung Hwang, Tai-Yang Zhang Composer: Sofia Gubaidulina Album: Am Rande des Abgrunds Label: Wergo Title: The Canticle of the Sun; iv. Glorification of Death Artist: Nicolas Altstaedt (cello), Andrei Pushkarev (percussion), Rihards Zaļupe (percussion), Rostislav Krimer (celesta), Chamber Choir Kamēr/Māris Sirmais Composer: Sofia Gubaidulina Album: The Canticle of the Sun Label: ECM At the end of the show: Title: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major Artist: Cédric Tiberghien (piano), Les Siècles/François-Xavier Roth Composer: Maurice Ravel Album: Concertos Pour Piano Label: Harmonia Mundi The Music Show was made on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung, Gadigal and Gundungurra Country Technical production by Tim Jenkins and Brendan O'Neill
Korea Herald
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Interview: Pianist Bruce Liu: Multicultural voice interprets Russian Romantics
The Chopin Competition winner returns to Seoul with a new recital program of Tchaikovsky, Scriabin and Prokofiev When pianist Bruce Liu last performed in Seoul in 2023, his recital was filled with electrifying technique and seven encores. Liu returns to Seoul in May as part of the 2025 Great Pianists Series, bringing with him an entirely new program centered on Russian Romanticism, featuring works by Tchaikovsky, Scriabin and Prokofiev. "With Tchaikovsky, I think there's this emotional vulnerability. His pain-dedicated personal moments, even larger-than-large gestures,' Liu, who catapulted to international stardom after winning the 18th International Chopin Piano Competition, said in an e-mail interview. 'Prokofiev, I'm excited to highlight with his rhythmical energy. It's a very modern edge. He brings a fresh, sometimes cheeky contrast that keeps the program very dynamic. Overall, I think I helped to create an arch. It feels like a journey through the emotional seasons of the Russian soul.' The program opens with 'The Seasons,' Tchaikovsky's 12-piece cycle capturing the atmosphere of each month. The work is the centerpiece of Liu's second Deutsche Grammophon album, released in November last year. 'Every piece in 'The Seasons' has its own charm and challenge,' he said. 'I love how Tchaikovsky managed to evoke the mood of each month so vividly. There's always something new to discover in every performance.' Liu made the rare decision to split the work into two parts -- January to June before the intermission, and July to December after. 'Dividing it into two parts was something I felt would help the audience to better connect with the emotional journey of the piece. 'The Seasons' is so much more than just a cycle of 12 pieces. It's a reflection of the passage of time with each month offering a very unique mood and texture. And by splitting it into two halves, I want to allow each step of the month to breathe and give the audience a chance to fully immerse themselves in the contrasting seasons and the images that Tchaikovsky evokes,' he added. From there, the program moves into Scriabin's Piano Sonata No. 4, and concludes with Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 7, often called the 'War Sonata.' Liu, who was born in Paris to Chinese parents and raised in Montreal, attributes much of his interpretive breadth to his multicultural upbringing. 'Growing up between cultures -- Chinese at home, French and North American outside -- taught me that there's never just one way to understand or express something,' he said. 'I'm drawn to the elegance and clarity of French music, the storytelling of Russian music. Being multicultural makes me more open and curious. I try to respect the traditions behind each piece but also find my own authentic voice. That's very important to me.' Though his victory at the Chopin Competition launched him into the global spotlight, Liu sees that moment not as a destination but a beginning. 'Winning the competition was truly life-changing,' he said. 'Everything happened so quickly — concerts, invitations, recordings. But internally, it gave me a new sense of confidence and responsibility. It's not just a prize — it's a legacy. It made me think more seriously about the kind of artist I want to be.' He continues to seek growth beyond the competition. 'I don't want to be defined only by that event. I want to keep evolving, exploring wider repertoire, collaborating with different musicians. I think art should be driven by honesty and curiosity, not just ambition. There's still so much for me to learn and discover.' As his international career has expanded, so too has his understanding of audiences -- among them, he noted that he feels 'a particularly deep emotional connection' with those in Korea. 'Korean audiences have a strong tradition of music appreciation. When they respond, it's not just polite applause -- it's genuine. I can feel they're with me through every moment. It's incredibly inspiring and intimate at the same time.' Liu is scheduled to perform at the Seoul Arts Center on May 11. Tickets are priced from 50,000 won ($35) to 110,000 won. gypark@
New York Times
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Cartoonist Who Tapped His Own Psyche and Found America's Unruly Id
