39 h. 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

41 h. 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

8 d. 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

8 d. 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

8 d. 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

2 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

3 w. ago Model/Actriz: Pirouette review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(True Panther Sounds/Dirty Hit)Inspired by Mariah and Kylie but full of jackhammer rhythms and noise, the quartet’s second album could attract a big followingYou can see why Model/Actriz’s 2023 debut album Dogsbody attracted a lot of approving critical attention. In an era when rock music largely leans towards familiarity – where originality has essentially come to mean rearranging recognisable sounds from the past in a relatively fresh way – here was a band who genuinely didn’t seem to sound much like anyone else.The Brooklyn quartet had released a handful of noisy singles pre-Covid, which attracted vague comparisons to the notoriously challenging clangour of the late 70s no wave movement or the frenetic dance-punk of Liars, an outlier band on the far left field of the early 00s New York scene that gave the world the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But on Dogsbody they honed their sound into something entirely their own. Continue reading...

Culture

4 w. ago Nicola Benedetti: Beethoven’s Violin Concerto album review – warm and deliciously playful throughout

Benedetti/Aurora Orchestra/Collon(Decca)Benedetti and the Aurora, who play from memory, have fun and freedom here, augmenting the role of the drum in an ebullient recordingWe tend to have an unhealthy reverence towards Beethoven, says Nicola Benedetti in the notes to her new recording of his Violin Concerto. He did, after all, write this now-venerated concerto largely on the fly, for a soloist whose party piece was playing the violin upside down.So it’s apt that Benedetti, Aurora and their conductor Nicholas Collon have recorded an interpretation that’s buoyant, warmly affectionate and at times just a little tongue-in-cheek. You’d expect playfulness in the last movement, but it’s there to some extent throughout, even in Benedetti’s weightless playing of the slow movement. There are striking moments nodding to historical authenticity – the drum, with sticks hard as nails, at the very start, and the vibrato-less strings in the introduction to the slow movement. The drum becomes unusua...

Events

4 w. ago Self Esteem: A Complicated Woman review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Polydor)After her big breakthrough and West End fame, Rebecca Lucy Taylor works through her worries in real time on her new album – to fascinating and confusing effectLast week, London’s Duke of York’s theatre played host to an elaborate four-night live staging of Self Esteem’s third album. Devised by Self Esteem herself – Rebecca Lucy Taylor – along with Tony award-winning theatrical director and designer Tom Scutt, it was rapturously received by critics, and seemed to speak of an entirely understandable confidence on Taylor’s part.Since 2017, she has completely reinvented herself, from one half of middle-ranking indie duo Slow Club into an on-her-own-terms pop star. Her second album as Self Esteem, 2021’s Prioritise Pleasure, was a critical and commercial success, shifting her into the realm of breakfast TV interviews and appearances on The Graham Norton Show and Celebrity Bake-Off. She also has a burgeoning career as an actor, having played Sally Bowles in a West End production ...

Politics