6 h. ago La Mer: French Piano Trios album review – expansive, beguiling and unexpected

Neave Trio(Chandos)Works by Saint-Saëns, Mel Bonis and Sally Beamish’s imaginative reinterpretation of Debussy’s La Mer make for a disparate but rounded programmeThree French works make a disparate but rounded programme on this release from the Neave Trio. Saint-Saëns took years to write his Trio No 2, and the result was a sprawling five-movement work that gets an appropriately wide-ranging and meaty performance here. The first movement roils and surges, the players catching both the push and pull of the restless theme and the brief passage of stillness later on. The slow third movement sings .with wistful nostalgia, and the fourth flows by in a waltz-like whirl pitched somewhere between Chopin and Dvořák. But the second movement, with its obsessively repeated rhythmic motif, perhaps needs a little more imagination to make it work.The two movements of Mel Bonis’s Soir et Matin, written in 1907, are the opposite way round in atmosphere from how you might expect: Soir (Evening) is sou...

Politics

9 h. ago Berlioz and Ravel album review – his orchestra is responsive to Mäkelä’s every move

Orchestre de Paris/Mäkelä(Decca)It may be missing that edge-of-your-seat excitement it had at last summer’s Proms, but Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique is full of colour and impact, and the energy keeps fizzing on Ravel’s La ValseKlaus Mäkelä and the Orchestre de Paris gave an unforgettable performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique at the BBC Proms last September, the electric atmosphere of which is not quite replicated on this recording, made in Paris a few months later.It’s all played with consummate skill by an orchestra who are clearly responsive to their conductor’s every move, as they were in Royal Albert Hall, and Mäkelä’s shaping of Berlioz’s music, from the gentle, vibratoless violins at the beginning to the careering witches’ dance of the finale, remains highly coloured and full of impact. Yet it all feels a little clinical; the edge-of-the-seat excitement is missing. Perhaps it has been engineered out: the sound feels over-tweaked, and although the spatial effects at ...

Politics

13 h. ago Loyle Carner: Hopefully! review – rap sweetheart faces family, fear and the feels | Album of the week

(Island EMI)The Londoner’s trademark sentimental sweetness is balanced by a new unaffected singing style – his fourth album is his most impressive work yetLoyle Carner raps like he has a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes. Wonder, nostalgia, love, hurt, excitement, hard-won peace: these are the emotions his voice tends to catch on. When combined with his typically blissed-out sonics – feathery breakbeats, dreamy piano figures, delicate synth washes, gently plucked guitars – the results are often very nice. Sometimes a bit too nice. So it is on Feel at Home, the sentimental love song that opens the 30-year-old’s fourth album, Hopefully!Carner – whose moniker is a spoonerism of his real name, Benjamin Coyle-Larner – never makes music that is boring or basic. As well as the slushy lyrics and comfortingly toasty chords, Feel at Home is buttressed by madly skittering percussion and what sounds like a blurry reproduction of young children’s playground chatter. But much like the outp...

Politics

6 d. ago Dâdalus & Bikarus: Off the Shelf review | Safi Bugel's experimental album of the month

(Lío Press)Zurich-based musicians Benedikt Merz and David Hänni meld krautrock, punk and big beat into tripped-out, swampy grooves that reach dizzying heightsAfter almost three decades of friendship, Zurich-based musicians Benedikt Merz and David Hänni moved into a studio together in 2019. They found common ground over their shared love of psychedelic music and spent long, woozy nights jamming together. But while one wanted to focus on live electronics, the other secretly wanted to start a band. The outcome was Dâdalus & Bikarus, a project which sits somewhere between these two worlds, welding elements of krautrock, punk and big beat into tripped-out dancefloor rhythms.Their second album, Off the Shelf, captures the obsessive energy of those early nocturnal experiments, which they’ve since built a reputation for in their live shows. Anchored by drawn-out loops, each track slowly builds tension to dizzying, near-erotic heights. On Erebros, this takes place across a hefty 11 minut...

