Below is a sample of my music writing in a range of different styles and formats. You can contact me for enquiries or commissions at bertiekkirkwood@gmail.com.
Skip to:
– Event preview, 300 words (Max Cooper at the Glasshouse)
– Album review, 400 words (Olivia Rodrigo GUTS)
– Album review, 1000 words (Phoebe Bridgers Lost Weekend)
– Local music feature, 1000 words (Newcastle DIY Ceilidh, winner of The Courier Culture Article of the Year 2025)
– Interview feature, 1000 words (Couch)
– Pop concert review, 1000 words (Vulfpeck live at O2)
– Classical concert review, 1000 words (RPO/Petrenko at the Glasshouse)
‘At the nexus of music, art and science’: Max Cooper set to wow Glasshouse with live audiovisual experience next month
Experimental DJ and visual artist Max Cooper is gearing up for a special performance at the Glasshouse in Gateshead on 21 May, in which he will showcase his new album Feeling Is Structure in an ambitious show specially adapted for the Sage One concert hall.
Cooper will be performing using 3D/AV live, an immersive audio-visual performance system he developed himself which has already wowed audiences across the UK and Europe.
This artist is no newbie to such technical wizardry – he holds a PhD in Computational Biology, and was one of the first cohorts of musicians to produce using Dolby Atmos’s cutting edge audio technology.
His upcoming tour, which starts with a sold out date at the Royal Albert Hall and concludes at Gateshead’s Glasshouse, is in support of his hypnotic new album Feeling Is Structure, which is released on Mesh Records on 8 May.
Cooper’s live set is renowned for its hypnotic atmosphere and conceptual clarity, drawing on themes of consciousness, connection, psychology and nature.
Nick Reed is the chair of Music Beyond Mainstream, a UK-wide network uniting ambitious music venues such as the Glasshouse to champion adventure, left-field live music. He said, “Max Cooper is a unique artist working at the nexus of music, art and science, and we are thrilled to be presenting his live show in some of the best independent concert halls in the country, many of which he will be visiting for the first time.”
Prior to his Glasshouse performance on 21 May, Cooper will also be hosting a masterclass and Q&A session at the venue this Saturday. The session will involve a deep dive into Cooper’s creative process, and a behind-the-scenes look at the technical challenges of creating his live shows.
Tickets to Max Cooper’s Feeling Is Structure concert at the Glasshouse on 21 May start at £31.30 and are available here. Tickets to his masterclass on 18 April are £5 and are available here.
Olivia Rodrigo: GUTS review – the rallying cry of a generation
Equally packed with punk rock instant classics and beautifully understated piano ballads, Olivia Rodrigo’s bravura second album is somehow fiercer, wittier and altogether even stronger than her Grammy-sweeping debut.
It takes about 52 seconds for the brilliance of Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘GUTS’ to hit. A delicately plucked acoustic guitar and sweet, almost whispered vocals abruptly give way to a clatter of drums and bratty, Avril Lavigne-esque vocals to match Rodrigo’s rage at ingrained misogyny. ‘All-American Bitch’ makes for a high-octane tone setter, landing with all the impulsive force of a teenager’s bedroom door slammed shut.
It’s a bracing opener for what should become one of the great pop-rock albums of the decade. Where her generally excellent debut record outstayed its welcome by wallowing in the same formative breakup, ‘GUTS’ sees Rodrigo venture (partly) beyond the world of misbehaving boys, in the process diving deep into the full-throttle punk music that lingered within the highlights of the debut. Gritty banger ‘Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl’ unleashes a torrent of lyrics before a restrained bridge that promptly collapses upon itself into an electrifying finale. ‘Making The Bed’ is just as eardrum-rupturing but artfully so, a wall of distortion enveloping Rodrigo as she painfully dissects the uglier consequences of her fulfilled wish to be a global superstar.
There’s plenty of depth in the ballads, too. ‘Lacy’’s production is strikingly pretty and ‘Logical’ features some of Rodrigo’s finest lyrics, skewering the “roses are red” formula in the chorus and describing “falling for you like water falls from the February sky”. The balladic jewel, however, is ‘Vampire’, a galloping tour de force with its heart-tugging chord progression and bell-clear belted high notes that cut through the mix like a hot knife through butter. A volley of slammed piano chords signals the end of the most enthralling three minutes of pop Rodrigo has produced to date.
