《幻想与遐思》，美国钢琴家布拉德·梅尔道在全新个人专辑中探索人在独处时的多种情绪状态。 游刃于爵士乐和古典乐之间的美国钢琴家、作曲家布拉德·梅尔道（Brad Mehldau）的全新个人钢琴专辑《幻想与遐思》（Fantasy & Reveries），将于2026年11月13日由Nonesuch Records发行。专辑收录《钢琴幻想曲》（Fantasy for Piano）与《十四首遐思》（Fourteen Reveries）两组作品，均由梅尔道创作。 昨日（9月8日），专辑中的《遐思一》（Reverie 1）和《遐思二》（Reverie 2）率先上线，并同步发布两首作品的滚动乐谱视频，让听众可以随着音乐阅读完整乐谱。 《钢琴幻想曲》最初受钢琴家杰里米·丹克（Jeremy Denk）委约创作，与梅尔道的《巴赫之后三首》（Three Pieces after Bach）处于同一时期。梅尔道在专辑内页中写道，这两部作品有着相近的“音乐执念”：漫长延伸的持续音、三和弦的协和与极端不协和之间的尖锐并置，以及自由划分的7/4拍。 他形容《钢琴幻想曲》的音乐织体“非常密集”，其中一个重要的演奏挑战，是在厚重的声音层次之中，让旋律自身的叙事线索依然能被听见。如果说《钢琴幻想曲》拥有更完整、连续的发展结构，《十四首遐思》则刻意走向相反的方向。梅尔道没有选择大跨度的发展，而是将十四首短曲分别凝缩成情绪。 “Reverie”既可以指白日梦，也可以指神游、出神的状态。梅尔道将它理解为一种清醒时刻里的暂时抽离：“人从眼前的环境中离开，进入只属于自己的意识空间。有时，这是一种主动的逃离，让人暂时摆脱日常生活的单调；有时，却是不由自主地滑向忧郁。” “在一切情况下，它都是一种内在经验，只属于我们自己的意识，与他人无关。”梅尔道写道。因此，《十四首遐思》最终表达的是一种独处状态：音乐时而陶醉，时而平静；时而紧张、孤寂，又时而趋于狂喜。 布拉德·梅尔道 图：Elena Olivo 《幻想与遐思》也延续了梅尔道近年来不断在爵士、古典音乐与个人创作之间寻找联系的轨迹。自2004年以个人专辑《东京现场》（Live in Tokyo）首次加入Nonesuch以来，他已经在该厂牌旗下发行22张作品，包括六张三重奏专辑，以及多张个人独奏与合作录音。 其中，2024年的《巴赫之后II》（After Bach II）和《福雷之后》（Après Fauré）分别从巴赫与福雷的音乐出发，将两位作曲家的作品与梅尔道受其启发而创作的音乐并列；《2020年4月组曲》（Suite: April 2020）则是在疫情封锁期间录制的个人钢琴作品。 2022年的《雅各的梯子》（Jacob’s Ladder）从《圣经》以及音乐与信仰的关系出发，同时融入梅尔道少年时期所钟爱的前卫摇滚。2023年的《布拉德弹披头士》（Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles）则是一张现场钢琴独奏专辑，收录他对约翰·列侬、保罗·麦卡特尼及乔治·哈里森作品的重新诠释。 梅尔道最近的专辑是去年8月推出的《驶向太阳》（Ride into the Sun），收录他对已故歌手、词曲作者兼吉他手埃利奥特·史密斯（Elliott Smith）作品的重新演绎。 音乐之外，梅尔道还曾于2023年出版回忆录《成长：建立个人音乐谱系·第一部》（Formation: Building a Personal Canon, Part I），以第一人称回望自己的音乐成长，以及那些构成其个人“音乐谱系”的作品与艺术家。

在不来梅音乐节闭幕之夜，西蒙·拉特携手弗莱堡巴洛克乐团与伊莎贝尔·福斯特，以历史演奏实践重新打开舒曼作品的声音世界。 By Ma Guanghui 05 September 2026 伊莎贝尔·福斯特、西蒙·拉特与弗莱堡巴洛克乐团在不来梅音乐节 © Patric Leo When 2026年9月4日 Where 不来梅钟厅（Die Glocke, Bremen） Who 小提琴：伊莎贝尔·福斯特（Isabelle Faust） 指挥：西蒙·拉特爵士（Sir Simon Rattle） 弗莱堡巴洛克乐团（Freiburger Barockorchester） What 2026年不来梅音乐节（Musikfest Bremen）的闭幕演出，以“舒曼宇宙”（Kosmos Schumann）为名，上演三部舒曼作品：歌剧《格诺费娃》（Genoveva）序曲、《d小调小提琴协奏曲》、《C大调第二交响曲》。 西蒙·拉特与弗莱堡巴洛克乐团在不来梅音乐节 © Patric Leo 记一笔 不来梅音乐节的最后一晚，迎来了本届可能最具明星相的阵容：指挥西蒙·拉特与小提琴家伊莎贝尔·福斯特。从伯明翰、柏林，到伦敦、慕尼黑，拉特尔早已对指挥现代大型交响乐团得心应手，但这一次与他合作的，却是以历史启发演奏（Historically Informed Performance）见长的弗莱堡巴洛克乐团。乐器、编制乃至声音理念都有所不同。而古乐、早期音乐及相关的历史演奏实践，恰恰是不来梅音乐节的传统与专长。在最后一个晚上，音乐节以舒曼向自己的传统致意。 拉特走上没有指挥台的舞台，以一种平视的姿势开始指挥。几乎从《格诺费娃》序曲开头的渐强开始，古乐团特有的透明层次感便逐渐显现，尤其是弦乐声部与打击乐、铜管交织时，各个声部依然保持着清晰的轮廓。而没有指挥台的好处也很快显现出来：拉特可以在乐团留给他的半圆形空间中自由走动，用一种更加亲密的方式与不同声部互动。小编制带来透明度，也带来了更强的灵活性。序曲临近结束时，音量突然收缩，拉特与乐团之间的默契在这样的瞬间尤其明显。 随后，身着一袭三宅一生的福斯特“飘”上舞台。这套服装她从琉森穿到柏林，再到不来梅，只是每次登台的配色有所不同。随着几名铜管乐手在序曲结束后离场，《D小调小提琴协奏曲》的乐队编制进一步收紧。最直接的听感，是乐团与独奏之间的关系变得水乳交融，没有谁试图盖过谁。尤其当独奏小提琴进入低音区时，这种融为一体的感觉更加明显，也更加接近室内乐。福斯特的琴声同样如此：丝毫没有压迫感，反而相当亲密，尤其当她与弦乐组彼此呼应时。福斯特向来不是炫技派，她的演奏审美也从来不是“多才是多”。这种克制首先体现在技巧层面：她很少使用颤音，即使面对的是浪漫主义作品。但当她真正进入低音区、让颤音介入时，那种高速而细密的振动反而带出了一种耳语般的质感，仿佛恋人絮语，耳鬓厮磨。 舒曼的这首小提琴协奏曲创作完成后被雪藏了80多年。它继承着贝多芬的衣钵，却又显得破碎、游移，甚至有些冗长，始终存在一种难以消解的内在矛盾。这或许也符合人们对于舒曼“神经质”的某种刻板印象。它最终得以首演，却又被纳粹德国挪用于政治宣传，成为被禁演的门德尔松小提琴协奏曲的“替代品”，首演时甚至使用了经过修改的版本。 西蒙·拉特与弗莱堡巴洛克乐团在不来梅音乐节 © Patric Leo 到了《C大调第二交响曲》，编制再次扩大。音乐在一片混沌与悬而未决中开始，逐渐找到清晰的节奏，最终形成相对固定的形态。拉特左手灵动，时而画圈，充满表情；拿着指挥棒的右手则轻点、勾勒，只在关键处给出方向。就这样，他像抽丝剥茧一般，把原本纠缠在一起的声部逐一理清，让每条线条重新显形。第二乐章的谐谑曲尤其有趣，在一以贯之的透明度，以及声部之间你应我和的基础上，弹性速度（rubato）也被拉特尔运用得出神入化，他仿佛同时掌握着刹车和油门。到了慢板乐章，更让人惊叹的是中段弦乐的低音齐奏：为什么那么多人可以发出那么小的声音？那一刻，音乐厅里原本几乎察觉不到的环境声突然变得嘈杂起来。当然，这也得益于钟厅本身出色的声学条件。随后，声音再一点一点累加，像重新生长，最终直接冲向第四乐章C大调的胜利尾声。这样的对比与动态变化，本身就是一种享受。 抛开音乐社会学、音乐考古学等因素不谈，古乐团常常被误以为表现力有限，仿佛现代乐器意味着声音的“进化”。但偶尔坐下来感受一下这样的“老爷车”飙车，倒是能顺便反思一下现代越来越强大、精密的声音体系究竟给了我们什么，又拿走了什么。 Writer Ma Guanghui

法国男高音本杰明·伯恩海姆在不来梅音乐节的独唱音乐会，从迪帕克、柏辽兹，到蒙波、希纳斯特拉，再转向普契尼，最终回到法国香颂，但问题是，他该怎么用声音处理不同的歌曲？ By Ma Guanghui 03 September 2026 When 2026年9月2日 Where 不来梅钟厅（Die Glocke, Bremen） Who 男高音：本杰明·伯恩海姆（Benjamin Bernheim） 钢琴：埃德维日·埃尔申霍德（Edwige Herchenroder） What 以“甜美的法国”（Douce France）为名的一场独唱音乐会，法国男高音本杰明·伯恩海姆从迪帕克、柏辽兹的法语艺术歌曲出发，走进蒙波、希纳斯特拉的西语世界，再转向普契尼的意大利歌曲，最终回到20世纪法国香颂。 本杰明·伯恩海姆与埃德维日·埃尔申霍德在不来梅音乐节 © Patric Leo 记一笔 法国是一个神奇的国家。即使社交网络上充斥着各种给法国“祛魅”的meme，也丝毫不影响法国依然仗着浪漫与美之名行走世界。这不，一场标题为“甜美的法国”（Douce France）的音乐会，主角正是那个永远脸上挂着灿烂微笑的法国男高音本杰明·伯恩海姆（Benjamin Bernheim）。他也果然不出所料，带着招牌式的微笑登上了舞台——身后的背景早已被蓝、白、红三色灯光点亮。 第一次在现场见识伯恩海姆的魅力，是去年10月柏林德国古典音乐大奖（Opus Klassik）的颁奖典礼。他演唱马斯奈《维特》（Werther）中的咏叹调《为何叫醒我》（Pourquoi me réveiller），黄金般的嗓音照亮了整个柏林音乐厅。但除此之外，更令我印象深刻的是他的获奖发言。他提到，整个产业应该继续支持古典音乐，而创作和演奏古典音乐，其实并不需要高科技。我猜他话里有话，或许是在暗指那场闹剧一般的颁奖礼。 但这一次在不来梅音乐节（Musikfest Bremen）的亮相，我其实是带着疑问去的。音乐会的部分曲目已经收录在2024年发行的同名专辑《甜美的法国》中，只是钢琴家有所不同。相比现场，这张专辑显然更符合“甜美的法国”这个标题：曲目主要围绕法国艺术歌曲与香颂展开，并没有现场这么多来自西班牙和意大利的作品。而我的担忧在于：伯恩海姆作为一个足迹遍布世界知名歌剧院的抒情男高音，唱起艺术歌曲来，是否终究会带有一些过于强烈的戏剧性？ 当晚，他一开口唱起迪帕克《邀游》（L’invitation au voyage），果然还是那个带着浓郁意大利味道的声音：明亮、集中，在高音处无尽闪耀。尤其是向上冲出的那一下，力度之强，足以叫醒任何一个打瞌睡的人。相比之下，钢琴家埃德维热·赫申罗德（Edwige Herchenroder）却显得更加冷静，这或许反而更接近迪帕克歌曲中那些借鉴舒伯特的部分。但在《菲迪莱》（Phidylé）中，伯恩海姆又展示了高音区的pianissimo，一个是炫目的高音，一个是几乎悬浮起来的弱音，两者都体现出他对自己声音近乎绝对的控制力。 到了柏辽兹的声乐套曲《夏夜》（Les nuits d’été），赫申罗德的钢琴向前走了一步，开始与伯恩海姆声音一贯的辉煌相抗衡。有时候，甚至能听出伯恩海姆歌声中的某种骄傲。尤其是在第二首《玫瑰精灵》（Le Spectre de la rose）中，当他唱到“你将我捧起时，我仍缀满珠露，那是洒水壶洒落的银色泪珠”时，声音本身的辉煌与歌词所带出的惆怅之间形成了一种张力。到了第五首《在墓地》（Au cimetière），听觉上的疲惫稍微得到缓解。伯恩海姆可以在低音区依然保持稳定的声量和气息，声音不再一味向外投射。末曲《未知岛屿》（L’île inconnue）中，赫申罗德的钢琴更加积极，伯恩海姆的声音也多了一点舞动的感觉，仿佛提前预告了下半场。 本杰明·伯恩海姆与埃德维日·埃尔申霍德在不来梅音乐节 © Patric Leo 从蒙波的忧郁，到希纳斯特拉带有弗拉明戈色彩的节奏，伯恩海姆的西班牙语发音同样十分清晰。但在发音与音色上，却几乎听不出它与前面的法语艺术歌曲有什么区别。而到了普契尼，伯恩海姆显然有一种驾轻就熟、回到主场的感觉，此前唱西语歌曲时摆在面前的谱架也被撤走。他一张口，就是典型的普契尼式抒情男高音：宽阔、明亮，带着毫不掩饰的戏剧性。这也是整场音乐会中最适合他声音的部分。在那些戏剧性与抒情性的时刻，他的声音十分慷慨，毫不吝啬，也成功赢得满堂彩。 最后是三首法国香颂。第一首便是音乐会同名曲《甜美的法国》。伯恩海姆紧张的声带在这里终于稍微松弛了一些，律动感开始出现，感染力也随之上升，甚至偶尔闪过一些爵士乐的感觉，赫申罗德的钢琴也自然跟了上来。结尾的《若我们只有爱》（Quand on n’a que l’amour）旋律和歌词都朗朗上口，四句一段的循环结构本来可以提供一种轻盈、流动的感觉，人声甚至可以偶尔稍微跳出节奏框架。但伯恩海姆显然将其更严肃化、戏剧化处理了。 这大概就是我听完整场音乐会之后最大的感受：伯恩海姆似乎在用同一种声音处理所有作品。当然，这并不意味着他的歌唱缺乏技术。恰恰相反，无论是高音的控制、弱音的稳定，还是不同语言中的咬字，他都展现出了一个顶尖歌剧男高音所拥有的能力。但那些制造戏剧性的颤音、突然迸发的辉煌高音，以及始终保持高度张力的声乐线条，或许不应该成为一种放之四海皆准的发声原则。 在一场横跨法、西、意的欧陆歌曲巡礼之后，返场曲似乎不可避免地来到了德语世界。弗朗茨·莱哈尔的通俗歌曲《你是我整个的心》（Dein ist mein ganzes Herz）不出意外地又以同一种方式被演唱：高亢、饱满、戏剧性十足。而就在这个瞬间，我想起了德国假声男高音安德烈亚斯·朔尔（Andreas Scholl）几周前在社交媒体上发布的一段视频。他把它称为给男高音的“进阶课程”：既然有一个高音C，就绝不能浪费，于是每一个音都要使出洪荒之力，最大限度地增加戏剧性。但有意思的是，不久之后，他又发布了一首新歌《Just be happy》——流行、说唱，当然不是用美声唱的。 Writer Ma Guanghui

