Books & Arts > Music
Divine Feminine by Shiva Feshareki (St Martin-in-the-Fields, London)
DIVINE FEMININE, the latest work by the Anglo-Iranian experimental composer and turntable artist Shiva Feshareki, is billed by the BBC, which commissioned it, as an immersive spatial opera invoking female goddesses from many…
George Jeffreys and the Birth of the English Baroque (Solomon’s Knot, Wigmore Hall, London)
TO LOVERS of English music, there is a huge gap in the roster of great composers between the Tudor William Byrd (1540-1623) and the late-Stuart Henry Purcell (1659-95). Innovation was elsewhere, as Monteverdi and his fellow…
Days of Ash, album by U2
THIS was a surprise. On Ash Wednesday, U2 released their first collection of new songs since 2017, appropriately titled Days of Ash. The EP contains five songs and a poem alongside a one-off digital version of their…
How Did We Get Here? An itinerant’s musical by Rob Halligan (Coventry Cathedral)
THE singer-songwriter Rob Halligan describes himself as a troubadour and a maverick, and his show, How Did We Get Here? as an itinerant’s musical. It swept us along on a reckless, dust-raising road trip, as he recounted the…
Brilliant Baroque (Isabella Leonarda and others) by the Nonsuch Singers (Holy Trinity, Sloane Street)
IT IS a boom time for female composers, as they emerge from the shadows. Isabella Leonarda (1620-1704), one of the 17th century’s most prolific composers, was born to a noble family in Novara, north Italy, and entered an…
A theatrical concert (Gesualdo Six, touring)
BY ANYONE’s lights, the Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613) had a colourful life. He was born into an aristocratic family, and his brother’s death moved him up the family line and prevented the planned church career;…
Music review: Lux, album by Rosalía
IMAGINE a pop record structured around four operatic movements with arrangements by the Pulitzer Prize-winning classical composer Caroline Shaw. On top of Spanish vocals, add 12 languages. Then immerse each song in female…
The Power of Music at the Foundling Museum, London
WHEN people sing in chorus, their hearts beat in unison. This remarkable fact arises from shared breathing patterns, but is a wonderful metaphor for the unifying effect of music created in community.As a result, in the words…
A Spanish Nativity (St Martin-in-the-Fields), Lassus and other works (Wigmore Hall, London)
SINGING without a conductor, as ever, the 12 members of Stile Antico delivered “A Spanish Nativity” at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, in December. It was a programme of unaccompanied Christmas choral music written during…
Psalter, album by Tim Boniface
WHAT do you get if you take a multi-talented composer, saxophonist, pianist. and priest, combine him with a band of serious players (in both senses of that word) in UK jazz, and give them all the book of Psalms to riff on?…
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