Throughout ‘GUTS’, Rodrigo deals with the uncomfortable question of whether committing her entire young adult life as an actor for Disney was wise. It all comes to a head on satisfying closer ‘Teenage Dream’ with the desperate line “they all say that it gets better / but what if I don’t?”, a sentiment that must resonate with millions of Gen Z-ers afraid of not living up to high expectations as they enter the adult world. Therein lies the great magic trick of ‘GUTS’, an album that has the raw intensity of Rodrigo’s singular life experiences but also an uncanny ability to resonate with an entire generation. When Rodrigo sells out arena after arena on her upcoming tour, it will be wholly deserved.
Phoebe Bridgers: Lost Weekend review – blockbuster return will make you believe in magic
Phoebe Bridgers’ third album improbably lives up to the hype generated by her ingeniously orchestrated return to earth: a high-budget, detail-oriented showpiece about grief and hope packed with spectacular twists and turns. When it comes to indie folk, Bridgers really is on a planet of her own.
It started with a poster, discreetly pinned to a street wall in Roswell, New Mexico, quietly left for the world to discover. Ever since Bridgers almost single handedly spurned a new indie folk revival with pastoral debut Stranger in the Alps and otherworldly Covid-era hit Punisher, fans had received nothing but six years of radio silence (at least when it comes to Bridgers’ solo work – her supergroup boygenius with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker is a different story). Always a ghost-like presence on stage with her snow white hair and featherlight vocals, it seemed reasonable to assume that Bridgers had simply been abducted by aliens. Perhaps she had it coming after tempting fate wishing for a tractor beam to whisk her away on Chinese Satellite.
But something strange was afoot in Roswell. In the town that became infamous for a supposed UFO crash in 1947, a new conspiracy was whispered – Phoebe Bridgers was not to be found in a spaceship, but a 400-capacity town hall in middle America, armed with new songs and a system to confiscate smartphones at the doors, preventing leaks. Fans could hardly believe it. Next she popped up in Lubbock, Texas and Little Rock, Arkansas, and before long fans were feverishly taking to social media, drawing red lines on maps, forecasting state-sized regions with “high risk of Phoebe Bridgers” and sharing intel about the latest “sightings”. After a triumphant, and remarkably still leak-free, show in Madison Square Garden, Bridgers’ only televised performances of Lost Boys came with a band of children, then with a band of wizened old men. For a lead single about the beauty and tragedy of men who never really grow up, it was a typically surreal stroke of genius from Bridgers. Early listening parties for the new album at 34 planetaria worldwide, featuring a celestial dome show by Babak Tafreshi. And then, to top off one of the most memorable album roll outs of recent times, Bridgers literally moved heaven and earth to coordinate a superbly on-brand solar eclipse two days before release day. Bravo Phoebe, bravo.
As it happened, Bridgers hadn’t exactly vanished. She’d been struggling with writers block, the death of her father (already a complicated figure looming in Bridgers’ catalogue), and an abortive engagement with Paul Mescal. It took Damien Jurado’s wistful country song The Last Great Washington State to inspire Bridgers to write this album’s pivotal title track, which both shrugs at the Mescal affair (“I’m supposed to be married, but I called it off”) and subtly discloses grief with Bridgers’ typical wry self-deprecation (“I am learning the same lesson over and over again”). The atmospheric organ hum might sound like typically understated Bridgers ambience, but the finale is anything but – a sonic Jackson Pollock of twinkling mandolin, shattering drums and melting violins. It’s no wonder Bridgers can be heard panting in the middle of it all; it’s perhaps the most breathtaking moment of her career.