Politics

6 d. ago Van Morrison’s new album Remembering Now is a sensational return to adequacy

The legendary Northern Irish singer’s recent output has been so bad, for so long, that the entirely decent ‘Remembering Now’ makes it seem like he’s made the new ‘Moondance’

Politics

7 d. ago The Lost Tapes, Beethoven sonatas 18,27, 28 & 31 album review – Richter always found something fresh to say

Sviatoslav Richter(Deutsche Grammophon)Sviatoslav Richter’s already huge catalogue is enriched by these rediscovered recordings of recitals of Beethoven’s piano sonatas from 1965Though he claimed to dislike performing in a studio, Sviatoslav Richter became perhaps the most intensively recorded pianist of the 20th century. But while his studio work was extensive, it was the huge volume of recordings made officially and unofficially at his recitals across more than 40 years that really bulked out his discography, with multiple versions available of many of the core works in his repertory. For those reasons the rediscovery of “Lost Tapes” might not initially seem so remarkable. The performances, of four Beethoven piano sonatas, Opp 31 no 3, 90, 101 and 110, are taken from recitals that Richter gave in 1965. Op 110 comes from a performance at the piano festival he had founded the previous year at La Grange de Meslay near Tours, the others are taken from a concert in Lucerne three months...

Politics

7 d. ago Haim: I Quit review – the messiest breakup album of recent times, in every sense

(Polydor)The three LA sisters dwell on the bitter end of a relationship in tracks that range from replayable valley-girl rap to plodding country-popHaim’s 2013 breakthrough single The Wire was a swaggering, high-spirited breakup anthem. The slick, twanging pop-rock was correctly identified at the time by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow as echoing the oeuvre of Shania Twain (though this wasn’t the sick burn he thought it was), over which the LA trio copped to commitment phobia, communication issues and having their heads turned, before skipping into the California sunset with their hearts intact. Well, to commandeer the title of Haim’s debut album: those days are very much gone.I Quit, the sisters’ fourth album, still has plenty of breakup songs, but these are no cheerful odes to dumping dudes in your 20s. Instead, the record fixates on the bitter end of a deeply flawed long-term relationship; at least some of these songs are informed by the love lost between lead vocalist Danielle Haim an...

Politics

1 week ago Addison Rae: Addison review – 2025’s most refreshing star revels in pop’s shallow pleasures

(Columbia)The one-time TikTok dancer’s remarkably cohesive debut spans Jersey club to R&B, and defies an obsession with ‘lore’ to suggest that the best pop isn’t that deepWhen Madonna came to the height of her powers in the late 90s and early 00s, it felt as though she had perfected a new mode of pop stardom, making icy, complex and uncannily incisive records such as Ray of Light and Confessions on a Dance Floor. Those albums are powered by a gripping interplay between detachment and intensity; they sound, to me, like attempts to make pop albums without any sense of ego. As if she’s saying: this isn’t a Madonna record, it’s a pop record.Addison Rae’s exceptional debut album reminds me of that unimpeachable run of Madonna records, understanding that supreme confidence and exceptional taste can sell even the most unusual album. It’s both familiar – Rae is an artist who unapologetically lives and dies by her references – and totally bold: I get the sense that she is less trying to ...

Politics

1 week ago Addison Rae’s debut album proves her evolution from influencer to pop heavyweight is complete

On her carefree debut, the US musician has gone mononymous and enlisted Swedish producers to help craft a Nineties and Y2K scrapbook that balances pop, past and present but never feels too try-hard

Politics

2 w. ago Ligeti: Violin and Piano Concertos, etc album review – As always, Faust’s performance is perceptive and immaculate

Faust/Neuberger/Les Siècles/Roth (Harmonia Mundi)These fresh and original concertos revealed the full power of Ligeti’s new musical language; Isabelle Faust and Jean-Frederic Neuburger give accomplished and polished accounts of bothThe huge stylistic shift that György Ligeti’s music underwent in the late 1970s and early 1980s was one of the most remarkable and unexpected changes of direction of any composer, perhaps only comparable with Stravinsky’s shift into neoclassicism in the 1920s and his adoption of serial techniques in the 1950s. The language that Ligeti invented for himself, which invested tonality with a whole new set of relationships and incorporated elements from a variety of non-western musical traditions, was unveiled in his Horn Trio of 1982, but it was in the two major concertos that followed, for piano in 1988 and violin in 1993, that the full power of his new language was revealed.Both are remarkable works, which seem utterly fresh and original, yet identifiably re...

