24 h. 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

28 h. 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

50 h. 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

8 d. 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

9 d. 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

9 d. 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

2 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

2 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

3 w. ago On Felt Better Alive, Pete Doherty surprises with a charming and chaotic picture of his newfound domesticity

A laidback family life in France is not what many Libertines fans would’ve imagined for the future of the famously troubled singer – but it’s where he finds himself on this creative new solo album

Politics

3 w. ago Scriabin: Vers la Flamme album review – Sudbin masters and humanises fourth and 10th sonatas

Yevgeny Sudbin(BIS)The pianist showcases Scriabin’s creative journey from Chopinesque preludes to utterly original modernism, shining bright in his exquisite treatment of the early worksOne of Yevgeny Sudbin’s first discs for the BIS label in 2007 was a Scriabin recital. It included three of the piano sonatas alongside a selection of miniatures that ranged right across Scriabin’s composing career, and, for his 25th release on the label, Sudbin has returned to the same composer and the same programming scheme. Though it’s the very late, intensely compressed poem Vers la Flamme from 1914 that provides the album’s title, it’s the two sonatas here, the fourth and the 10th, that provide the weight and focus, with a selection of smaller-scale pieces – selections of preludes from Scriabin’s Op 11 and Op 16, and études from Op 8 and Op 42, as well as the B minor Fantasie Op 28. The disc plots out the creative journey that Scriabin made, from its Chopinesque beginnings in the preludes, to th...

Politics

3 w. ago Shanti Celeste: Romance review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Method 808/Peach Discs)Six years on from her acclaimed ‘fast house’ debut, the UK singer-producer invites listeners into a sunlit space between night out and morning afterNo one could accuse Shanti Celeste of being a dance producer who indulges in lofty conceptualising about their music. Not for her, the album that represents the soundtrack to a film that hasn’t been made yet, or a sci-fi-influenced cosmic opera, or a globe-spanning travelogue inspired by the peripatetic lifestyle of a DJ. Her acclaimed 2019 debut album was called Tangerine, a title she chose because she “really like[s] fruit”. A journalist who gamely attempted to press further, inquiring about the images conjured in her mind while creating the music, was told: “Moments on the dancefloor.”Tangerine featured ambient interludes and the sound of Celeste playing the kalimba in the living room of her father’s home in Chile (she moved to the UK with her mother as a child). But its signature sound was the author’s own, in...

Politics

4 w. ago Grisey: Vortex Temporum album review – bold, assertive interpretation of a masterly score

Ukho Ensemble Kyiv/Gaggero(Kyiv Dispatch)Gérard Grisey’s extraordinary, performed here by Ukraine’s leading new-music group, is one of the finest compositions of the late 20th centuryUkho Ensemble Kyiv is Ukraine’s leading new-music group, founded in 2015 by the Italian conductor Luigi Gaggero. Since the Russian invasion of the country in 2022, its members have inevitably been dispersed and its activities curtailed, but it has continued to perform a wide range of 20th and 21st-century repertories outside Ukraine. This performance of what is one of Gérard Grisey’s most important achievements, and one of the finest scores of the final decades of the last century, is taken from concerts the group gave in Stuttgart in December 2022.Grisey completed Vortex Temporum, for two winds, three strings and piano, in 1996, two years before his shockingly sudden death. If the work that followed it, the extraordinary Quatre Chants pour Franchir le Seuil, suggested that Grisey’s music was about to e...

Politics