That ambition and full-throttle experimentalism can be found on virtually every track of Lost Weekend. Bridgers has certainly not spent recent years biding her time. Instead she’s assembled a small army of super-producers and collaborators for arguably 2026’s biggest blockbuster record. Jack Antonoff sounds a world away from the syrupy synth pop he churns out for Taylor Swift on the gorgeously detailed thrum of Panorama, and indie darling Alex G offers his considerable songwriting talents on the folky palate cleanser Haunted. Bridgers’ on-and-off partner Bo Burnham offers backing vocals on Never Going Back!, a fleeting campfire singalong about white-hot grief that recalls Burnham’s own cleverly subversive campfire folk pastiche That Funny Feeling. Her grief is not melancholy and morose as you might expect, but angry and indignant. “I can’t imagine you dead / But you are, every day” she sings bleakly on the heart-wrenching Still Standing. She is disbelieving, outraged by fate and unwilling for easy reassurances. “He’s not coming back as a bird,” she tells us in the closing track, as if pre-empting the listener’s search for a hopeful closing note.
But there is hope here if you care to search for it. Bridgers snaps a romantic polaroid picture during a shopping mall date in Liberty Tree, albeit a mall that is famously dilapidated and, as Bridgers called it in an interview, “Backrooms-y”. The glorious Bobby is about as close to a straightforwardly joyful love song she’s ever written, the melodies lush and fluent over a breezy mix of rattling drums, sunny guitars and trickling mandolin. Bridgers is now easily capable of ditching the songwriting stabilisers of the traditional verse-chorus structure – instead, all of Bobby feels like one uplifting extended chorus. She’s just as capable playing with form on slow-burner Kill Me, which erupts into life with a thunderclap of bass and a torrent of foreboding vocals from a certain Cameron Winter. It’s a song that distinguishes Bridgers from her winsome indie folk imitators more clearly than ever: no chart-topping artist in 2026 sounds remotely like this. Perhaps it will take the rest of the industry another six years to catch up with her.
Bridgers returns to her career-long motif of plane flights on highlight As Above, cleverly connecting that mode of transport’s oddities – no exits, a separation from the “real world” below, an ability to hop through time zones – with the grim reality that there’s no travelling back in time to save her dad, and there are no easy exits from grief. “You won’t have to believe in magic / Leave it to me and I’ll make it happen,” she belts in a spine-tingling, Imax-sized bridge. This whole album is a sort of magic, a sublimation of grief into beautiful art, 16 songs that inhabit an expansive world of their own. Perhaps Bridgers really did crash her UFO in Roswell. Perhaps she really did find herself amidst a Peter Pan-style troop of Lost Boys. Perhaps she will vanish once more. Whatever your doubts were about her, this remarkable album might just make you a true believer.
Dancing back in Tyne: flourishing folk dance night announces new spin-off
The monthly ceilidh held in the Lubber Fiend is the beating heart of Newcastle’s folk scene. Now the organisers announce a new night offering more dance and slightly less chaos.
It must be said that, viewed through drizzle on a dark autumn evening, the Lubber Fiend is not an immediately inviting venue. In fact, it’s little more than a tattered doorway leading to a creaky staircase, the dim light just enough to make out the ageing stickers that plaster the walls.
However, through the next door and – if you close your eyes at least – it’s like stepping into a buzzing medieval tavern. Above the sound of patrons laughing over beers, a band onstage plays a jig, the fiddles squealing furiously. In the centre of the room, it’s pure chaos: 50 or more attendees dancing in pairs to the music, spinning, hopping, clapping and oftentimes colliding. This is DIY Ceilidh, one of Newcastle’s most joyous, enthralling cultural experiences.
For the uninitiated, a ceilidh is a traditional Scottish and Irish social gathering, and a menace in the spelling bee (it’s pronounced KAY-lee). It’s essentially a folk music concert where each song begins with a ‘caller’ teaching basic choreography to the crowd, before stepping back and letting glorious mayhem ensue. It is not for the socially faint of heart – many dances will leave strangers paired up in an intimate ballroom hold – but the result is an overwhelming sense of togetherness in the crowd. A single dance with a new friend is less an icebreaker, more an ice-obliterator, and at DIY Ceilidh’s bustling monthly events, there is no shortage of new friends to be made.
“We’re probably one of the biggest regular ceilidhs in the UK right now,” co-founder Jo Feijó tells me over tea in a city centre café, sounding surprised himself at the huge success his event has seen in the two years since it launched. At one point last year the ceilidh became so popular there was almost no space left for dancing. “We never thought that would be a problem,” band leader Sam Baxter admits, recalling feeling “very stressed” when the organisation briefly employed a ticketing system. Today, the ceilidh is firmly pay-as-you-feel, with no minimum entry fee. “I’d like to work on increasing our inclusivity,” Baxter says, as if – lack of elevator aside – the ceilidh isn’t already one of the most wonderfully inclusive and welcoming social events I know.
