Skip to main content

Terry Riley review – father and son deliver gleefully chaotic minimalism

Oval Space, London
The composer, aided by guitarist son Gyan, sounds like Bach doing bebop during this series of joyously ramshackle improvisations

For half a century, Terry Riley has found himself filed alongside fellow American composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass and John Adams, whose minty-fresh minimalism sounds as if it has been plotted out on graph paper. Riley’s music is, in the best possible way, often much messier than that of his peers, and it seems to have become even more gleefully chaotic in recent years. The minimalist rigour is there, but it has been warped and reshaped by Riley’s multiple interests, not least his love of Indian ragas, Balinese gamelan, west African percussion and jazz. It reminds us why the Who’s Pete Townshend, a fan of Riley’s work, once said “the only thing minimal about Riley’s music is the limitation of the audience”.

Tonight’s show is as close to a jazz performance as you’re likely to see by Riley, or indeed any other contemporary music composer. Riley shares the stage with his guitarist son Gyan Riley, collaborating in a series of loose improvisations. It is as joyously ramshackle as this venue, which resembles a large scout hut that has been painted white to convert it into an art gallery.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2LE4GfR
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more