基里尔·别特连科带着柏林爱乐重返逍遥音乐节，带来乐团2026/27新乐季开幕演出同款曲目。 By Weida Wang 03 September 2026 When 2026年9月2日 Where 伦敦皇家阿尔伯特大厅（Royal Albert Hall） Who 指挥：基里尔·别特连科（Kirill Petrenko） 柏林爱乐乐团（Berliner Philharmoniker） What 埃尔加《谜语变奏曲》，Op. 36 柴可夫斯基《第四交响曲》，Op. 36 基里尔·别特连科与柏林爱乐在逍遥音乐节 Photo: Berliner Philharmoniker/Lena Laine 记一笔 今年五月我去了英格兰中西部的莫尔文（Malvern），也走了几处与埃尔加有关的故居和纪念地。丘陵起伏平缓，镇子安静，人与人之间的距离似乎比大城市短。站在那里回头看《谜语变奏曲》，这样一部作品最初来自一个相当私人的生活世界。 十四个变奏写的都是埃尔加身边的人：妻子Alice、朋友、音乐上的同伴，还有朋友家那条掉进怀伊河的狗。灵感来得也偶然：他结束一天的教学回家，坐在钢琴前随手即兴，Alice听见一段说好听，作曲家于是开始设想，如果换成身边不同的人来弹，这段音乐会变成什么样。而全曲最后一个变奏E.D.U.写的是他自己。不过这部作品从出生第一天起就不只属于英国。1899年的首演由汉斯·里希特（Hans Richter）指挥——一位出身哈布斯堡王朝匈牙利部分、在维也纳受训、以瓦格纳权威闻名，后来成为伦敦音乐生活核心人物的指挥家。首演九年之后，尼基什·阿图尔（Nikisch Artúr）就带着柏林爱乐演了它。 所以今晚真正的问题不是“德国乐团能不能演埃尔加”，而是：一百二十多年之后，别特连科在这部作品里放进了什么。这部作品本身其实也鲜少在柏林爱乐乐团近年的曲目单中出现，但却出现在了其今年的乐季开幕音乐会之中。 逍遥音乐节（BBC Proms）的这套曲目两周前刚在柏林作为乐团本乐季的开幕音乐会演出，原样搬到了伦敦。由此看来，这不仅是为巡演而精心设计的曲目，是他们给自己乐季定调的那一套。 基里尔·别特连科与柏林爱乐在逍遥音乐节 Photo: Berliner Philharmoniker/Lena Laine 上半场 《谜语变奏曲》的演绎相当克制，同时保留着非常鲜明的柏林爱乐气质。 差别最明显的是弦乐。英国乐团的埃尔加传统习惯让连绵的齐奏带上浓郁而直接的歌唱性，情绪是铺开的。今晚柏林爱乐的演绎，旋律依然流动，但声音内部始终留着一层不肯完全交出去的东西。Nimrod变奏的渐强不是一口气推上去的，而是分层展开，声部一层一层叠进来，力度的增长带着台阶感，顶点不像被冲出来的，更像被一级一级搭起来。 克制并没有让作品变重。在那些轻快甚至带点玩笑意味的变奏里，乐团的反应极其灵巧：Troyte变奏的粗鲁与冲撞、Dorabella变奏的木管碎步、G.R.S.变奏里那条狗落水又爬上岸的短短几十秒，节奏、音色与声部之间的转换都带着近乎室内乐的敏锐。 低处的含蓄和快处的灵动互相映照，“谜”的意味恰好藏在这种不断变化的距离里。音乐一直在显露性格，同时一直有所保留，这里的神秘感来自声音内部的暧昧与层次。 下半场 “柴四”是一部情绪高度饱和的作品。命运的铜管动机、焦虑、挣扎、突然爆开的激情，从第一乐章起就不断推着音乐往前。今晚的情绪同样满，但结构始终没有松掉。 织体复杂的段落最能说明问题。即使进入高度紧张的状态，各声部仍然保持着鲜活的存在感：旋律、伴奏音型、内声部之间不断彼此回应、彼此推动，层次始终清楚。 第三乐章的全弦乐拨奏是个现成的展示台：今晚的拨弦音量压得相当低，却颗颗清楚，没有因为轻而变得含混。随后木管与铜管的进入极漂亮，声音带着一层光泽，与前面那片低语式的拨奏形成了很干净的对比。末乐章在阿尔伯特大厅是个真正的难题，铜管与打击乐极容易糊成一团，而今晚打击乐始终清楚有力，没有被吞进混响里。 基里尔·别特连科与柏林爱乐在逍遥音乐节 Photo: Berliner Philharmoniker/Lena Laine 别特连科 上一次认真听别特连科的现场之后，我以为自己知道他会怎么处理这两部作品。今晚的印象是，他的印记比我记忆里更深。 深在一种吊诡上：沉静的地方极其幽微，情绪几乎不完全交出来；一旦放开，又浪漫得毫不迟疑。这两端在同一场演出里并存，而且不是靠交替，是靠同一种控制力同时维持的。他给情感一个清晰的形式，又不让形式冷掉。 别特连科在台上动作并不小。左手用得极多，几乎全程在塑形：提示层次、压音量、指出某个声部该往哪儿去。身体的动作也很明显，不是那种把自己收起来的指挥。最引人注意的是他给节奏点的方式：果断、准确，几乎是“卡”在点上，乐团接得毫不含糊。他和乐手之间的交流是看得见的。也就像世间对他的评价一样——一些看似不经意和超越性的表达往往来自于别特连科个人极度精心的排练过程和对作品本身极度考究的分析与拿捏。 值得一提的是，乐团方面提到别特连科长期着迷于变奏这一形式，视其为“围绕一个恒定内核的持续变化”的音乐化身。这几乎就是今晚《谜语变奏曲》给人的感受：距离一直在变，音乐的内核始终没有动。考虑到他一贯把德奥古典与浪漫传统当作乐团的DNA，在乐季开幕选埃尔加，本身就是个例外动作。 返场 “柴四”结束后，掌声和欢呼持续了相当一阵。阿尔伯特大厅的站票区跺起脚来，声音直接从地板传上去。别特连科几次回到台上鞠躬，乐团几次起立。我一直以为下一次他回来就要开始了。 但没有返场。 事后顺手查了一下，这大概本来就是他的习惯：2018年他带柏林爱乐来Proms，观众同样热烈，同样没有加演。于是今晚出现的其实是一种错位，伦敦观众按Proms的方式表达期待，指挥按自己的方式回应。也许对一部已经把情感推到极点的“柴四”来说，再补一首轻巧的小品确实多余。 Writer Weida Wang

Sirat (Óliver Laxe, 2025) 阅读中文版 Sirat didn’t win “big” at Cannes 2025 — instead, it took home the Jury Prize, almost an consolation prize. Yet for many critics and festivalgoers, it was the true best of the festival. In a competition judged by a nine-member elite jury, the outcome is rarely “fair” in any objective sense — too much depends on personal taste. Beyond the official prizes, alternative rankings by unofficial outlets often provide a clearer picture of a film’s artistic impact. The most influential among them include the Screen International grid, the International Cinephile Society (ICS) panel, and one overall critics’ grid voted on by over a thousand accredited journalists. In many of these, Sirat emerged as the champion of the competition — the true “uncrowned king” of Cannes 2025. In Islamic belief, the Sirat is a bridge — thinner than a hair, sharper than a blade — stretched over hellfire that all souls must cross after death. Filmed in the Sahara, Sirat reimagines this concept as a grueling journey. Set in a future ravaged by the third world war, the film follows a group of subcultural “refugees” from Europe who plunge deep into the desert, seeking out a kind of radical Burning Man-style rave. One step from heaven or hell, one step from collapse or transcendence — the film balances precariously on this spiritual and existential edge. Bridging these extremes is a pounding techno score by French electronic musician Kangding Ray (born David Letellier), whose artist name reflects his early time living in Kangding, Sichuan province of China. Techno rooted from Detroit in 1980s, it’s driving, minimal and percussive. The music at first feels like an odd choice, almost absurd. A line of futuristic sound systems being assembled in the sand, cut into the dry quiet of the desert valley, has a surreal dissonance. In his previous film O que arde, director Óliver Laxe used Vivaldi’s arias and Andreas Scholl’s ethereal countertenor voice to elevate his already poetic imagery. That was graceful — if a little too expected. This time, Laxe gives out a command to fall. Kangding Ray takes it literally, tethering transcendence to the ground with rhythm, bass, and sweat. In this film, the “high” and the “low” — spirit and flesh, void and rave — don’t flow in a one-way vertical hierarchy. They loop. After years of harsh reality — pandemic, war and social upheaval — Laxe’s film offers a quiet faith: that sacredness can still emerge from collapse. In most films, music adds only an emotional filter. In Sirat, it’s structural — take it away, and the film couldn’t make sense at all. Kangding Ray’s soundtrack, composed mostly before shooting even began, grants the music a surprising independence. Yet its deep entanglement with the film scenes ensures it remains inseparable from the images. This is minimalism not in style, but in method — a reminder that new languages don’t come from more material, but from new perspectives. The night before Cannes’ main competition awards were announced, the 15th Cannes Soundtrack Award named Kangding Ray its winner — joining the ranks of previous honorees like Mica Levi (The Zone of Interest), Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never (Good Time), and Lim Giong (The Assassin). On the morning of May 24, Sirat was screened one last time at the Debussy Theatre in Cannes. After 90 minutes, the entire city of Cannes lost power. The screening halted abruptly. Some audience members walked out in confusion. Others, moved by the techno, started dancing in the aisles. One person cried out: “This is the most immersive film I’ve seen. I won’t leave until I finish it.” A short apology was broadcast. Then, in a poetic turn, Beethoven’s string quartet filled the anxious room. Six minutes later, the lights faded again. The classical stepped out, the techno resumed. We had the pleasure to speak with Kangding Ray on May 22. I was a bit afraid, to be honest, because I felt like it was very ambitious — and very crazy in a way. G=Ma Guanghui K=Kangding Ray G: How did you get involved with this production? Is this your first time working with Óliver Laxe? K: It's my first time working with Óliver, but it's my second score. I've done one German film before. Sirat has been a pretty amazing journey. We've been working on the score for a year and a half. I started working when he approached me — he knew my music and wanted me to get involved in the film, so he sent me the script. We worked a lot based only on the script, the story, and the impression it gave me. It was much more of a mental approach to the music. I didn’t score to the images — I scored based on the story and what was inside Óliver’s head. Sirat (Óliver Laxe, 2025) G: That's amazing, because usually composers make the music based on the images. K: It was more, you know, a discussion — because we had really long work sessions, sometimes lasting five days. I would stay at my place, and we’d work in the studio and try things. He would tell me about the movie he had in his head, and I was producing sounds and themes. At some point, we managed to find the texture and the right atmosphere. It was all about finding the right tone for what Óliver had in his mind. G: Can I say Óliver is a fan of yours? K: Yeah, I mean, he loves my music very much. He basically loved both sides of it — the more techno-driven work, but also the more ambient, atmospheric, mental, hypnotic side. I have quite a wide range of music in my discography, and he had been listening to it. So he just approached me. And when someone like Óliver reaches out, I just wanted to follow him on this crazy adventure. G: What was your initial reaction to the script? K: I was a bit afraid, to be honest, because I felt like it was very ambitious — and very crazy in a way. There were many things I was almost unsure about. I was like, “Are you sure you really want to go there?” But at some point, you know, he’s the director, so you have to follow him. There’s a level of trust you need to build — and I built that trust. I said, “Okay, I’ll make the music, I’m at the service of your vision. I’ll do my best, and we’ll make a really crazy film together.” But first, I had to trust his vision. G: But I feel like somehow you can resonate with this story, right? K: Yes, I totally relate. It resonates so much with my music — the mystical approach, the rave scene, and the fact that we’re showing people who are not usually represented in cinema. It’s a subculture, and I wanted to represent it in the best, most respectful way possible. These are marginalized people, often invisible to society. They travel in trucks, live on the fringes, and choose to live outside of contemporary modern society. But at the same time, they’re very pure. Even though I live in a city like Berlin and am more connected to society, I really relate to this state of mind. And I also really loved Óliver’s mystical approach — it’s a very spiritual film, I think. I learned a lot just by talking to Óliver — about spirituality, about what it means, about our relationship to death, and the journey we’re all taking in life. It was an incredible learning experience — like having a teacher. Sirat (Óliver Laxe, 2025) G: Who took the lead during the music production process? Was it you or Óliver? K: I mean, I did the music — I was responsible for the music. He followed my lead in that sense, but of course, it was a dialogue. When I compose music, I want to resonate with an idea. I don’t just make random cool music — that doesn’t interest me. I want the music to be exactly what’s needed for the images. Óliver trusted me with the music. He told me several times that this was one of the most intellectually stimulating collaborations he’s ever had. We had deep conversations, talking