The two of them have joined me to discuss an exciting new development for the DIY Ceilidh: a spin-off folk dance night spearheaded by Feijó. The night centres on the balfolk tradition, a form of dance that proliferated across Europe during the 1970s folk revival, whilst England remained stuck in its ways with its energetic reels and jigs (“jumpy stuff”, as Feijó calls it). “Balfolk is a lot quieter, a lot calmer, a lot more intimate,” Feijó, who fell in love with the art form whilst growing up in Portugal, tells me enthusiastically. “The level of intimacy and surrender that is allowed within balfolk is very different [to the ceilidh]. It’s very much: let’s just close our eyes and listen to the music for a bit.”
With a more elegant dance style comes a more elegant venue. Instead of the sticky floors of the Lubber Fiend, the balfolk night will be hosted in the tastefully decorated confines of the Black Swan, a venue tucked away in the basement of Newcastle Arts Centre, opposite NX on Westgate Road. To Feijó, it’s the perfect setting. “It’s really gorgeous – you can’t beat it. They’ve got a little staircase on the side and a balcony, so you can stand there and look down on all the dancing”. It promises to a be a calm, instructive evening of dance – he admits the dances are “a little bit more complex sometimes” – and a valuable alternative to the ceilidh, where a trip to the bar whilst a dance is underway can feel like going into battle.
One of the great joys of the DIY Ceilidh is the sheer quality of the music, which is performed live by as many musicians as can squeeze onto the stage. Along with Feijó’s dance expertise, the balfolk night features some members of the Hearken Quartet, a local band specialising in the rich and varied tradition of European folk music. Baxter largely credits the strength of Newcastle’s folk scene to the University’s Folk and Traditional Music degree, which for decades was the only degree-level folk music course in England. “Nearly everyone in the band has gone through the folk degree or is on the folk degree,” he tells me, which includes co-founder Frankie Insley and Baxter himself. Newcastle’s geography also plays a role. “Northumberland’s one of those places that hasn’t changed a lot. It’s very isolated and rural, and those are the perfect conditions for preserving oral traditions”. Being close to Scotland, where folk music degrees abound, also helps.
The new balfolk night is great news for the local folk scene, but DIY Ceilidh’s ambitions don’t end there. The dream is to host a two-day folk festival, as well as a series of ‘DIY Ceilidh presents…’ folk gigs aimed at sharing the success of DIY Ceilidh with the local folk scene. Crucially, everyone is welcome. “The ethos of DIY Ceilidh is that theoretically anyone can come and join the band. Anyone can call a dance,” Baxter says. What’s clear after my meeting with Feijó and Baxter is that DIY Ceilidh is borne out of pure passion for folk music far more than a desire for profit. “It’s a special thing,” Baxter remarks. “It’s delightful and we love it.”
DIY Ceilidh’s Balfolk Night: European Dance for Chill Folk launches on 21 November at the Black Swan at 6pm, pay as you feel on the door. The next ceilidh is on 9 November at the Lubber Fiend. For more info, see @diy.ceilidh on Instagram.
‘Every bandmate is infusing their tastes into this album’: seven-strong pop collective Couch on their funky debut record
After years of virtual band meetings and drumming up buzz online, Boston band Couch look set to take over the world with a debut album of polished, meticulously crafted pop bops and a sprawling 36-date tour. They spoke to Undertone about launching a band during the Covid years, their vulnerable new single, and the tricky task of making music with seven songwriters.
