Beginning like a mashup of Oskar’s shenanigans in Günter Grass’s Tin Drum and the gently crass lyrics of 1940s band Spike Jones and the City Slickers, the autobiography of Berlin-born jazz guitarist Coco Schumann reflects prosaic insight into the European Holocaust. It gives life to the adage […]
THE SCENE IS set for something utterly extraordinary. Quietude pervades. There’s a tight row of wooden crosses, standing plunged into the ground. And the riffs of sound filter through the space, subtly at first and then with richer resonance. You’re on high alert. You don’t know what might […]
HE SITS AT the piano and caresses it into life, like a god. Like a demon. Like a godly demon or a demonic god. Sometimes he looks maniacal and deformed at other times, like a sprite, who could at any moment leap the constraints of gravity and fly away. […]
HEAD OF PIANO at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Joanna MacGregor (b. 1959) knew from her early childhood that piano was her first love. Prior to her arrival in Johannesburg, she responded to questions from My View about the flamboyance and fierceness but also the humour of […]
MUSIC WASN’T THE first life choice of this year’s Composer in Residence for the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival. It was physics. Indeed, Neo Muyanga (b. 1974), calls music the mistress he serves under duress. He told My View about music’s grammar, 14th century madrigals and what ‘folk’ means, as […]
IT’S NOT EVERY day that you’re privileged enough to see a staging of 17th century madrigals with real Baroque instruments played on a major Johannesburg stage. It’s also not every day that you get to see Monteverdi translated into isiZulu in the surtitles, with the timelessness of his tales […]
A MEDLEY OF songs is a curious thing. It’s a bit like a Reader’s Digest compilation: enough to get your heart racing with nostalgia, but not enough to include every word. It’s a tight juxtaposition of hits that doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive, and yet the cohesive whole […]
WHICHEVER WAY YOU approach his work, Nataniël is a phenomenon: a very specifically South African phenomenon who approaches the idea of self-love out of the proverbial left field. His shows are unashamedly formulaic in their construction but there’s a magic ingredient to each of them that keeps you focused […]
“PLATO SAID TEACH your children music because that way they will learn all the patterns of existence,” says composer Rexleigh Bunyard, who not only sees music in different colours, but she dreams it too. “I don’t think there’s anything supernatural about this. I think this about your psyche […]
BRITISH MUSIC CRITICS describe Italian pianist Alessandro Taverna (33) as the natural successor to Italy’s Arturo Beneditti Michelangeli (1920-1995) who arguably headlined the 20th century in pianistic skill and verve. Since winning the prestigious Minnesota International Piano Competition in 2009, Venice-born Taverna’s career has taken off exponentially, with awards, […]
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