about ideas and how to translate them into sound for the film. So he guided me conceptually, and I created the sounds as we went along. Most of the music was made during the first phase — before the shoot. Then I adjusted things when the editing came in. That adjustment process took a long time too; it was very precise work. But the core material was already there. I’d say 90% of the material was done before filming. Some things were adjusted later, but it was more about fitting it to the final cut — refining the placement. The nice thing is that they could shoot with the music already in mind. In a way, the edit followed the music more than the music followed the edit. It’s no longer about entertainment. It becomes a soul-searching experience. G: I also listened to the soundtrack you made for Wann kommst du meine Wunden küssen. I feel like that one was more ambient and restrained — compared to what you did for Sirat, which feels more raw and intense, like techno in its pure and brutal form. What led you to this different approach? K: Because I listened to the director. That first film is a very delicate one, directed by Hanna Doose. It's a fragile story about three women going through a kind of crisis. There’s no action, no big drama — it’s all emotions and dialogue. It’s a very restrained and tender film. It’s beautiful, but it’s not intense or crazy or action-driven. So the sound had to match the tone. If I had done something too intense for it, it would have been completely out of place. But with Sirat, we wanted the music to match the energy of the film. And the energy is like a slap in the face. It’s a descent into the abyss. The film starts with techno and then slowly dissolves — until, by the end, there’s almost nothing left. That was the idea: to show a journey from the rave, the intensity, those massive techno slaps at the beginning, and then gradually dissolve into something more like a soundtrack — beautiful, granular, almost like grains of sand. So I used the sound of wind, the sound of sand, the feeling of the desert, the idea of the horizon. And of course, there's a psychedelic approach, because the whole thing is kind of like a trip — a psychedelic trip. And because the story itself dissolves — the film becomes more abstract, more fragmented — the sound had to follow that energy, to slowly go towards nothingness. Sirat (Óliver Laxe, 2025) G: Okay, this just leads perfectly to my next question. I feel like we can split the film into two parts. The first part is a journey of searching — searching for the daughter and also for the next rave. The second part feels like a struggle for survival — everyone doesn’t know when they’re going to die. You’ve already explained your different musical approaches to these two sides of the story. K: Yeah. But there's also another kind of searching — a search for the self. The search is no longer outward, it becomes inward. And because this is an immersive film, we wanted to express that to the audience — that you're not watching the film, you're in the film. The sound pulls you in, makes you part of it. So as a spectator, you're also searching — but inside yourself. You start asking: What am I afraid of? You’re confronted with things you usually can’t — or don’t want to — see. So it’s no longer about entertainment. It becomes a soul-searching experience. G: Yeah, I totally agree. I feel like in many parts of the film, I just wanted to stand up and dance — but, you know, I couldn’t do that. Many films use electronic elements in the score, like the works of Cliff Martinez, Oneohtrix Point Never, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Alva Noto. But what you did for Sirat feels completely different. K: Yeah. I mean, there are different approaches to this. Alva Noto, for example, is a good case — he’s one of my mentors. He’s the one who really introduced me to the world of music. He was one of the first artists I connected with when I arrived in Berlin. Same with Ryuichi Sakamoto. I met both of them, and we played together in Japan and Europe. But over the years, I gradually developed my own approach — something much more raw, visceral, and psychedelic. Of course, I’m still influenced by those mentors — Sakamoto, Alva Noto — but my world now is a blend of experimental music, the Berlin techno scene, and the psychedelic festival culture in Europe and Japan, which I’m very involved in. So when I make music for film, all of those influences come together. I have a knowledge of both the more academic, experimental, institutional music world — and also the most underground raves and clubs. That’s why I can bring both faces into the film. Sirat (Óliver Laxe, 2025) G: Have you ever discussed with Óliver why he wanted techno for this film? The reason I ask is that in his last feature, he used a lot of classical music — which is totally different from Sirat. K: Yeah. Again, I think it’s a matter of matching the culture he wants to represent. The culture in this film is one of raw experience through dance. Dance is at the center. Dance is a form of being alive — of still being alive — and also of overcoming adversity. A lot of the characters have disabilities — they’ve lost a hand, they’ve suffered. And dance becomes a form of catharsis for that suffering. There’s a strong connection between religion and dance, between spirituality and dance. I think