The pandemic did strange things to the music industry. On the one hand, we saw a fresh wave of what was giddily termed the 2020s’ “disco revival”. Jessie Ware, Róisín Murphy, Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa all released unequivocally dancefloor-primed records that perversely chimed with listeners trapped indoors all day, pining for a hedonistic escape and a return to the wonderfully unhygienic surroundings of a cramped and sweaty nightclub. On the other hand, the pandemic was a prompt for many artists to return to their roots with homespun, introspective album recorded with minimal equipment from home studios. Paul McCartney’s stripped-back McCartney III had the man himself play all the instruments, Charli xcx was in a reflective mood on how i’m feeling now, and Adrienne Lenker’s understated magnum opus songs was entirely recorded in a cabin in rural Massachusetts. As with seemingly many other aspects of society, such a radical change was only temporary: a few years after releasing her own folksy and minimalist albums folklore and evermore to critical acclaim, Taylor Swift is firmly back to her stadium-filling former self.
Couch, meanwhile, were biding their time, patiently plotting their route to stardom. Purveyors of soulful pop in the vein of Vulfpeck, Sammy Rae and Lake Street Dive, the seven-strong group specialise exactly the kind of free-spirited disco and funk tunes that topped the charts in 2020. For them, however, the pandemic (as well as attending various colleges across the States) meant it was three years of intermittent band meetups and FaceTime calls before the Bostonians finally took to the stage together for the first time.
That may sound tedious, but it was a blessing in disguise, keyboardist Danny Silverston tells me. “Once Covid hit, a lot of bands were like ‘man, what do we do now?’, but for us it was like ‘we actually kind of know what to do now’. We got to spend some really quality time together, and it set us up pretty effectively for our first ever tour, which was pretty much like a slam dunk.” Guitarist Zach Blankstein, who doubles as the band’s manager, agrees. “We had that remote incubation period where we got to share our music with people and start to feel some external excitement. Getting everyone [in the band] to make themselves available to go tour eventually was easy because we were all excited to go do it and felt like was a long time coming by that point.”
Silverston and Blankstein, as well as bassist Will Griffin, speak to me partway through a 16 hour drive back to Boston from Asheville, North Carolina, where they’ve just performed a charity show. The band may still be relatively new, but they’re no strangers to this sort of long-distance touring, and their first trip to the UK – an impressively full-throttle show which Undertone was lucky enough to catch – was over two years ago. For Griffin, touring and songwriting go hand in hand. “Something that feels best for us in the rehearsal space might feel totally different on stage. It opens up different opportunities to explore variations of arrangement styles and grooves.” In fact, Couch’s huge upcoming tour, which starts in November, was booked well before the new record was even fully written. Other times, though, it’s the finished song that comes first. “But they’re definitely very connected processes, no matter which order they happen,” Blankstein adds.
Perhaps it’s a sign of Couch’s easy-going, fluid approach to songwriting that, as Blankstein admits, the new album Big Talk isn’t even finished by the time of our interview. The band’s exceptional attention to detail, in particular with their knotty horn sections (see: Still Feeling You‘s wonderfully wiggly breakdown), no doubt slows down the writing process, but their emphasis on collaboration from all band members also partly explains the six year gap between their debut single and Big Talk. Whilst singer Tema Siegal takes the lead lyrically, musically the band takes a more democratic approach, taking turns as bandleaders and voting on creative choices. “On the one hand, I imagine it kind of slows us down,” Silverston says, “but it also means that the final product will really be Couch‘s debut, not like one or three individuals. It really feels like every single person in the band is infusing their tastes and sensibilities into the album.” It’s a key asset, Silverston says, that his bandmates don’t have identical, or even similar, musical tastes. “Jared [Gozinsky, drummer], for example, likes a lot of big band jazz stuff, which gets mixed with a few other band members who like more rock, heavy music. I think that difference is actually what makes songwriting so exciting, and where our growth can be seen the most.”
The first taste of this growth comes via the band’s slick new single What Were You Thinking, which winningly pits a tale of a romantic power imbalance against a sumptuous disco bass line and a silky smooth piano breakdown. The vulnerable lyrics and anthemic melodies make for an interesting contrast, I note to Blankstein. “Jeff [Pinsker-Smith, trumpeter] brought the demo that we all really liked and when Tema heard it she felt like it called for something a little angry,” he explains. “She had this story in her mind for a while […] and the energy she was feeling from the instrumental felt compatible with that story”. The result is a pop song that sounds simultaneously embittered and euphoric, matching Seigel’s snappy takedowns (“What were you thinking / Handling a heart of 20 years like that?”) with a sense that she’s emerged from the relationship with her sense of joy and self-confidence ultimately undimmed.
