Cultural Elsewhere
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RICHARD NUNNS AND TAONGA PUORO (2019): Sounds from darkness into the light
12 Sep 2019 | 6 min read
On Waiheke, one of the islands in the Waitemata Harbour of Auckland, there is a remarkable private museum of musical instruments. It is exceptional in one key detail. As many would know, museums lovingly curate their instruments in glass cases and protect them closely. Sometimes too closely. At a museum in Rome I was once followed by a small and seemingly angry guard who would jump... > Read more
Te Aho Ku, by Hirini Melbourne, Richard Nunns, Aroha Yates-Smith
Chris Gendall: Tones (Rattle)
9 Jun 2019 | 1 min read
Elsewhere never lied to you, we announced ourselves as an “ever-expanding on-line magazine for people curious about new music, different travel, interesting arts and much more”. This album of contemporary chamber music by the award-winning composer Chris Gendall (a graduate of Victoria Uni, doctoral degree from Cornell, more recently Mozart Fellow at Otago Uni) is firmly for... > Read more
Suite 4: Bagatelle
Bella Hristova and Michael Houstoun: Beethoven; The Violin Sonatas (Rattle)
16 May 2019 | 1 min read
Sometimes just because we can, Elsewhere makes a courageous leap into the world of contemporary classical music because – in part – that is where we grew up; La Monte Young, Reich, Glass, Nyman et al. But The Serious Old Big Stuff – like Beethoven's violin sonatas, which we have sometimes/occasionally heard and enjoyed in small doses – we leave to the... > Read more
Adagio Espressivo
JEWISH MUSIC ON THE MARCH (2018): Soviet resistance songs of the Second World War
26 Nov 2018 | 4 min read
The unwelcome rise of right wing and overtly neo-Nazi groups across Europe, South America, South Africa and in the US seems inexplicable to decent folk, and more so to those with a grasp of history. But cowardice and anger is given strength when it finds company and these groups which attack the weak and often easily identified – notably immigrant people and Jews – draw their... > Read more
Shpatsir in Vald/A Walk in the Forest
MORE PROVOCATIONS OF RATTLES (2018): Elsewhere, classical, jazz and further elsewhere
6 Jul 2018 | 4 min read
As recently as April – just three months ago – Elsewhere acknowledged not just the quality of recordings on Auckland's contemporary music label Rattle, but the sheer number of albums it is releasing. As we had done in August 2017, we pulled a bunch of them together in a single column (as we are going to do here) but would also note that between times we had also reviewed many... > Read more
A PROVOCATION OF RATTLES (2018): Digressions, sojourns, shadows and sonorous sounds
10 Apr 2018 | 4 min read
If it is a murder of crows and a clowder of cats, why not “a provocation of rattles” to describe a bunch of new contemporary music releases on the Rattle label? Rattle out of Auckland has become the preeminent label for improvised music (aka jazz) and contemporary music (aka classical) as well as holding the banner high for taonga puoro (traditional Maori instruments, often in... > Read more
ROBERT FREEMAN PHOTOGRAPHER: CREATING AN ICONIC ALBUM COVER (2018): Moody, unsmiling and With the Beatles
28 Feb 2018 | 2 min read
When Elsewhere wrote about the 1965 album Take A Heart by the British group the Sorrows, we noted the cover image and said you could probably pick the year just by looking at it. It was, as we wrote (with supporting images) very much one of the many which were a trickle-down of Robert Freeman's classic cover for With the Beatles which appeared in November '64. That stark image was so... > Read more
LEONIE HOLMES AND EVE DE CASTRO-ROBINSON CONSIDERED (2018): Classical, contemporary and beyond . . .
5 Feb 2018 | 4 min read
Leonie Holmes and Eve de Castro-Robinson would seem to have much in common. Both are composers, both are lecturers in composition at the University of Auckland's School of Music, both have had their works performed widely and have CDs released on Atoll, and both . . . And here the thread runs out, because each works in very separate idioms within the broad church of what we call... > Read more
VOLUME SOUTH AT MIT (2018): The songs and stories from the streets
2 Feb 2018 | 3 min read
The Volume: Making Music in Aotearoa exhibition -- seven decades of New Zealand popular music -- which ran at the Auckland museum from late 2016 to May 2017 was an extraordinary success. It had more than 200,000 visitors – in excess of the museum's predictions – and a younger demographic came, and people spent more time in it than for other... > Read more
LINZI NAPIER PROFILED (2018): The colouring of art and imagination
29 Jan 2018 | 2 min read
Those Elsewhere readers who have seen our pages and reviews of the music of Leeds-based multi-discipline artist Chris Wade (who goes by the name Dodson and Fogg) know that we frequently refer to the cover illustrations by his partner Linzi Napier. Her colourful paintings invite the viewer in, but also possess the suggestion of something else going on. Many of her works capture... > Read more
THE OLD ARCHITECTURE OF OSLO (2017: Headlong into the past . . .
