Sir Paul puts on a five-star show
Music
Sir Paul Mccartney
SSE Hydro
Stacey Mullen
*****
THE Hydro has now had its greatest night thanks to Sir Paul Mccartney
– or at least that’s what it felt like.
Legend after legend has played the venue since it opened five years and while there is no denying that all those shows were special, Friday night with The Beatles star is always going to be difficult to surpass.
Opening up with A Hard Days Night, the atmosphere was electric as he performed a piece of rock n’roll history on the Hydro stage.
He then teased: “Good evening Glasgae! We are going to have a bit of fun here tonight.”
And boy did he deliver on that promise.
A mixture of The Beatles hits, Wings classics and solo material helped compile a set list featuring some of the greatest songs ever made.
Oozing charisma, Mccartney rocked as hard as his younger self to perform I’ve Got A Feeling, before taking to the piano for the Wings’ Let ‘Em In. He then joked, “The Postcode Lottery song,” recognising the commercial success the track has had in recent years.
He might be 76 but there was no sign of his age except when it came to showing off his skills as a seasoned performer. The veteran star even proved that the decades of stage shows have been kind to his vocals, which sounded exactly the way you would expect on all the classics.
Mccartney’s music has a worldwide reach – something he pointed out as he said hello to his fans from Japan. He also joked that a superfan “must be loaded” as he revealed the man had been to 120 of his shows. It’s that audience interaction that makes Mccartney likeable and, more importantly, a British icon.
A performance of Queenie Eye had the audience captivated as the big screen showed A-list stars including Kate Moss, Johnny Depp and Chris Pine dancing to the music.
While Lady Madonna and Eleanor Rigby ramped up the atmosphere, Something was simply stunning as Mccartney paid tribute to George Harrison.
And that was just the start of the hits during a show, which lasted three hours.
Let It Be was a moment to remember, while Live And Let Die set the fireworks off, literally.
Hey Jude took the roof off the
Hydro before Birthday, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Wonderful Christmastime rounded off the show in style.
Arise Sir Paul, you have just been crowned king of the Hydro.
Theatre
Kinky Boots
The Playhouse, Edinburgh
Neil Cooper
****
IT’S A man’s world all right in downtown Northampton, where Charlie Price has just inherited a family business he never asked for in Harvey Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper’s award-winning Broadway musical, which arrives in Edinburgh this week for the festive party season as part of its first UK tour.
A trip to London to try and offload an excess of sensible shoes changes everything when Charlie accidentally bumps into Lola, a drag queen nightclub diva whose high heels can’t quite take the strain, and Price and Son becomes a very different business as Charlie’s ideals take a sassier turn.
With roots in a real life incident and a subsequent feature film, on one level Fierstein and Lauper’s leather-clad yarn is the latest stage musical rooted in a very British post-industrial fall-out and hot off a production line spearheaded by Brassed Off and
Billy Elliot.
Like them, Jerry Mitchell’s production is also about family, community and acceptance of those who may not fit in with the accepted norm.
Throw in Charlie’s upwardly mobile girlfriend Nicola and a slick-talking developer attempting to convert the shoe factory into luxury flats, and given recent efforts by real-life property magnates to do something very similar to long-standing businesses on Leith Walk, and this feels very current indeed.
Joel Harper-jackson as Charlie and Kayi Ushe as Lola lead a highstepping company through a stream of song and dance routines that reveal the mismatched pair as kindred spirits in a world of old-school prejudice.
Ushe in particular belts out
Lauper’s mix of heart-on-sleeve pop-art vignettes with soulful largesse, infectious sass and emotionally grounded oomph, and there is a fine duet with Harper-jackson on Not My Father’s Son.
The ensemble numbers are heightened even more by the glittery showers of showbiz pizazz brought into play by Lola’s troupe of all-male Angels, who strut their stuff on the catwalk to save the day in this most deliciously non-binary of musicals hand-crafted with a common touch.
Music
The John Wilson Orchestra
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Keith Bruce
****
THERE is a peculiar skill to talking from the podium and every conductor who is good at it has their own individual style. John Wilson’s plain North East England way of speaking combines informed authority with a camp wit that speaks to generations of movie devotees. Although we hear less of that at the City Halls, we are fortunate to see him at work regularly as Associate Guest Conductor with the BBC SSO, but his own orchestra is something else again on the soundtrack music that reliably fills our concert halls.
The SSO has its own Christmas concert of movie music at the City Halls in 10 days and the links between the two included principal flute Charlotte Ashton filling that position in this edition of the JW band.