What Were You Thinking promises to be the highlight of Couch’s latest live offering, which will tour 36 cities across 11 countries from November to March. Fans can expect “most of, if not the entire new catalogue of music, plus some new arrangements of the older tunes that we’re really excited about,” says Blankstein. If it’s anything like their debut UK show in 2023 – which produced an electric atmosphere in Manchester’s Band on the Wall – it should be an memorable night of jubilant funk-pop singalongs. “We’re putting together a proper show to pay tribute to this album,” he concludes and, given the time and energy the whole band have put into Big Talk, there’s no doubt there’ll be plenty to love.
Couch’s debut album, Big Talk, is released on 24 October. Tickets for their US and Europe tour (including dates in Glasgow, Manchester, Bristol and London) are available here. Couch’s new single, What Were You Thinking, is out now.
Vulfpeck live at the O2 review – panto funk collective have the key to your heart
Performing a vanishingly rare UK arena show, the lovable funk group offered plenty of light-hearted musical delights for a bouyant O2 crowd, even in the absence of founding member Theo Katzman. Joey Dosik and Charles Jones were the standout soloists, whilst Jacob Jeffries’ juvenile skits were tedious for any concert-goer above the age of about seven.
Forget Sadiq Khan. For one night only, Joe Dart is the most powerful man in London. He strolls onto an empty stage at the O2 Arena, plays three notes on his bass guitar – rich, portentous, meaty – and pauses to allow a buoyant audience of thousands cheer back at him. Beneath his trademark shades, he exudes a statuesque cool. 100 minutes later he will look no different, again standing alone at centre stage as he rips into this evening’s climactic bass solo on Beastly, the bones in his fingers apparently becoming liquid as he accelerates into a chest-rattling final cadenza. In World Cup terms, it’s like we’re watching the Messi of bass guitar: unflappable, unhurried, and unfailingly brilliant in his chosen field.
Vulfpeck is arguably Joe Dart’s band, but the Michigan funk collective – my favourite band for most of my life, who hadn’t played in the UK since I discovered them in 2016 – are chock full of entertaining characters. Jack Stratton is the zany ringleader in a football shirt and Britney headset like an overenthusiastic PE teacher; Antwaun Stanley the old-school soul singer with ants in his pants; Joey Dosik the endearing basketball-obsessed lad next door; Cory Wong the pearly-toothed rhythm guitarist with never a hair out of place; Woody Goss the fabulously obtuse ornithologist and jazz piano nerd, chunky binoculars dangling from his neck even as he glides through another impeccable Rhodes solo. The big loss tonight is Theo Katzman, part kids entertainer, part spiritual guru, and a mainstay of Vulfpeck who has chosen to quit touring in the band in order to focus on his own (exceptional) singer-songwriter work.
It’s this marriage of these comedic characters with solid jazz know-how that makes Vulfpeck such an appealing prospect to so many. Here is a kids band that can rip through Jackson Five-esque Motown bangers, a joke act that also happens to include one of the world’s foremost bass guitar virtuosos. Concertgoers tonight age from seven to seventy. Stanley is central to that broad appeal, puppyishly bounding across the stage during an ecstatic 1612 and needing little excuse to orchestrate plenty of call-and-response with an audience all too willing to oblige. He finds some pathos amidst the relentless ad libs in a heart-melting Wait For the Moment, a song about not getting invited to a party that fittingly ends with a stunning extended solo from the introverted Goss, his improv questing from sleek baroque to angular jazz to barnstorming arena pop.
Vulfpeck are a motley crew of individuals, and songwriting quality in tonight’s set depends heavily on the songwriter. Stratton, perfect as an eccentric master of ceremonies, is a songwriter allergic to earnestness. 3 On E, his song about a generic funk bass line sounds, surprisingly enough, like a generic funk song, and tonight it comes with a pantomime routine where successive players refuse to end the song “until the groove is exhausted”. Indeed, exhausting is the word that comes to mind. This Is Not the Song I Wrote similarly tells the story of a terrible plagiarised pop song by reproducing just that, with no interest in altering the terrible bit; Jacob Jeffries’ autotuned chorus is an insult to the entire genre of pop music. Stratton does have great songs in him – Animal Spirits is a jubilant romp ably performed by Louis Cato, taking the unenviable task of replacing Katzman – but even here you have to accept that the lyrics are broadly meaningless (“Twitter on your telly / Ramen in your belly / Economics” reads the finale).