R. Crumb, the underground cartoonist, bumped into things when he was young. Before his eyes were tested in first grade, and he was fitted for Coke-bottle glasses, he could perceive neither depth nor distance. His parents thought he was clumsy. With no sense of spatial dynamics, he had to think his way into the world rather than enter it the way most of us do, by simple intuition. When he began to draw, it was as if he was already dipping into a deeply personal and self-replenishing reservoir. He was unusual — a weirdo, to borrow the name of one of his comic book series — right from the start. It's been nearly 60 years since Crumb helped define the visual iconography of late-1960s psychedelia, with surreal imagery that's as instantly recognizable as a Deutsche Grammophon record label and that seemed to come from the past and the future at the same time. His Zap Comix, not for kids, read like a stoner version of the Sunday funnies and gave us the loping and big-footed dudes in his 'Keep On Truckin'' panels and the bald, bearded and semi-baffled mystic Mr. Natural, who in one strip was kicked out of heaven for telling God it was 'a little corny.' There was his version of Felix the Cat, later adapted into the first X-rated animated film, and the cover he drew for 'Cheap Thrills,' the hit second album from Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Janis Joplin — the one with 'Piece of My Heart' on it. It's been more than 30 years since Terry Zwigoff's eye-popping documentary 'Crumb' (1994) reintroduced him to the world and fleshed out his sexual fetishes (notably his inclination to ride piggyback on big women's backs, occasionally uninvited), his demons and his obsession with old-timey 78 r.p.m. records. The movie humanized him — it made him seem like an earnest citizen out on a peculiar limb. The documentary also, as if interpreting the freak-show nature of many of his cartoons, the coarse Russian fairy tale vibe of them, set him alongside his troubled and profoundly eccentric family, which included his often institutionalized mother and a sibling who reclined on beds of nails and regularly passed a 29-foot strip of cotton through his digestive system, in the mouth and out the anus. Is the world ready, as if in every-30-years installments, for another rocky wagon ride into Crumblandia? I was, if only because Dan Nadel's new book, 'Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life,' is a definitive and ideal biography — pound for pound, one of the sleekest and most judicious I've ever read. He's latched onto a fascinating and complicated figure, which helps. But there's more going on here. Nadel, a museum curator who has written two previous books about artists and cartoonists, is an instinctive storyteller, one with a command of the facts and a relaxed tone that also happens to be grainy, penetrating, interested in everything, alive. He knows exactly when and how long to pause and tweezer in background information, a skill that flummoxes so many biographers. This machine kills boredom. 'Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life' is an official biography, written with Crumb's permission. He fact-checked the final manuscript, though he had no control over the final text. He imposed one condition, Nadel writes: 'that I be honest about his faults, look closely at his compulsions and examine the racially and sexually charged aspects of his work. He would rather risk honesty and see if anyone could understand than cooperate with a hagiography.' Robert Crumb's childhood was nomadic. He was born in 1943 in Philadelphia, but his father was in the Marines and the family (Crumb had four siblings) followed him from base to base. Crumb and his older brother, Charles, took to cartooning early, on the bedroom floor, their materials stuffed into coffee cans and cigar boxes. They deplored superhero comics, which were filled with intimidators solving problems with their fists. They were into oddball strips, like Walt Kelly's 'Pogo' and the early work out of Disney. When he was in high school in the 1950s, where he was painfully self-conscious, an absolute outsider, Crumb began to tune into discontented voices such as those of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. Mad magazine was another revelation. He and Charles began sending their homemade comic books out into the world. He skipped college but lit out for Cleveland, where he got a job drawing for a major greeting card company. He married his first wife, Dana Morgan, when he was 21 and she was 18. They took LSD together and it permanently shifted the contents of his mind, in a manner he liked — it gave him a direct passage to his subconscious. He began to draw for alternative newspapers. He and Dana drifted out to San Francisco, where he embraced the counterculture, and it embraced him. 'Keep On Truckin'' appeared in Zap Comix No. 1, which hit the streets in 1968. The image was a widely bootlegged phenomenon, to the extent that Crumb would see it on the mudflaps of passing trucks. He was a sort of knowingly inverted dandy, to borrow Walker Evans's description of James Agee. He wore corduroy trousers, baggy pants, thick spectacles and fedoras. Joplin advised him to stop dressing like a dude out of 'The Grapes of Wrath.' He was 'beak nosed,' Nadel writes, 'Adam's apple ready to bob in distress.' He was not quite made for this world. Crumb's underground comics were transgressive comics — they were dirty. Zap No. 4, which came out in 1969, contained a strip called 'Joe Blow' about a family that cheerfully and explicitly commits nearly every variety of incest imaginable and sent a signal, Nadel writes, 'that the American nuclear family was not well.' Zap No. 4 was the first comic to be declared obscene. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested in his City Lights bookstore for selling it. Crumb's sudden fame drove him and his wife out of San Francisco. They settled up north in California's rural Potter Valley, where they slowly developed a commune of sorts. They had an open marriage, of which Crumb took more advantage than Dana did. Both had affairs, but Crumb had more of them, with some later ones lasting decades. He had a physical type: big haunches, bold posterior. His sexual obsessions don't swamp this biography, but they linger near the surface. Crumb carried a lot of baggage. He let his warty, untutored id loose in his work. He had a sense of himself as, Nadel writes, 'a grotesque ectomorph.' He sometimes drew comics about domination, about rape, about women without heads who seemed to be little more than pieces of meat. 