Culture

2 w. ago John Early: The Album Tour review – a rich slice of larky self

Soho theatre, LondonChatty waiters, visiting the loo in company and overinvesting in sexual role-play are uproariously discussed alongside covers of Madonna, Britney and Dolly PartonFor fans of a certain brand of comedy – the comedy that exposes self-fashioning in the age of social media as ridiculous performance – this flying UK visit by John Early has been keenly anticipated. The outre star of millennial self-satire Search Party and sidekick to the brilliant Kate Berlant, Early has spent his career perfectly situated where generational social commentary meets flamboyant silliness. At his best tonight, he richly delivers on the expectation. And even if his best doesn’t sustain from start to finish, in the first half, when the Tennessee man addresses himself to frightened, vacuous, deracinated American modernity, he’s riveting.What’s interesting about Early’s approach is that – unlike Berlant, Leo Reich, and others – he doesn’t hide behind a character, or a grotesque version of hims...

Politics

3 w. ago Béla Bartók: Complete Piano Concertos album review – Tomáš Vrána rises to the challenge

Vrána/Janáček PO Ostrava/Káli(Supraphon)The young Czech pianist tackles Bartók’s formidable concertos with confidence and technical accomplishment, although tempi can feel a little sluggishEven though they are among the most challenging piano concertos in the repertory, there is no shortage of outstanding versions on disc of the three Bartók works, from Géza Anda in the 1950s to Pierre-Laurent Aimard two years ago. They are certainly ambitious works with which to launch a recording career on Supraphon, but Tomáš Vrána is undoubtedly dauntless; his performances are full of confidence, verve and faultless technical accomplishment. At times, though, they do seem rather sluggish; Vrána’s tempi are often on the slow side, but the textures from the Janáček Philharmonic tend to be rather muddy too, though there is plenty of neat, alert solo playing from its wind and brass. For all his keyboard agility, Vrána seems to be at most imaginative in the concertos’ slow movements, especially the c...

Culture

3 w. ago My Days: Orlando Gibbons and Nico Muhly album review – a luminous tribute

Davies/Boden/Hymas/Holliday/Fretwork(Signum)The English composer died 400 years ago; this new collection commemorates the enduring power of his music; Muhly’s My Days, a ritualised memory piece about Gibbons, contrasts perfectly. The 400th anniversary of the death of Orlando Gibbons has so far been one of the less prominently marked of this year’s significant musical dates. Gibbons, who was born in Oxford in 1583, was one of the last significant English madrigalists, and is often viewed as a transitional figure between Renaissance music and the baroque, though historically he has been overshadowed by the more prolific William Byrd, with whom he may have studied.As well as vocal works, Gibbons wrote a wealth of string chamber music, and Fretwork’s selection includes Fantasias in two, three, four, five and six parts, as well as a Pavan and Galliard for six viols. Placed at the centre of the sequence is Nico Muhly’s My Days, originally commissioned for Fretwork and the Hilliard Ensembl...

Politics

4 w. ago Pierre Boulez: Éclat/Multiples album review – two of his most significant works are played with fabulous precision

Collegium Novum Zürich/Ensemble Contrechamps/Wendeberg(Bastille Musique)In the composer’s centenary year, this disc showcases two of his most substantial worksAlmost all the major works from the second half of Pierre Boulez’s composing career developed in the same way: their starting point is a small-scale ensemble or solo piece that served as the kernel for the much expanded and elaborated later score. That was the process that led to the final versions of works such as Mémoriale, Anthèmes and explosante-fixe , and to the pair of substantial pieces that are played with fabulous precision and incisiveness on this disc.Éclat/Multiples, completed in 1981, began life in 1965 as Éclat, a kit-like eight-minute exploration of the sound world Boulez had first created for the central movements of his masterpiece Pli selon Pli, and which he then expanded to a work for 25 instruments. For Sur Incises, which grew by stages through the mid 1990s, the starting point was a solo-piano piece, Incis...

Economics

4 w. ago Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No 3 album review – hear the performance that made Yunchan Lim a star

Yunchan Lim/Fort Worth SO/Alsop(Decca)The prodigious South Korean talent won 2022’s Van Cliburn piano competition with this performance; his version deserves a place alongside Argerich and Rachmaninov himselfAs soon as the 2022 Van Cliburn piano competition in Fort Worth, Texas, was over, news travelled across the Atlantic that the latest winner was very special indeed. Over the following year or so, Yunchan Lim’s recitals in Europe and a first disc for Decca (of the Chopin Études), together with recordings that documented his performances in the competition, of Liszt’s Transcendental Études in his semi-final recital, and Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto in the final, confirmed that the reports had been no exaggeration: he is the real thing, a once-in-a-generation talent. Now Decca has reissued the Fort Worth concerto performance, but with the sound significantly cleaned up and rebalanced, and the wonder of Lim’s playing if anything enhanced. What is immediately striking is the sheer co...

Culture