Perhaps it’s just as well that Stratton’s bandmates and co-songwriters are taking things more seriously, then. Tonight’s standout performer, Joey Dosik, delivers a stunning rendition of his lovelorn ballad Running Away, and his infectious funk bop LAX is perfectly pitched: a lighthearted song about being picked up from the airport that is both genuinely witty (“Bought you something back from a distant land / She bought fajitas from the taco stand”) and superbly catchy. Stanley and Jeffries are on hand as hilariously choreographed backing vocalists, and Dosik impressively makes a split-second switch from lead vocals to saxophone for a delightfully raspy finale.
Imperious organist Charles Jones has a similarly impressive turn in the spotlight with his soulful gem Baby I Don’t Know Oh Oh, before a strikingly poignant organ rendition of gospel standard I Won’t Complain. It’s a world away from the work of Jacob Jeffries tonight, who offers a song called Mango Chutney that involves using his buttocks for percussion, and a performance of How Much Do You Love Me? that sounds like a mosquito buzzing around somewhere inside your inner ear canal. He precedes the former song with a skit about being too shy to play. “Perhaps this one should just stay in my living room,” he says, and you end up wishing he wasn’t joking.
On the face of it, Dean Town is an improbable closing number for any arena act: a pastiche of Weather Report’s Teen Town that comprises a complex 16-bar through-composed bass melody and no real hooks to speak of. For some reason, though, it’s a universal fan favourite. Perhaps it’s something in Dart’s flawless bass playing, or Stratton’s insistent disco drumming, or the synchronicity of Goss and Wong, who also play the bass line in lock-step unison. Whatever the reason, the O2 sings every note of that sinuous, restless jazz fusion melody, and the crowd continues to bellow the opening four notes as they stream out towards North Greenwich station ten minutes later. It’s nonsensical, it’s silly, it’s oddly euphoric. It’s Vulfpeck.
RPO/Petrenko at the Glasshouse review – high octane Shostakovich sets the heart racing
Tom Borrow’s solidly unassuming rendition of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto was a little heavy-handed, but nonetheless a worthy scene-setter for Shostakovich’s whirlwind Tenth Symphony, a timely piece about Stalin’s authoritarian regime that sounded viscerally shocking under Vasily Petrenko’s assured baton.
It’s not immediately clear that Tom Borrow realises what’s going on. He strolls out onto the stage of a rammed Glasshouse, weaving between a forest of microphone stands (a BBC Radio 3 recording is forthcoming, as one excited concertgoer later tells me in the interval) before plonking himself on the piano stool and hunching back patiently as the opening orchestral strains of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 creak into gear. This should be a moment of dignified poise, but instead his demeanor is more like he’s comprehending bashing out a bit of The Winner Takes It All at his local train station piano, one foot tucked underneath his stool as if anticipating a mad rush for the 1532 to Carlisle.
Luckily, it turns out Borrow is happy to linger this time, doling out the concerto’s famous opening refrain with occasional cursory glances to his side as if he’s only just noticed the 80-piece Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in full flow beside him. His demeanor may be a little dazed and confused, his playing is anything but: Tchaikovsky’s spine-tingling, filmic introduction is given the robust treatment it deserves, Borrow’s soaring top line every bit a match for the graceful flock of violins that soar alongside him. It is a powerful start, but also an open goal for Borrow and RPO’s resident conductor Vasily Petrenko – this is the sort of uncomplicated, straight-to-the-heart pop-classical material that is quite difficult to ruin with a poor rendition.