Nietzsche once said, “I would not trust a god who doesn't dance.” So dance is a kind of affirmation — it’s how we express who we are as human beings. It doesn’t need to make sense. It’s a celebration of life. So that’s one element. We wanted this strong, intense way of dancing — not just a little movement, but really going for it, in a very powerful, almost primal way. And then there's another element: texture. The texture of the desert. The desert isn’t soft. It’s not glossy or smooth — it’s granular. It’s sand, rocks, scorching sun, infinite horizon, dried-up riverbeds. The sound needed to reflect that. That’s why, in our very first discussions, Óliver and I talked a lot about this: What is the sound of the desert? How do you convey this feeling of vastness — of being so small, so insignificant in front of the sky? It’s a confrontation with the immensity of the universe — and a search for who you are within it. They’re real people. They’re not playing roles. G: Just to follow up on what you just said — I was really fascinated by how your score sometimes merges with the film's sound design. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but during one desert driving scene, I felt like the friction of the wind, the sand, and the car almost formed a rhythm. I could hear a kind of boom boom — like a hidden pulse underneath everything. K: Yeah, sometimes we used sound elements to match and blend. And sometimes you don’t even know exactly what you’re hearing. The wind is often incorporated — like, sometimes something passes and rises up, and I use that in the score to blend elements together. The sound design elements — like the truck sounds and other effects — were created by Laia Casanovas. But of course, we worked very closely together. It was a team effort. We’re all working toward one vision, so everything — the score, the sound design — needs to be connected and flow as one. G: In traditional film scoring, composers often rely on recurring themes, motifs, and variations. Do you also work this way? K: There is one motif that we used — it’s kind of the theme of the film. It appears in three different forms. The first time it shows up is during the rave. It’s the underlying motif of one of the rave tracks — the last one, before… well, I won’t spoil it, but let’s say the last rave track. That’s where it starts, and it launches the journey. This underlying motif then appears maybe two or three more times throughout the film, but each time it becomes more and more degraded — almost disintegrated. By the end, it’s unrecognizable. It's like the sound slowly decays, mirroring the degradation in the film itself. You can interpret that in many ways, but one inspiration was this very important piece by William Basinski called The Disintegration Loops. He used tape loops and played them for hours until the physical material of the tape began to degrade. That process of physical disintegration really inspired me — the idea of a sound becoming unrecognizable as it falls apart. G: I also found it quite funny when Jade, the leading female raver, says something like, “This music is not for listening — it’s for dancing.” She’s basically explaining the rave scene to the father. K: Yeah, she says that in response to the father, and it’s a very nice scene because you can feel that he’s really annoyed — he actually hates the music. But he has to go through it. And slowly, he begins to understand why they’re doing this. That scene is like a ceremonial introduction — a way of showing him, and the audience, why this matters. The father, in this case, represents the establishment. A lot of people — especially from outside the scene — say things like, “Techno is just noise. It’s just boom boom boom.” But for those who are part of the scene, who are immersed in it, it’s not noise at all. “Noise” is always in the ear of the listener. If you don’t have the cultural context, of course you’ll think it’s too loud or meaningless. You might prefer something like classical strings. But if you're part of this culture, the meaning of what you call “noise” changes completely. This has always been the case throughout music history. When punk first arrived, the establishment called it noise too. There’s this famous interview with Iggy Pop where he says something like, “They call our music noise.” That’s what always happens — when people don’t understand a new sound or movement, they dismiss it as noise. And yes, it is noisy, just like punk. But once you understand the attitude and the cultural meaning behind it, it’s no longer noise — it becomes music. In the film, the father says something like, “I can't tell the difference — it all sounds the same.” And she replies, “Yeah, but it’s not for listening. It’s for dancing.” That’s how you understand it — through movement, through being in it. Of course, there are layers. You can also just listen to the music without dancing, and it still means something. But this scene reflects how the system — the establishment — views subcultures like rave. G: And also, it feels quite physical from what you just said — especially considering the choice of actors. K: Yes, exactly. They’re not professional actors. They come from the real rave scene, from the free party scene. They were cast directly from that world. So they’re real people — they’re not playing roles. You can't get more authentic than that.

