Latest news with #Multitudes
The Guardian
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
In C review – Sasha Waltz matches Terry Riley's 1964 classic with a minimalist community
Contemporary choreographers love minimalist music. Its rhythmic repetition, unceasing momentum and layering of phrases provides a useful framework for movement, as in Lucinda Childs' Dance set to Philip Glass and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's Fase, to Steve Reich. Now German choreographer Sasha Waltz tackles Terry Riley's seminal 1964 piece In C. Riley had an interest in psychedelia and altering consciousness (it was the 60s after all) and this is music that can lead you to zone in or zone out, lose track of time or be vividly aware of every quaver. It's built on 53 cells, like riffs, repeated as many times as the players choose, on any combination of instruments. Here they are played admirably by the London Sinfonietta as part of the Southbank's cross-disciplinary Multitudes festival. In fact, the whole thing feels admirable. Waltz's choreography, created in 2021, is a movement score with its own 53 figures and set of rules, a structured improvisation that has been performed in numerous permutations with professional and amateur dancers since its inception. Waltz intended her In C as an exercise in structuring communities, thinking about democracy, having agency within a group. Waltz's company of dancers are a delightfully diverse collection of bodies and ages and striking movers. You can see the atoms of the dance – a shoulder shrug, a head turn, a simple lunge and sweep of the arm – which build to make the work. Motifs emerge, fade or morph, as in the music, while groups form and disperse, dancers peeling off in new directions. It's a huge feat of stamina, for players and dancers alike. At first the body is open, the angles wide, the energy bright but easy. As the hour progresses, the palette expands. The result can feel purposeful or aimless; brief moments of unison are energising. It never feels less than controlled but as time goes on the world seems to deliberately fray: bodies lie down, spill off the stage, smiles are cracked – there's a beautiful moment when dancer Jaan Männima comes face to face with another performer, suddenly moving in sync, and their face breaks into a spontaneous smile (of elation, relief, solidarity?) In a second you see the humanity not the algorithm, the community in action and the work come alive. At Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, until 30 April
Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
In C review — barefoot dancers spark joy from a minimalist masterpiece
Minimalist music and postmodern dance — which both originated in the 1960s — were made for each other. The insistent pulse, rhythmic architecture and hypnotic meditative state of composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich have been catnip to choreographers, from Lucinda Childs to Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and beyond. Now, in her 21st-century work, the German dancemaker Sasha Waltz winds back the clock to 1964, when Terry Riley's landmark In C announced the birth of minimalism. Her dance, presented at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London as part of the Southbank Centre's Multitudes festival, follows the template of Riley's music, played here by a dozen members of the London Sinfonietta on stage next to the dancers. The score comprises 53 sequential phrases that
The Guardian
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
RPO/Petrenko review – a blistering, multi-hued Shostakovich
Southbank Centre's life-enhancing Multitudes festival is turning out to be a stimulating mix of orchestral fireworks and artistic cross-fertilisation. Of course, the trick with multidisciplinary work is to ensure that one form doesn't overwhelm the others, and this Royal Philharmonic take on Shostakovich's epic Leningrad Symphony, with imagery by Russian art/film director Kirill Serebrennikov and video artist Ilya Shagalov, got the balance just right. A brief first half offered a thrusting reading of Sibelius's Finlandia, a more straightforwardly patriotic work than Shostakovich's tantalisingly equivocal symphony. Conductor Vasily Petrenko proved a master of dramatic contrasts, from the opening rasp of low brass to the composer's final proclamation of nationhood. Kurt Weill's Four Walt Whitman Songs were equally effective, thanks to Roderick Williams' honest simplicity and razor-sharp diction. The German expat's gawky settings of nationalistic poetry have the potential to get chopped up and tossed into word salads, but not with Williams at the helm. Firm-toned and equally firmly committed, he landed all four with musical panache and lyrical insight. As for the symphony, Serebrennikov and Shagalov allowed Petrenko's blistering, multi-hued interpretation of Shostakovich's cinematic masterpiece to command centre stage. Their absorbing but never over-fussy illustrations offered extra-cerebral stimulation with evocative and occasionally provocative imagery playing out on three giant screens. Shostakovich's four movements were visualised as a series of discrete yet interconnected narratives, broadening the storyline from Soviet resilience in the face of the destruction of Leningrad (whether by Hitler or, as Shostakovich once suggested, by Stalin) to the impact of man's technological overreach on the planet. The live-guided imagery, which referenced 20th-century constructivism and contemporary sci-fi, was inspired, from a psychedelically infused eyeball scanning the heavens to the blood-red vegetation of a haunted forest. The opening Allegretto channelled the Icarus myth, the on-screen action going cheek-by-jowl with Petrenko's masterly build of Shostakovich's battle theme. In contrast, the light-footed second movement was accompanied by dancing cells and synapses. A poignant, post-apocalyptic Adagio led into an intense, emotional finale where Technicolor flowers blossomed as vividly as Shostakovich's music. Petrenko, visibly moved at the end, never put a foot wrong. Multitudes, at London's Southbank Centre, continues until 3 May.
Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
RPO/Petrenko review — a five-star, piercingly good performance
★★★★★The idea of illustrating Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, the Leningrad, conjures distasteful images: Panzer divisions confronting the Red Army while the composer's wartime symphony gradually detonates around you. But the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's contribution to the Southbank Centre's Multitudes festival — a Royal Festival Hall event called Symphony of Shadows — defied expectations. I found it both disturbing and engrossing. That the event's architects — conductor Vasily Petrenko and art director Kirill Serebrennikov — are both estranged from their native Russia is surely not a coincidence. (Next month the two tackle another Russian icon, the opera Boris Godunov, in Amsterdam.) Introducing the event, Petrenko reminded the audience of Shostakovich's complicated relationship to his homeland; the Leningrad Symphony, premiered as propaganda for Stalin and
The Guardian
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
LPO/Gardner review – no recording could match the visceral thrill of Mahler's Eighth Symphony live
Gustav Mahler objected to his Eighth Symphony being promoted as 'The Symphony of a Thousand', just as he worried about its 1910 premiere being made into a 'Barnum and Bailey show'. But the symphony remains a vast undertaking, calling for hundreds of musicians, so the nickname has stuck. Meanwhile, crossing a symphony with a circus act sounds exactly like a night at the Southbank Centre's self-consciously boundary-crossing Multitudes festival. As it happens, the circus has already been and gone, but this Mahler 8 came with accompanying video by Tal Rosner in a performance directed by Tom Morris. The basic point, the programme explains, is that 'you can't experience Multitudes at home'. Mahler had already seen to that, of course. No recording (and no domestic sound system) could match the visceral thrill of the combined London Philharmonic Choir, London Symphony Chorus and Tiffin Boys' Choir launching into the fortissimo opening from three sides of the stage. Or the London Philharmonic Orchestra laying down a contrapuntal theme in monumental slabs. Or two sets of timpani and offstage brass in balconies serving volleys in blistering stereo. Or the sudden spare harshness of the opening of Part 2 as conductor Edward Gardner held back his enormous forces, making space for sinewy woodwind and mere flashes of intensity through another achingly slow buildup, climactic phrases placed with absolute precision, his pacing virtuosic. Woven through this intricate texture and singing mostly from behind the orchestra, the eight solo voices inevitably made the greatest impact at quieter moments, their words often lost in the melee. For those interested in the text, screens provided surtitles – albeit in white, illegible at times against Rosner's video. Part music-video, part screen-saver, it spoke the familiar language of advertising: shimmering lights, rippling fluids, hard lines amid smoke. In Part 2 – based on the end of Goethe's Faust Part 2 – Faust himself emerged from the abstraction, then appeared on stage and followed Gretchen up into the auditorium for redemption under a spotlight's glare. Such gestures felt bluntly out of place: too bland and too literal to hold their own alongside such a powerfully immersive musical performance.