20 Nov 2017 | 1 min read | 1
Previously Elsewhere has offered a three-part series of images of the breathtaking and cutting edge -- but human-scale -- new architecture of Oslo, the capital of Norway. But the city also has its older areas around the centre . . . although admittedly many buildings are undergoing gentrification because the new architecure has brought a younger demographic into those areas for the... > Read more
THE GENIUS OF ZAHA HADID (2017): The pulling power in Seoul
12 Sep 2017 | 4 min read
If anyone doubts the pulling power of great architecture and design to re-invigorate a city and lure tourists they need only consider one word: Bilbao. In the Eighties, this city in the Basque region of northern Spain was in economic free-fall: Industries were failing or in decline, unemployment – especially among the young – was climbing and the city of some one million... > Read more
THE ART OF THE OILS (2017): Iconography and imagery on Midnight Oil album covers
5 Sep 2017 | 3 min read
When it came to rock culture and how artists presented themselves on album or EP covers, the Australians were about a decade ahead of New Zealanders in cultural and artistic associations with their homeland. The jazz fusion group Ayers Rock, for example, not only appropriated the European name of Uluru in the red centre but also had a cutout image of the rock on the cover of their '74... > Read more
EVE de CASTRO-ROBINSON'S NEW WORKS FOR PIANO (2017): Pictures made into sound
14 Aug 2017 | 1 min read
In her new work for solo piano – a zigzagged gaze, 10 piano pieces -- the New Zealand composer Eve de Castro-Robinson was “let loose among the art collection of the Wallace Trust” which she describes as “a gleeful trawling through riches” in the liner notes to the new Rattle release by pianist Henry Wong Doe. On that album Pictures, Wong Doe interprets... > Read more
Trick-or-Treater
PRINCE EUGEN'S WALDERMARSUDDE IN STOCKHOLM (2017): The prince and the painters
14 Aug 2017 | 3 min read
Although most people discreetly draw a veil around the private life of Prince Eugen of Sweden, you can't help note the homoerotic quality of the male nudes in his art collection. Or the absence of women in his inner circle of friends. Prince Eugen – born into a liberal royal family in 1865 as Eugen Napoleon Nicolaus Jansson, fourth in line to the throne... > Read more
THE NEW ARCHITECTURE OF OSLO, PART THREE (2017): Operaen; The Norwegian National Opera and Ballet
9 Aug 2017 | 3 min read
In the first two parts of this brief series about the architecture of Oslo, we looked at the new developments in the Barcode area and around the Renzo Piano-designed Astrup-Fearnley Museum of Modern Art. The centrepiece of Oslo's archirtectural regeneration and development however is the undeniably beautiful and strikingly innovative home to the Norwegian Opera and Ballet, a landmark... > Read more
THE NEW ARCHITECTURE OF OSLO, PART TWO (2017): The Tjuvholmen district
7 Aug 2017 | 2 min read
In the first part of this photo essay-cum-envy tourism look at the new architecture of Oslo, we turned the camera onto the small and developing area known as Barcode which is emerging behind the city's magnificent opera and ballet hall on the water's edge. More on that building in Part Three, but here we look to the small peninsula beyond AkerBrygge just a few minutes walk from City... > Read more
THE NEW ARCHITECTURE OF OSLO, PART ONE (2017): The Barcode development
31 Jul 2017 | 2 min read | 1
Although the jewel in Oslo's architecture is the breathtaking Norwegian National Opera and Ballet building -- pictured here, like a glacier on which people can walk on and through -- there are many spectacular examples of 21st century design everywhere. Not the least of course is the Renzo Piano-designed Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art with its huge curved roof and passageway between... > Read more
BOB DYLAN: THE ARTIST AND HIS 'ON THE ROAD' SERIES (2017): The travelling musician as snapshot painter
24 Jul 2017 | 2 min read
Although most people, including many longtime followers of his music, only know of Bob Dylan's paintings because of his Self Portrait and The Band's Music from Big Pink album covers many decades ago, he has long pursued a creative outlet through the visual arts. He makes large scale sculptures and has presented a number of themed painting and graphic exhibitions in recent years, notably the... > Read more
THE BEATLES' SGT PEPPER'S COVER (2017): An image for all seasons
22 May 2017 | 2 min read
Within weeks of the release of Beatles' album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 50 years ago, its front cover image -- photographed and constructed by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth -- was being copied, parodied and appropriated. Numerous bands and companies down the decades have used the idea, and Frank Zappa was quick to grab onto it for the Mothers of Invention album We're Only In It... > Read more