伦敦Soho区的Ronnie Scott’s爵士俱乐部将于2026年2月启动全新音乐空间Upstairs at Ronnie’s，可容纳140名观众。这是俱乐部自2005年重启以来规模最大的一次改造，标志着这家老牌爵士地标首次为古典音乐设立固定演出单元。 新空间的节目编排由小提琴家、歌手兼制作人莉齐·鲍尔（Lizzie Ball）与俱乐部艺术总监、钢琴家詹姆斯·皮尔森（James Pearson）共同策划。每周一晚的古典音乐之夜将分为早场和晚场，围绕三个板块展开： Ronnie Scott’s Classical All Stars：由皮尔森领衔，集合Lizzie Ball、Shlomy Dobrinsky、Megan Cassidy、Gabriella Swallow、Jon Shenoy、Callum Au、James Turner七位英国乐手组成，以室内乐编制重新演绎交响与管弦作品。首场将纪念《蓝色狂想曲》英国首演100周年，后续曲目包括拉赫玛尼诺夫《第二钢琴协奏曲》、沃恩·威廉斯《云雀高飞》、莫扎特《小夜曲》，以及“好莱坞黄金年代”与“电影原声Part II”。 Classical Kicks：鲍尔2012–2019年在俱乐部发起的先锋项目重启，阵容包括Gabriella Swallow（大提琴）、Miloš Milivojević（手风琴）、James Turner（打击乐），曲目跨越皮亚佐拉、巴托克、格什温。 Close Up Classical：音乐与对谈形式，嘉宾有演员朱丽叶·史蒂文森（Juliet Stevenson）、电影作曲家大卫·阿诺德（David Arnold）、作家哈丽雅特·康斯特布尔（Harriet Constable）。 詹姆斯·皮尔森与莉齐·鲍尔 © Mark Allan 特别活动包括Her Ensemble（英国首支由女性与非二元性别音乐家组成的乐团）、Chineke! 驻场弦乐四重奏、#UriPosteJukeBox项目，以及世界知名无伴奏合唱团The King’s Singers首次登台，带来爵士与流行改编节目。 Upstairs at Ronnie’s在2024年暂停演出后进行了全面改造，如今配备Yamaha S3X三角钢琴、升级舞台与声学系统、Yamaha与D&B音响，并由新任行政主厨Steven Connolly打造餐饮。后台区域首次向公众开放，改造为The Greene Rooms，以老板Sally Greene命名，作为会员与艺术家交流空间。 伦敦首家专业爵士俱乐部Ronnie Scott’s背景 1959年由萨克斯手罗尼·斯科特（Ronnie Scott）与彼得·金（Pete King）创立的Ronnie Scott’s，是英国第一家专业爵士俱乐部。它从唐人街地下室起家，经历英镑危机、房租上涨、疫情封锁，仍在伦敦音乐地图上屹立不倒。这里曾接待Miles Davis、Chet Baker、Ella Fitzgerald等传奇，也留下Jimi Hendrix去世前的最后一次演出。2019年俱乐部成立60周年时，原址爵禄街39号门外挂上“蓝牌匾”，确认其历史地位。 当下，英国音乐场地正处于普遍困境：2023年全国16%的基层场馆关闭，超过四成亏损。Ronnie Scott’s的扩建不仅是空间的更新，也是一种姿态，意在维系音乐生态。正如皮尔森所说，这里的古典系列要保持与爵士现场一样的亲密与活力，而董事总经理Fred Nash强调，目标是让Upstairs成为“世界上最好的小型场地”。 六十五年来，Ronnie Scott’s一直是伦敦少数仍在运营的老牌俱乐部。如今，它把爵士与古典并置于同一屋檐下，既是延续，也是新的开始。

When 21 November 2025 Where Barbican Hall, London Who Hiromi Uehara Sonicwonder James Copus What One of the highly anticipated performance of EFG London Jazz Festival: Hiromi’s Sonicwonder — live performance featuring Hiromi (piano, keyboards), Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Hadrien Feraud (bass), Gene Coye (drums), with special guest James Copus (trumpet). Why Knowing Hiromi for many years only through recordings and videos—solo, in her Trio Project, with Sonicbloom, and now with Sonicwonder—the Barbican concert on 21 November was, the first time I had seen her live. Hiromi's Sonicwonder © Emile Holba Live Notes A Canon Under Pressure The concert was introduced by a Guardian critic, who presented Hiromi as one of the newest additions to the pantheon of jazz greats—named in the same breath as figures such as Pharoah Sanders and Herbie Hancock. For a brief moment I hesitated. The very notion of a canon has been under heavy attack since the second half of the twentieth century. In classical music, invoking “the canon” today immediately draws attention to its mechanisms of exclusion: the power of institutions, the selective violence of curricula and programming, the overwhelming dominance of western, white, male composers. To speak of “the” canon without irony is already to raise eyebrows. In jazz, this situation is more paradoxical. On the one hand, we all think we know who belongs to its central pantheon: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, to name only the most indisputable. Their music is surrounded by a constellation of standards, archetypal solos, and historically charged recordings, endlessly transcribed, quoted, and re-actualised. In this sense the jazz canon is not merely a list of works or artists but a set of obligatory passages: recordings and pieces through which one is expected to travel in order to become recognisably “a jazz musician”. On the other hand, jazz’s own historical self-understanding is oriented toward transformation, rupture, and the invention of new temporalities. Each major moment— bebop, modal jazz, free jazz, fusion, the proliferating post-1990 genealogies—defines itself by breaching a boundary that earlier institutions had tried to stabilise. The canon in jazz therefore cannot simply be a canon of stable forms. It can only be a canon of breaks: a retrospective ordering of decisive gestures that, in their own time, unsettled the very criteria by which canonicity could be measured. This makes the idea of a jazz canon structurally unstable. If those we call “great” are precisely those who fracture inherited vocabularies, the canon can never be a closed museum of styles. It becomes an archive of fault-lines. To declare someone “the latest addition” to such a canon is less to fix them in place than to pose a question: what, in their music, constitutes a genuine shift of language rather than an intensification of existing ones? Hiromi’s Position Hiromi occupies a curious, perhaps symptomatic place within this unstable canon. She is uniquely fluent across jazz history, with a famously devout relationship to Oscar Peterson—she opened for his final trio tour in Japan in 2006—and a clear debt to Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and the whole lineage of pianists who negotiated classical technique with jazz improvisation. She moves between ragtime stride, bebop figuration, quartal harmony, fusion-era keyboard textures, and prog-rock riffs with the speed of a passing thought. Hiromi © Emile Holba It is tempting to reduce all this to “technique”, and her sheer technical reliability arguably surpasses that of many of the figures to whom she is constantly compared. But the more interesting question is what this technique is in the service of. Hiromi’s idiom is an almost delirious synthesis: stride piano collides with stacked fourths, Zappa-like fusion lines, funk ostinati, and the complex time-signature changes of progressive rock. The result is delivered at a level of clarity and precision that, in purely pianistic terms, places her among the most technically assured performers jazz has produced. Yet this very density of reference also marks a distance from the kinds of innovation associated with the canonical names mentioned earlier. Parker, Coltrane, even Corea in his most decisive moments, changed the underlying vocabulary: they reconfigured the grammar of lines, harmony, form, or ensemble interaction. In Hiromi’s case, one often has the impression of an extreme synthesis and acceleration of already established idioms rather than the inauguration of a genuinely new one. Even the much-discussed “classical” influence—something long since familiar from Art Tatum, Bill Evans, Jarrett and others—no longer appears as a rupture but as a further intensification of an existing hybrid. The Concert All of this was still turning in my mind when Hiromi and the other three members of Hiromi’s Sonicwonder—Adam O’Farrill, Hadrien Feraud, and Gene Coye—took the stage and, within seconds, dissolved any neat theoretical considerations about the “canon” . They opened with the now notorious “XYZ” from her debut album Another Mind, a piece whose theme has acquired a kind of cult status among musicians. The composite metre—variously notated but here felt as something like 9/16 + 4/8 + 9/16 + 3/8—immediately forced the audience into a different sense of pulse: too irregular to settle into comfort, too insistently grooving to be experienced as mere complication. From the first bars the band demonstrated a level of synchronisation, accuracy, and mutual control that was frankly shocking. By the time Feraud launched into his first bass solo, the Barbican was already won over. Adam O’Farrill and Hadrien Feraud © Emile Holba Having seen many jazz musicians over the past decades, some of whom are routinely claimed as “greats”, what unfolded on this stage felt calibrated on another scale. Before any extended improvisation had taken place, Sonicwonder already resembled, in its compositional density and rhythmic precision, the world of bands like Animals as Leaders or Tigran Hamasyan’s more prog-inflected projects: labyrinthine unison lines, abrupt metric shifts, and a control over form that can only come from countless rehearsals and shared band history. But within two bars of