It is a studio-ready outfit of pin-sharp players with a star first trumpet in Mike Lovatt, even if the rest of the big band brass did not have enough of the spotlight in this programme.
It did, however, tick a few of the boxes that were conspicuously left untouched in the RSNO’S recent Varese-sarabande label celebration, with glorious early scores such as Franz Waxman’s for The Philadelphia Story, Arthur Schwartz’s Girl Hunt Ballet from The Band Wagon, and a suite of Max Steiner’s music for Now Voyager. The latter was introduced with a typical Wilson line about the sexual mores of 1942, which would be around the date of conception of many in the audience.
Sole vocalist on this tour is Londondomiciled American Kim Criswell, somewhat unflatteringly introduced for her range of impressions. While undoubtedly adaptable, she is most convincing at the Judy Garland end of the spectrum. Her voice was most peculiarly amplified here, however, especially at the start of the night, with more added reverberation than necessary for the hall. Her take on Funny Girl’s Don’t Rain On My Parade was nonetheless the evening’s reliable showstopper.
Mr Mcfall’s Chamber
City Halls Recital Room, Glasgow Keith Bruce
****
FOR the final programme of its At Home In A Foreign Land season of concerts, Robert Mcfall’s eclectic chamber ensemble was often on familiar musical territory, but the thematic landscape, exploring the links between composers who made their reputations far from home, was as carefully defined as in all the concerts that have preceded it. The softly-spoken violinist was characteristically fascinating as he introduced works covering three centuries, by the mature Mozart, precocious teenager Felix Mendelssohn and tango-master
Astor Piazzolla, highlighting the latter’s shared – and Boulanger-nurtured – affinity with Bach.
All three were also, of course, masters of melody, and the Piano Quartet in G Minor contains some of Mozart’s best known chamber music tunes. With Mcfall himself in the leader’s chair, unusually, and pianist Graeme Mcnaught a little over-loud at the start, it took a while to find a good balance, but concluded as a vibrant celebration of a work that came towards the end of a happy purple patch of the composer’s life.
Mcfall moved to viola, alongside Brian Schiele, for the unusuallyscored sextet by the 15-year-old Mendelssohn, regular Rick Standley coming in on bass behind cellist Su-a Lee and Cyril Garac the first violin.
The combination made for a very rich ensemble sound in the space, with some radical switches of tempo and rhythm as the work develops.
Although not in form, in content it is almost a piano concerto in miniature, and hugely demanding of the pianist. With a much better balance between keyboard and strings, Mcnaught was on magnificent form in what is a very challenging work.
The same instrumentation, with Mcfall back on second fiddle, played his arrangements of Piazzolla after the interval – and this is repertoire for which his group have few competitors. As well as Bach, there are other baroque echoes in Autumn from the composer’s take on the seasons, but it is also not too fanciful to hear an affinity with King Crimson – whose repertoire Mcfall’s has also visited – in Piazzzolla’s way with a Fugue.
BBC Sso/chauhan City Halls, Glasgow Keith Bruce
*****
ALTHOUGH their backgrounds could hardly be more different, British conductor Alpesh Chauhan and Spanish cellist Pablo Ferrandez are of the same generation and have an established musical relationship at the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini in Parma where Chauhan is Principal Conductor. The soloist had that advantage for his debut with the BBC Scottish, as well as the choice of Dvorak’s perennially popular concerto to play, which was the likely explanation for a full house for Thursday afternoon’s performance, broadcast live on Radio 3.
Ferrandez produced a classy take on the work too, full of attack at the start but with a gentler tone on the baroque sound of the second movement and bringing real passion to the duet with leader Laura Samuel in the finale. A hymn-like encore from the repertoire of his namesake and countryman Pablo Casals followed. Chauhan is a cellist himself, and his affinity with the piece was as evident, with a lovely blend of the winds at the start and beautifully balanced horns and low strings later.
The Second Symphony of Jean Sibelius is spiritual music of profound depth, and has the cello section at its heart throughout. The SSO’S was on fine form here, and Chauhan’s reading was alive to the drama of the work, as at the Vivacissimo start of the third movement, but at its finest on the slower sections, like the majestic beginning of the second movement. The SSO’S string sound was sumptuous and again the winds were on top form, with first trumpet Mark O’keeffe also making a beautifully poised contribution.
The programme began with one of the most successful commissions by the BBC Proms of recent years, Anna Clyne’s Masquerade, conducted on the Last Night of the 2013 season by Marin Alsop, whose style on the podium Chauhan’s sometimes resembles. A vibrant and colourful evocation of the experience of the Proms themselves, it is, naturally, a showcase for what the machine that is an orchestra can do.