War Breaks Out Across Europe - Death Of Archduke Franz Ferdinand Somehow Involved Yes Tim, we get it.When he tries to be clever - "I believe in a ghetto for the poor" (wha?) - he stumbles. But there's something simple and sweet, na? and childlike about Burgess which carries him through.It's some sort of testament to his solo material that tonight - under a low-arched ceiling in the pelting Yorkshire rain - these qualities still shine. Oblivious to heckles for Charlies songs (he placates them with "Life Is Sweet", the Chemical Brothers hit he sang on), he bashes his tambourine and sings in a feathery falsetto which just about holds up throughout. Whatever anyone else thinks, he believes."War Breaks Out Across Europe - Death Of Archduke Franz Ferdinand Somehow Involved". This classic headline from The Onion's Our Dumb Century book is enough to make any A-level History student shudder in partial recall of the labyrinthine network of treaties and allegiances which meant that when the young Serb, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Austro-Hungarian royal, the continent was plunged into the First World War.Maybe it's just a name. But by calling themselves after him, Franz Ferdinand, the much-hyped Glasgow four-piece (the phrase "new Strokes" has, yet again, been tossed around), already let you know that they are not to be taken lightly.Side partings straight out of a Leni Riefenstahl, striped grandad shirts buttoned all the way up, they stride imperiously onstage with jerky new wave movements, and let loose a hailstorm of charcoal-grey minor chords, while Sixties thrillers and vintage holiday movies play on the back wall. But Franz Ferdinand are good enough to transcend the spot-the-influence game, offering - in their own self-aware, supernaturally confident words - "a night of dark fantastic passion".s.price independent.co.ukFranz Ferdinand: Fez Club, Sheffield (0114 279 7997), Wed; Zodiac 2, Oxford (01865 420042), Thur; Carling Academy 2, Liverpool (0870 771 2000), Fri. Late in the day it certainly was - a good 20 minutes past ten at the first euphoric exhalation of Vergn? Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust and close to midnight by the ecstatic, incendiary climax of Dopo notte, atra e funeste - but charisma, invention, precision, originality, daring and beauty finally convened in Prom 70 at the Royal Albert Hall this Wednesday night. Moments like this - so far from the standard stylistic models of historically informed performance practice and so uninhibited, naked and intimate as to be untranslatable to the purely aural medium of radio, I fear - are what make this gargantuan, often tiresomely uneven festival an imperative still. If this year's Proms have brought more than a modicum of musical mediocrity to attention over the past eight weeks, too much Tchaikovsky, a baffling amount of bad Brahms and a cluster of indefensibly under-rehearsed concertos, the experience of seeing Anne Sofie von Otter, Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre bend Bach, Rameau and Handel Late in the day it certainly was - a good 20 minutes past ten at the first euphoric exhalation of Vergn? Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust and close to midnight by the ecstatic, incendiary climax of Dopo notte, atra e funeste - but charisma, invention, precision, originality, daring and beauty finally convened in Prom 70 at the Royal Albert Hall this Wednesday night.
They may even recall my invoking it in reviews of Simon Keenlyside, Angelika Kirchschlager, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and other singers. But none of these modern-day Orpheuses has, I think, developed a relationship with their accompanists, singular or orchestral, quite like that between von Otter, Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre; a relationship so tight and so technically assured (that's the nobilit?art) that when a singer takes flight (that's sprezzatura), 40 players respond with the fluency, spontaneity and ease of a jazz trio. If Christine Brewer, Mark Wigglesworth and the London Philharmonic shrank the Royal Albert Hall to the size of the Wigmore a fortnight ago in Berg's Sieben fr?Lieder, von Otter, Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre turned it into a smoky, film noir, torch-song dive of the kind that probably ceased to exist in the mid 1950s. Tribal taxonomies be damned! Forget the box marked "baroque"! When metre all but disappears, when melody leads to elastic extemporisation, when harmonic progressions hang unresolved for what sounds like an eternity but feels like a heartbeat, when emotions scald with intensity, when sexuality burns in a singer's throat and invention supercedes convention, that's jazz Or grazie, if you like. For von Otter's Orphic account of Scherza infida was as far removed from Handel's softly propulsive original as Sarah Vaughan's imperishable, courageous 1982 version of You are too beautiful is from the wistful little ballad written by Rodgers and Hart, and that, for my money, is great singing indeed.Now seemingly as informed by her collaborations with David McVicar and Elvis Costello as by her nearly 20 years of experience in Baroque repertoire, von Otter's extremely physical, richly textured, highly personalised Handel might not be to the taste of the purists. Indeed accusations of self-indulgence might, with some justification, be levelled at both von Otter and Minkowski; not least for the latter's over-egged medley of Rameau's theatrical music, here pretentiously titled L'Apoth?e de la Danse. Movements extracted from nearly 20 years of his increasingly experimental op?-ballets and trag?es lyriques - including the Tambourins and Chaconne from Dardanus, the Dance of the Savages from Les Indes galantes, La Musique's exquisite air tendre from Les f?s d'H? and the abstracted Overture to Za?- made for a breathtaking orchestral display of articulation, character, dynamic verve, virtuosity, ensemble and rhythmic panache but did not form a cohesive suite. Scherza infida's near-metreless da capo - impossible in the context of Ariodante - likewise stretched credibility, while von Otter clearly found the business of negotiating the sudden flurries of demi-semi-quavers in the ultra-cerebral orrery of the central aria of Cantata 170 with her powdery, brushed-steel chest register quite taxing. The same work also showed some dubious post-musicological expediency in Minkowski's odd replacement of the final movement's organ obbligato with a flute. |
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