Reviews
MUSIC
Stereophonics Hydro, Glasgow JJJ There’s a relentlessness about the Stereophonics both on stage and in their career. Now 26 years on from the point when singer and guitarist Kelley Jones, bassist Richard Jones and their original drummer, the late Stuart Cable, started playing together in their home town of Cwmaman, the current version of the band’s energy for what they do and the enthusiasm of their fans roars on unabated.
In efficient, professional fashion, where many of their early contemporaries have folded or weathered critical storms, the never entirely fashionable but always dependable Stereophonics have battered out ten albums, only one of which has landed outside the UK top ten.
This means they’ve built a back catalogue which allows them to largely fill a two-hour set with tracks which even casual fans will be familiar with, from the wistful Maybe Tomorrow to the catchy if lyrically slim More Life in a Tramp’s Vest and Mr Writer to a charged closing trio of their most emotive signature hits Local Boy in the Photograph, A Thousand Trees and The Bartender and the Thief (although the appearance of a chorus of Motorhead’s Ace of Spades amid the last may have been trying too hard).
With the Hydro apparently as full as it gets and the odd arena-scale trick employed – a breakout set on a satellite stage, stripped-back acoustic tracks from Kelley, the Spinal Tappish appearance of Scots drummer Jamie Morrison on a kit ascending from the ground during Mr and Mrs Smith – the real enjoyment came from the ebullient efficiency with which the now-quintet played and the enduring power in Jones’ blues-flavoured vocal.
After all this time there’s clearly a lot of nostalgia to their appeal but they bridge the gap between their glory days and the present better than most.
DAVID POLLOCK
MUSIC
Rich Hall’s Hoedown Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh JJJJ As a cultural ambassador for the US, Rich Hall has become the sort of hard-gigging, craggy troubadour he so venerates in Willie Nelson and so disparages in Bob Dylan, an American icon whose diminishing returns from endless touring leaves the comic feeling furiously short-changed.
Happily for fans of the worldweary Hall, though, while there’s a sizeable chunk of classic material here, especially in hilarious songs such as Rose of Hawick, with his setlist tailored to a Scottish audience, the new material is vital and incredulously angry.
Split into a half of stand-up and another of country tunes with his band, Hall, who lives in Montana for most of the year, promises himself that he’ll ease into the Donald Trump jokes, a pledge he splutteringly reneges on less than five minutes into the night.
The recurring cycle of gun violence, hand-wringing and inaction allows him to be topical with sharp, well-honed observations, as does the US class system of wealth and Stateside stupidity generally, though he arguably misrepresents the NRA’S position on video game influence to set up some highly amusing despair about the power of cartoon animals to sell insurance.
Hall has some gnarled skin in the game here, as his loss of Obamacare health coverage under Trump coincides with a major scare for him, the visual image of him hanging on for a life-or-death diagnosis while a nurse toys with her lunch the highpoint of an engrossing, personal tale that’s beautifully told. Some compelling insight into the rough and smooth of his marriage too presages the droll, bittersweet songs to come.
JAY RICHARDSON
CLASSICAL
RSNO Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow JJJ I’m guessing it was a dedicated labour of love for Yale musicologist Paul Haukshaw to undertake the arduous task of revising Bruckner’s epic Symphony No8, basing his version on original 1887 manuscripts, therefore undoing the various revisions that Bruckner himself, and later Leopold Nowak, made to the original.
Haukshaw’s edition, unveiled in a Yale performance last year, was presented to us over the weekend by the RSNO under its music director Peter Oundjian. There are noticeable differences from the version we are used to, but by and large the skeletal chunks – those hefty, powerdriven granite-like motifs or, as in the central Adagio, those moments of timeless, ethereal bliss – remain unchanged in content and context.
The trouble with this performance was that it lived only for moments. In the course of Oundjian’s 80-minute discourse I found myself enthralled for short periods – the exultant culmination of the Scherzo, the dense sonorities of the start and finish of the Adagio, the final fiery exhilaration of the entire symphony, to name a few – but equally felt let down by long tracts of dullness and lack of joined-up thought.
Oundjian has a habit of concentrating on the day-to-day management of the beat, rather than standing back, gesturing the big picture and leaving the musicians to respond instinctively. That’s what this performance needed.
In the opening half, pianist Christian Blackshaw’s crisp, clean playing of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K503 was a refreshing preface to the thickset Bruckner.
KEN WALTON
JAZZ Scottish National Jazz Orchestra: Peter and the Wolf/carnival of the Animals Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh JJJJJ Having cast transformational brilliance over Mozart’s 9th piano concerto, how would the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, directed by saxophonist Tommy Smith and guest pianist Makoto Ozone, handle these two much-loved popular classics? In the event they pulled off a double bill that combined virtuosity and ingenuity with unadulterated theatricality.
Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf – Liz Lochhead’s Scots translation narrated with eye-rolling loquaciousness by Tam Dean Burn – followed the established plot (though with a contemporary closing twist) but with Smith’s arrangements bringing bigband swing as well as vivid jazz colouring to the tale.
Ozone’s piano embodied Peter, the wolf emerged via a malevolently growling
trombone trio, while Tom Macniven’s mute trumpet channelled the plaintively parping duck.
It was a delightful collision between folk tale and big-band swing with a fair dash of panto, but Ozone’s orchestration of Saint-saëns’s “zoological fantasy” allowed soloists to really open out, with saxophonist Konrad Wiszniewski pulling a soulful break out of the languorous can-can of Tortoises, clarinettist Martin Kershaw morphing potentially clichéd cuckooing into a lyrical serenade and joining fellow reedsmanpaultowndrowinanathletic Kangaroo duet.
Ozone accelerated into gleeful boogie-woogie for Pianists (clearly designated a taxonomical class of their own), Fossils were re-animated with audaciously Cuban brio and that staple cello solo The Swan saw Smith’s tenor sax dialoguing with flautist Yvonne Robertson and gliding inventively, before a serious drum solo and sparring trombones brought this uniquely colourful carnival to a close.
JIM GILCHRIST