The News Review:
- Skylon Royal Festival Hall Belvedere Road London
- A look back before the Vancouver jazz festival’s last fling
- Flying the flag
- Israeli film takes two prizes at Munich festival
Skylon Royal Festival Hall Belvedere Road London
Independent – Jun 30, 2007
Make a social occasion out of it take people who will enjoy themselves never go alone and above all never again take mother to The Fat Duck and make her eat a caramelised cocks-comb. Make a social occasion out of it take people who will enjoy themselves never go alone and above all never again take mother to The Fat Duck and make her eat a caramelised cocks-comb.
A look back before the Vancouver jazz festival’s last fling
Globe and Mail – Jun 30, 2007
Bills have included Vancouver trumpeter Brad Turner’s quartet (Monday) cellist Peggy Lee (Tuesday) and two groups led or co-led by guitarist Ron Samworth (Talking Pictures and DarkBlueWorld with singer Elizabeth Fischer on Friday). Quebec-raised Vancouver-based clarinetist François Houle fronted a one-off all-star tentet at the VECC Thursday night. Houle a mainstay of festival programming since arriving on the West Coast in the early 1990s was commissioned two years ago to write a large-scale piece for the VIJF’s 20th anniversary. This time he selected six Vancouver players including trombonist Jeremy Berkman and violinist Jesse Zubot (whose own trio ZMF opened) plus three out-of-towners – American French horn player Tom Varner Swedish reeds player Fredrik Ljungkvist and Jon Ballantyne. It was an absorbing hour-long set as the pieces swayed from these grave highly managed scores (Varner’s tentatively titled Heaven and Hell: The Combo Platter) to jazz tunes (by fabled soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy) to Houle’s own bare-bones improvisational strategies. The colours were often terrifically beautiful with the combination of Varner Berkman and Zubot adding a level of depth and ambiguity to the otherwise familiar palette. And while many of the soloists stood out (trumpeter J.
Flying the flag
guardian.co.uk – Jun 30, 2007
This is crucial but what was the reaction to these works: where when and why were they performed? Equally important to the story is the huge rise in the consumption of classical music stimulated by the war the formation of two new London orchestras the birth of the Edinburgh festival the first of William Glock’s music summer schools at Bryanston then at Dartington the creation of the Arts Council the popular success of the Proms as they transferred to the Royal Albert Hall and the thirst for a Festival of Britain that led to the building of the (just triumphantly reopened) Royal Festival Hall. We still live culturally in the shadow of that enormously creative period. Peter Diamand of the Edinburgh festival once expressed the spirit of that period as “a healing process” after the war but we can now see it more as a direct continuation of the way the arts flourished on a truly democratic basis during the war and as a bright gleam through the years of austerity Britain. The musical repertory too was shifting in seismic ways: in the early years of the BBC Third Programme a vast new range of music was made available from the complete symphonies of Mahler (until then reviled in this country – though both Henry Wood and Britten were enthusiasts) to early music that had previously been unheard. This year’s Aldeburgh was the 60th and it is 80 years since the Proms of Sir Henry Wood were taken on by the BBC in 1927 – one reason to look at the contrasts between these two musical festivals which at first seem dissimilar in size and scope. Another is to consider whether both are challenged by the huge changes in consumption and dissemination that now face all areas of musical life. The origins of every great undertaking become enshrined in myth and those of the Aldeburgh festival and of the Proms back in 1895 are no exception… ‘Why not’ said Peter Pears ‘make our own festival? A modest festival with a few concerts given by friends? Why not have an Aldeburgh festival?”And Robert Newman of the Proms in the 1890s: “I have decided to run those Promenade Concerts I told you about last year. I want you [Henry Wood] to be the conductor of a permanent Queen’s Hall orchestra.
Israeli film takes two prizes at Munich festival
Jerusalem Post – Jun 30, 2007
The Band’s Visit was also picked as the audience’s favorite. Koliren said he was very excited and that the enthusiasm with which his film had been greeted all over the world was the best reward.