'He was stuck between shame and desire; the spiritual and material; worship and hatred,' Nadel writes about some of these cartoons. 'They are also curiously devotional, drawn with great care and attention, as though Robert was mesmerized by his own fantasy.' Nadel presents the voices of women who were appalled; he cites just as many who ardently defended him, who felt that women have masochistic fantasies too, and that no one should be in the business of regulating fantasies. Crumb certainly did not run a P.R. campaign on behalf of his own psyche. He tinkered in his work with ugly racial stereotypes. These drawings deeply troubled many of his liberal cartoonist friends. His work was purging satire, he insisted, and others, including the poet Ishmael Reed, agreed with him. He became his own best character in his work; he was both ventriloquist and dummy. The second half of this biography shows us Crumb mostly running away from things, first in Potter Valley and later in rural France, where he moved with his second wife, Aline Kominsky, with whom he frequently collaborated. Too much socializing made him squirm. He'd often start drawing in the middle of a busy party. He ran from fame. He was determined not to be perceived as a joke that 1968 left behind. He avoided Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim when they wanted to make a movie with him. He turned down an opportunity to play banjo on 'Saturday Night Live' with his band, which sometimes went by R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders. He declined a $10,000 offer to draw a Rolling Stones album cover. He blocked most attempts to commercialize his work and characters. Over the decades he slowly began to feel that he'd run out of original ideas, though the sketchbooks he filled over the decades prove otherwise. Still, he more often illustrated the work of other writers — notably Harvey Pekar in the autobiographical and blue-collar 'American Splendor' series, but also James Boswell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, Charles Bukowski and the Book of Genesis. He drew dozens of photorealistic and often solemn portraits of the long-forgotten musicians he so loved. There are a lot of road trips in this biography. Crumb was too dyslexic to learn to drive. He enjoyed the existential state, Nadel writes, of being the 'eternal passenger.' He took two stabs at being a father, a role for which he felt ill equipped, and did a bit better the second time around. His second marriage was an open one, too. Aline died in 2022, at the age of 74. Nadel is a canny visual reader of comics, and he traces Crumb's influence on a long line of cartoonists, from Art Spiegelman and Matt Groening to Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry and Seth. 'Every cartoonist has to pass through Crumb,' Spiegelman tells him. 'What happens when you encounter Crumb is like the accelerated evolution scene in '2001.' You had to pass through him to find out what your voice might be.'
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk album review
Performing Shostakovich has been one of Andris Nelsons' calling cards during his first decade as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. What began as a project to survey all of the symphonies, with recordings of them subsequently released by Deutsche Grammophon, was extended to include all the concertos, and ended in spectacular fashion in January last year with concert performances of Shostakovich's most ambitious and controversial stage work, the 1934 opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Surprisingly for a work of such notoriety and historical significance, this is just the fourth recording of Lady Macbeth (there's also one available version of Katerina Izmailova, the revision of the score that Shostakovich produced in 1962 in an attempt to rehabilitate it with the Soviet authorities after its official condemnation in 1936). But unfortunately this new version, taken from one of the Boston performances, does not seriously challenge the existing choices. Oddly, each of the three previous commercial recordings, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, Myung-whun Chung and Ingo Metzmacher respectively, all take exactly the same time over the complete opera: 155 minutes. Here, Nelsons takes a whole 20 minutes longer. Though few passages seem to drag unduly, the difference in timings does confirm a lassitude in his performance; despite some of the individual contributions, there's a flatness to the proceedings, a lack of urgency, that undermines their dramatic impact. And, even though there's no shortage of loud, brash playing, Nelsons and the BSO tend to neuter a score that includes some of Shostakovich's most savagely ironic and parodic invention, a radical extreme from which he was forced to retreat. Hearing this account of the score, it's sometimes hard to understand why it should have offended Stalin so much. And while Kristine Opolais has her moments in the title role, her characterisation of Katerina is rather one-dimensional, doing a good line in the character's self-pity but little else. Brendan Gunnell is plausible enough as her lover Sergey, Peter Hoare suitably complaisant as her husband, Zinovy, with Günther Groissböck completing the menage à quatre as her bullying father-in-law Boris. All in all it's a disappointing ending to the Boston Shostakovich series. This article includes content hosted on We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