Feraud’s solo it was clear that we had moved somewhere else again. Playing electric bass in an effortless alternation of slapped figures and legato runs, he navigated the shifting accents and implied modulations with a kind of casual ferocity, never sacrificing sound or time. The solo did not feel like an embellishment of the written material so much as its continuation on another plane, as if the composition itself had sprouted an additional, improvising limb. In that moment, the language of canon and pantheon felt oddly beside the point. What was shown on stage was an extreme present tense: a music that, while built from existing vocabularies, produced an intensity that made one briefly understand why, despite all the justified suspicion surrounding the word, critics still reach for “canon” when they encounter something like this. Suddenly all critiques of “mere synthesis” no longer registered as accusations of insufficiency. If anything, it may be exactly what makes Hiromi emblematic of a late-canonical moment: a stage at which the historical innovations of jazz have been internalised so thoroughly that their recombination can reach previously unimaginable levels of complexity and energy, without necessarily producing a new dialect. She appears less as the founder of a new school than as the point at which multiple histories converge and are driven, with exhausting force, to their limits. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Because while Feraud was showing that he was operating at the highest level all by himself, I noticed something about Hiromi that perhaps only a live setting allows one to grasp fully: her comping. Giving the other band members centre stage until late into the song, Hiromi was content to remain in the role of accompanist—yet in the most meaningful way possible. As many pianists, guitarists and others will attest, comping is the secret mastership of jazz improvisation. It is rarely as immediately dazzling as an elaborate solo, but to find one’s own voice in this category deserves its own credit and comes with its own demands: a finely tuned ear for one’s fellow musicians, an unshakeable sense of time, and the intuition of when to step back and when to assert oneself. Hancock, if anything, was an exceptional comping player. I sometimes feel more capable of recognising his playing from the way he accompanies others than from his own solos. Hiromi must have eaten his records by the spoonful; otherwise it is difficult to explain the level of expertise and dedication she displayed long before playing the first note of her own solo. Gene Coye © Emile Holba Before that moment arrived, however, it was Gene Coye and Adam O’Farrill’s turn to take centre stage. While Coye’s solos did not fill me with the same kind of awe that Feraud had inspired minutes earlier, he maintained throughout the evening a solid, reliable backbone for the band. If Feraud was revelatory as a whole, his style is too volatile—at too many parties at once—to be bound to simple rhythm-section duties. It was here that Coye held the whole thing together. Meanwhile O’Farrill has, over the past years, established himself as one of the most striking trumpet improvisers of his generation, moving between New York’s avant-leaning small groups and more straight-ahead contexts with equal ease. His playing combines a dry, centred tone with an almost conversational phrasing: lines that begin in tightly coiled, bop-inflected figures and then unfurl into wide intervallic leaps or sudden bursts of upper-register intensity. At rapid tempos he threaded this restless, slightly angular language through Hiromi’s and Feraud’s rhythmic grids with total assurance. The youngest member of the group made it abundantly clear that this is where he belongs, even at such an early stage of his career. All of them had earned their ranks by the time Hiromi began her own solo, moving, as she is known to, between grand piano and her two Nord keyboards, binding together decades of styles once more: George Duke-inflected fusion synth lines—with an almost theatrical use of the pitch wheel—colliding with grand-piano runs reminiscent of Oscar Peterson or Chick Corea. All of this appeared, impossibly, in one crisp, tightly argued solo. From here on out the concert unfolded without surrendering anything of its initial force. The band moved into Out There, the four-part suite from the Sonicwonderland project: beginning with “Takin’ Off,” then into the restless, slightly mischievous “Tidal Wave,” passing through the groove-driven “Strollin’,” and closing with the expansive, questing gestures of “The Quest.” Played without interruption, the suite functioned less as a sequence of pieces than as a single, continuously modulating environment through which the band travelled with absolute authority. The Encore The concert ended with standing ovations and the unmistakable sense that what had been witnessed would not soon fade. Yet as if to intensify this impression even further, Hiromi opened the encore alone, with her rendition of the Beatles’ “Blackbird.” In this stripped-down moment she seemed to negotiate directly with the audience, turning toward us on certain chords and phrases as if to ask, almost teasingly: did you hear that? One felt a performer whose command was not only technical but atmospheric; someone capable of shaping the room itself simply by directing her attention outward. I do not know how many decades it takes to reach this level of presence, this ability not merely to play for an audience but to guide it, mould it, make it complicit in the smallest inflection of a line. James Copus and Adam O’Farrill © Emile Holba The concert closed with a guest. London-based James Copus, who has rapidly gained recognition in recent years for his combination of crystalline tone, fluid upper-register control, and unusually compositional approach to improvisation, joined the stage. Having substituted for Adam in three of the Netherlands dates earlier in the month, he was invited to finish the European tour together with the full group. Closing with the title track “Sonicwonderland,” audiences at the Barbican were able to witness an unprecedented, perhaps never-to-be-repeated formation: a quintet built around two of the most promising young trumpet players on the planet. Watching Copus take his solo with the poised, forward-leaning concentration that characterises his playing, one sensed O’Farrill regarding him with a mixture of camaraderie and competitive spark. When Adam entered, he delivered his finest solo of the evening—rapid lines, daring rhythmic displacements, and a final ascent into the upper register executed with a nonchalance that bordered on defiant. Afterglow The band left the stage again under standing ovations, and I am sure that if the sudden lighting of the hall had not imposed its unmistakable signal of finality, the audience would have remained, calling them back for yet another encore, and another after that. There was a shared sense that something unusually complete had unfolded. Not complete in the sense of closure or resolution, but complete in the way an evening occasionally aligns: when players of extraordinary ability find themselves in a formation that amplifies, rather than competes with, each individual voice. Hiromi's Sonicwonder © Emile Holba What lingered was not merely admiration but an afterglow, the feeling that one had witnessed a group operating at the very edge of its own capacities yet without strain, without display. In contrast to some of the other concerts at this London Jazz Festival, Sonicwonder did not need to present itself with attitude. It simply unfolded at a level rarely reached, leaving in its wake a quiet astonishment that such evenings still occur—moments in which the music justifies itself without proclamation, but by the sheer force of its own momentum.

