Friday, April 25, 2014
London Symphony Orchestra & Dhafer Youssef, Barbican, review: 'an unmitigated horror'
Real religion has often inspired great music. But that pleasantly woozy sense of something spiritual "out there", which nowadays passes for religion, tends to inspire only numbing clichés - as this dire concert showed. Picture a darkened concert hall, filled with ululating vocal sounds portending a vaguely Eastern mystical realm, floating on a nice soft cushion of orchestral strings, and you'll have the measure of it.
The ululations came from star Tunisian singer and oud player Dhafer Youssef. Before he appeared we heard two purely orchestral pieces which invited us to sit up straight in the light, rather than day-dream in the dark. Both were by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, whose brand of slow, reverent minimalism has become one of the unexpected hits of recent decades. His piece Fratres, played here in the version for percussion and strings, is as hard and stark as an Egyptian stele.
At least it should be. Unfortunately the conductor Kristjan Järvi tried to emphasise the music's "spiritual" quality by stretching the pulse, and making each chord blend with the next. As a result the piece lost its mysterious aloofness and came perilously close to being rather ordinary mood music. Then came Pärt's 3rd Symphony, composed some years earlier. His signature style isn't yet discernible, but the music's granitic oppositions of plainchant, chorale and cavernous silences are certainly impressive. Like Fratres it needs a stark, unsentimental approach, but Jarvi couldn't resist turning it into a soap opera.
REVIEW: Arvo Pärt: Total Immersion, Barbican
Then Youssef appeared on the now-darkened stage, alongside the LSO and Youseff's own jazz-flavoured quartet of piano, electric guitar, bass and drums. Youssef has a pleasingly clear light voice, just right for the quavering ornaments of Middle Eastern music. Unfortunately he's a massively self-indulgent musician who spoils everything by exaggeration and showing off. To resort once or twice to that desperately hackneyed film-score trick of adding digital echoes to his voice, as a way of suggesting vast horizons, would be bad enough. Youssef did it all the time.
His most irritating trick was soaring up to the soprano region, which he did at every opportunity. Youssef's playing on the oud was dull, without any of the microtonal inflections which normally make that instrument such a joy to hear. The LSO, as always with these cross-over events, was reduced to the humiliating status of a backing band. It was really an unmitigated horror.
REVIEW: Music in Colour, London Symphony Orchestra
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/39c16f11/sc/38/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Cmusic0Cclassicalconcertreviews0C10A787950A0CLondon0ESymphony0EOrchestra0Eand0EDhafer0EYoussef0EBarbican0Ereview0Ean0Eunmitigated0Ehorror0Bhtml/story01.htm