The bigger challenge for Petrenko and Borrow was to make sense of the subsequent 30 minutes. Bafflingly, that opening refrain leaves and never returns – perhaps one reason why Tchaikovsky’s first choice of pianist detested the concerto so much he pointedly refused to play it – and instead the composer proceeds with a smorgasbord of tangentially related ideas. Tonight Borrow is the anchor, wave after wave of notes sweeping up the full length of the keyboard like curtains of rain. There are glimpses of tenderness in his rendition of the delectable middle movement – caressing some delicate, wind chime-like arpeggios in the upper register during one particularly crystalline moment of calm – but there’s a sense Borrow is really just here for that rollicking third movement. When he gets there, he leaps onto the sprightly, folky refrain with boyish enthusiasm, shuffling impatiently in his seat in between each knotty burst of notes. In the end, perhaps it all gets a little too much – a heavy sustain pedal muddies the water somewhat in some of his mazy runs, and he finds himself rushing ahead of Petrenko in the lightning quick finale, the concerto collapsing in on itself. It’s a slightly fluffed finish but Borrow’s face doesn’t show it as he takes three seperate curtain calls, then begins Bach’s famous Sheep may safely graze for a refreshingly un-virtuosic encore, Borrow’s considerable talent as a concert pianist shown not in the technical difficulty of the piece, but his knack for shining light on the inner voices hidden behind the ringtone-worthy refrain.
The main meat of tonight’s programme, though, comes after the interval. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony was the first he wrote after the death of Stalin, at last free of the fatal risk that the dictator would deem his new music too ‘bourgeoisie’ for Soviet society, an extreme artistic restriction the composer had contended with – and occasionally fallen foul of – his entire career. Shostakovich himself insisted that the Tenth was a no-holds-barred account of the erstwhile Stalin regime, a shapeshifting blur of jagged melodies and haunting motifs that reflected on the immense terror and brutality of the preceding 30 years of Russian history. Tonight’s performance could hardly feel more timely – it’s conducted by a Russian and preceded by an Israeli pianist, but it’s the emerging American regime that feels most obviously reflected in RPO’s repertoire choice.
As a stark reminder of just how bad authoritarian regimes can get, Petrenko and his orchestra stated their warning more powerfully than any formal speech or collection of facts could. This is a symphony you feel in your gut. At times the rabid strings evoke a panic attack, the violinists wielding their bows like daggers, which often audibly slap against the instrument’s body, such is the ferocity of RPO’s attack. Brass blares, double basses brood, and the percussion section often deafens, the xylophone punctuating every fresh onslaught of strings. Stephen Quigley is the lynchpin on the symphonic gong, an overwhelming presence during the fortissimo passages but ghostlike and wispy for the symphony’s many quiet back alleys of intrigue. Lesser conductors might be inclined to throw their arms wildly and leap from the podium in the midst of Shostakovich’s Stalinist storms, but Petrenko admirably keeps a lid on things, well aware that this symphony is about much more than just shock factor. As a result, the minimalistic quiet sections also sound sickeningly intense, every moment of tranquility paired with the sense that a monster is always lurking just around the corner. The only blemish in Petrenko’s measured approach is perhaps how he handles the lurid marching band that shoulders its way into the third movement, a moment of provocative black humour from Shostakovich, but tonight too understated and slow to be the sardonic grin at the waning Soviet Union it ought to be.
The odd thing about Shostakovich’s Tenth – a symphony expressly intended to condemn the hubris of one very powerful man – is how egotistical it is. Shostakovich’s signature motif used throughout his career (which follows the initials of his name: D-Es-C-H, or D-Eb-C-B to me and you) pops up more and more in the final two movements. Tonight Petrenko keeps it insistent and unmissable; the earworm still loops around in my head as I leave the venue. In the narrative of the Tenth Symphony, Shostakovich casts himself as the hero (alongside his female pupil Elmira Nazirova, who also gets an initials-based motif) triumphing over the powers that be with this signature motif that comes to dominate the entire orchestra in the audacious finale. Whether it’s a moving symbol of individual victory over a soulless regime or a moment of hyprocritical hubris depends on your point of view. Still, it’s hard not to be awed by RPO’s delivery. Triangles trill, strings scintillate, the timpani sound like a rocket taking off. After 53 minutes of musical terror, this is our two minutes of giddy jubilation. With a final flick of the wrist Petrenko summons a final skywards lurch from the strings, the brass roaring, all five percussionists hammering away at their respective instruments. It’s thunderous, but the applause is louder still. This symphony had been not just thought-provoking and timely, but also simply a feast for the ears.
