Now that was a bigger change than anything at the start of the show But tango is the great uniter, and certainly was in the civilised ambience of the Dean Street Pizza Express, where Sandra Luna was promoting her new CD, Tango Varon. For this charismatic exponent - who started singing in Buenos Aires clubs when she was six - tango is "cinders" that burn again and again, and her repertoire of songs, including Carlos Gardel classics, confirmed its self-renewing power. Her pianist was Lisztian in both sound and look; her bandoneonist's ice-pure cascades perfectly offset her own combination of coquetry, sensuality and menace.
Women of Cape Verde was designed to show what vocal talent those rocky islands possess besides the great Cesaria Evora, and if one of the three we heard - Maria Alice - was a lighter, sweeter variant on the Barefoot Diva, the other two, with their songs drawn from Portuguese/African fusions, were exciting new discoveries. That all the events reviewed here should be part of the London Jazz Festival says something about both world music and jazz: while "jazz" is defined ever more broadly, "world music" proves ever less suited to ghettoisation. At the end he dispatched the mighty Fifth Symphony, with all its repeats, in 28 minutes. Now that was a bigger change than anything at the start of the show. Taking 20 per cent off the usual duration, while playing more music, seems like a caricature of what graduates from the early music movement do to familiar pieces. Far from diminishing the symphony's power, however, the performance intensified and heightened it.The LSO can get round the notes physically faster than Gardiner's period-instrument orchestras, but so relentless was the drive and so firm the rhythmic impetus, that this went way beyond a "look what we can do" experience.
Substantial elements of period technique, coupled with a reduction of the string sections, kept the balance clear and avoided any sense of scramble.There were some irritating squeaks on the horns, as players of modern valve instruments pretended they had old ones, but mostly this spring-clean was nothing but positive. Initially the blast of sound at the arrival of the finale seemed an anticlimax, so speedily was it sent on its way, but soon the onward rush and the assertive brass developed a vivid, rather French character that renewed the music's shocking sense of liberation: once associated with the European events of 1789, it was immediate enough to put a modern audience in mind of 1989.What worked well on the Fifth had put on a less happy show in the Fourth. Sure, it is good to be reminded that this too is a concentrated piece, but the character is more genial and pace can be counterproductive. Not for nothing did Beethoven write "ma non troppo", not too fast, over the finale. |
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