Gareth's Culture and Travel Blog

Contemporary Music

It’s a long time since I last saw Ben Folds. His concerts used to be a bit random and frequently irritated me. I certainly never expected to see him at the Royal Opera House, but that’s where he played with New York sextet yMusic (violin, viola, cello, clarinet, flute and trumpet / horn) and drummer Sam Smith and boy was it a treat. Though there were some songs from the back catalogue, rearranged for this configuration, it was mostly new stuff and I now can’t wait for the album to follow. It was a serious but good-humoured affair and the vocal contribution of the audience, conducted by Folds, was stunning. A treat.

Classical Music

My second Prom of British music wasn’t as good as the first, as it turned out to be a bit of a ragbag selection. It was bookended by Walton with Vaughan Williams, Elgar and a piece by Grace Williams, a 20^th century Welsh composer I’d never heard of, in-between. It wasn’t the individual pieces, which were each good in their own way, it was that they didn’t seem to belong together. Perhaps my continual thinking about the journey home during a tube strike was distracting me.

I was attracted to Prom 32 by works by Gershwin and Copeland and the fact it was choral, though I’d never heard of Eric Whitacre, the American conductor and composer of four of the seven works. It turned out to be a huge treat – Whitacre’s works were inventive and captivating, there was a refreshing informality with introductions to each piece and a touch of showmanship for good measure. I think I became an instant fan.

We followed it (after the picnic, obviously) with another Prom featuring the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique under John Eliot Gardiner playing two classic symphonies, Beethoven’s 5^th and Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique, and though they were well played (despite the rather rasping brass) it didn’t rise to the afternoon’s heights.

The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is as good as most of the London orchestras, as they proved convincingly in their lovely Prom programme of three works written in the last year of the Second World War by Britten, Korngold & Prokofiev under their dynamic young Ukrainian conductor Kirill Karabits. The Sea Interludes and Prokofiev’s 5th weren’t new to me and both were beautifully played, but the Korngold violin concerto was and Nicola Benedetti played it (and an encore) brilliantly.

Film

My problem with Dear White People is that I couldn’t get past my distaste of the conservative, traditional middle-class American college system to get to the satire on racism. It was OK, but only OK.

Art

The Alfred Wallis exhibition at new Old Street gallery Modern Art, on loan from Cambridge’s Kettle’s Yard, was fascinating. His naïve childlike paintings, mostly of ships and boats, were painted from memory on salvaged card and paper. They weren’t technically accomplished, but there was something compelling about them.

The London Metropolitan Archives are new to me, but once I’d found them (!) the exhibition of Victorian London in Photographs was fascinating. They included street scenes, street sellers, theatrical figures and albums from schools and asylums.

A trio of photographic exhibitions three days after completing a photography course may not have been my best idea as it plunged me back into feelings of photographic inadequacy. The first was Revelations at the Science Museum, examining the influence on early scientific photography on modern & contemporary art. Though the photos were almost all fascinating, I’m not sure it did what it said on the can. At the Natural History Museum, my reaction to the Wildlife Photography Prize Exhibition was different with the extra knowledge I’d gained since I saw it last. I now seemed to be more aware of, and therefore thinking about, the technology that enabled the photos as much as, if not more than, the creativity of the photographer. Still, they were still amazing. The same happened at the Royal Geographic Society’s annual Travel Photography Prize exhibition, but I was still wowed and still in awe of the results.

Duane Hanson’s uber-realistic sculptures of people at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery were rather spooky. I mistook more than one for real people and a real person for a sculpture; fortunately I didn’t stare too long or photograph him. Back in the Serpentine Gallery itself, I popped in to see an exhibition of paintings, mostly dark portraits with occasional flashes of colour, by contemporary British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and loved them – an unexpected bonus in an art afternoon, which also provided an opportunity to see the extraordinarily colourful 2015 Serpentine Pavilion from the inside.

Utopia, at The Roundhouse, was their most ambitious summer installation yet. Taking its lead from Thomas More’s 16th century book, it took us through sweat-shops, bookshops and wastelands, questioning the price and value of consumerism. Brilliant, thought-provoking stuff.

Up in Edinburgh it was lean pickings for art this year, though I chose to wait for two exhibitions heading to London, but what I saw I liked. The annual International Photography exhibition was up to its usual standard with a hugely improved colour catalogue for a knock-down price. At the Scottish NPG there was an interesting exhibition of photos by Lee Miller documenting the friendship of her and her husband Roland Penrose with Picasso (which provided an opportunity to see the newly renovated gallery in all its glory). At the new Ingleby Gallery there was a fascinating exhibition of pictures, posters and sculptures by Charles Avery, someone new to me, whilst at Dovecot Studios, another new space, two treats – Kwang Young Chun‘s obsessive but enthralling work made of tiny folded paper parcels and Bernat Klein‘s tapestries with the artwork for them.

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