When 23 November 2025 Where HERE at Outernet, London Who Nubya Garcia Max Luthert Sam Jones Lyle Barton Jamz Supernova What The finale of EFG London Jazz Festival 2025 featuring Nubya Garcia and her band, opened by Jamz Supernova. Why After hearing SHABAKA and Hiromi’s Sonicwonder earlier in the festival, I was curious to see what it would mean for Nubya Garcia to close the London Jazz Festival in a very different space, with a very different promise: a late-night, standing-room show in HERE at Outernet, complete with bespoke visuals projected onto the venue’s giant LED screen. Nubya Garcia Band © Tatiana Gorilovsky Live Notes The change of room already reframed expectations. The Barbican, where SHABAKA and Hiromi had played, is an archetypal concert hall: fixed seating, frontal acoustics, everything oriented toward listening. HERE at Outernet is almost the opposite – a subterranean, club-like box four floors below Tottenham Court Road, designed for 1,500 standing bodies, with light and screen doing as much work as sound. The evening began with Jamz Supernova’s DJ set, which kept the atmosphere closer to a club warm-up than a typical festival support act, and the main set started noticeably later than billed – a delay that might not matter in a purely dance context, but which here reinforced the sense that visual and atmospheric build-up were being weighted as heavily as the music itself. On paper, the band could hardly be stronger. Garcia arrived off the back of Odyssey, the 2024 album that extends her blend of spiritual jazz, dub and orchestral colour, and she brought with her the now-established touring rhythm section: Max Luthert on bass, Sam Jones on drums, with Lyle Barton on keyboards and electronics fleshing out the harmony. This is a group that has already been tested in festival conditions and in more traditional concert settings. And in the opening stretches of the set – built around material from Source and Odyssey, including a version of “The Message Continues” – you could sense why they have become central figures in the London scene: the bass lines heavy but mobile, the drums carving broken-beat patterns that lean as much toward contemporary beat culture as toward hard bop, the saxophone riding on top with a broad, vocal tone. Yet what unfolded over the next ninety minutes never quite matched the promise of that line-up. Compared with Sonicwonder at the Barbican – a band that appeared entirely without attitude, simply took their places and played at a frighteningly high level, leaving everything else to the music – Garcia’s show leaned heavily into presentation. The musicians were sharply styled, framed by a constant stream of cosmic imagery: nebulae, starfields, abstract planetary forms drifting slowly across the immense screen. In principle this interstellar staging could have articulated something essential in her recent work, which often reaches for a sense of journey and cosmology. In practice, it sometimes felt as though the visual dramaturgy was doing work that the sound could not consistently sustain. The problem was not concept but execution. Sam Jones’ drumming drew on the now widely circulated language of hyperactive, almost JD-Beck-like continuous chops: hi-hat runs and snare flurries that turn the backbeat into a dense, flickering texture. At its best this gave the music a nervous propulsion; at its worst it slid into a kind of gestural blur. Several times, fills that looked dazzling from the balcony – sticks flying, arms carving big arcs through the light – landed slightly behind or ahead of the beat, or smeared accents that the rest of the band seemed to be aiming for. The result was a rhythmic surface that promised more than it delivered: visually spectacular, musically a little sloppy. Nubya Garcia © Tatiana Gorilovsky A parallel issue emerged in the saxophone sound. Garcia’s basic tone remains compelling: warm, rounded, with the grain of the instrument always audible even when pushed hard. But the decision to bathe the horn in heavy reverb and delay – presumably to fill the large room and match the “cosmic” aesthetic – had a severe cost. Anything faster than an eighth-note line quickly dissolved into mush; runs that acoustically were almost certainly articulated with clarity became indistinct clouds of notes, their inner rhythm buried under the tail of the previous phrase. On medium and up-tempo tunes, the ear no longer followed the contour of a line but only its general energy. The effect was to flatten the difference between a carefully built solo and a more routine passage: both arrived at the listener as washes of saxophone colour hovering over the beat. This is not to say that the evening lacked strong moments. When the tempo dropped and the band opened the texture, the same reverb that had previously obscured detail suddenly made sense. Sustained notes bloomed into the room; the interplay between bass and drums became legible; motifs from Odyssey gained a certain widescreen aesthetic, at times reminiscent of the legendary Cowboy Bebop soundtrack or even Ornette Coleman’s Virgin Beauty. There were stretches where Garcia’s phrasing, given more harmonic and temporal space, reconnected with the spiritual-jazz lineage that first brought her to prominence. But these moments alternated with passages where the sheer ambition – drums, synths, processed saxophone, screen imagery – produced less an image of mastery than of poorly executed pretension. The contrast with SHABAKA’s festival appearance earlier in the week is instructive. SHABAKA has recently moved away from the overtly maximalist language of his work with Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming toward a more stripped-back, meditative register; live, this registered as a refusal of spectacle in favour of concentrated sound. Hiromi’s Sonicwonder, for their part, achieved something opposite but equally focused: a virtuosic, almost prog-jazz excess whose internal precision kept every detail audible. Garcia’s Outernet show seemed to sit uneasily between these poles: committed to the idea of a fully immersive, audio-visual “journey”, but without the rhythmic tightness or sonic clarity needed to make that immersion musically compelling from start to finish. One could say, more generally, that the evening dramatised a tension running through much of the contemporary London scene: between the desire to treat jazz as dance music again – to draw on club culture, sound-system aesthetics, the visual vocabulary of electronic festivals – and the still unresolved question of how jazz functions in such environments. When the room, the lights and the projections demand constant escalation, solos risk becoming pure display, spectacle for its own sake. In the end it was precisely the interstellar metaphor – weightlessness, the sense of being carried far away – that was least convincingly delivered.

Bitter Christmas (Pedro Almodóvar, 2026) As the recalled titles for the Cannes awards ceremony began circulating hours before the closing ceremony, the festival’s guessing game entered its most suspenseful phase. It happens every year. This time, the shortlist reportedly included Fjord, Minotaur, Fatherland, The Black Ball, The Dreamed Adventure, A Man of His Time, All of a Sudden, and Coward. These eight films would ultimately divide the festival’s seven major awards. Either a tie would emerge in one category, or Cannes might once again create a special distinction for a particular film, as it had done for The Seed of the Sacred Fig in 2024 and Bi Gan’s Resurrection in 2025. Until shortly before the awards ceremony began in the evening, journalists and critics continued to publish predictions. Meanwhile, a vast legion of cinephiles who weren’t even in Cannes took to social media for a virtual Cannes experience and weighed in with their own forecasts, often relying on jury grids by numerous outlets or reviews from critics whose tastes aligned with theirs. This phenomenon further underscores the inherent game nature of the awards mechanism—it is as rich in dramatic tension as it is in interactivity. The final results were hardly surprising. Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu claimed a second Palme d’Or with Fjord, nearly two decades after winning with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in 2007. Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, now based in France, received the Grand Prix for Minotaur. Best Director was shared by Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland and the directing duo Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo for The Black Ball. Whether such a lineup possesses credibility remains, as always, a matter of individual judgment. Yet the significance of Cannes has never rested solely on its prize winners. As the world’s most influential film festival, its value emerges from the totality of the works it presents. Together, these films tell stories about individuals while simultaneously reflecting the condition of the contemporary world. Artists’ Cinema Across its Official Selection and parallel sections—including Directors’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week, and ACID—the 79th Cannes Film Festival screened 122 feature films. Among them, the 22 titles competing for the Palme d’Or represent the highest-profile showcase of contemporary auteur cinema. What is striking is that at least thirteen of these twenty-two competition films place artists at the center of their narratives, either as protagonists or as essential mediators through which the story unfolds. The first competition title, Fukada Koji’s Nagi Notes, revolves in part around Yoriko (Matsu Takako), a sculptor whose reunion with an old friend, Yuri (Ishibashi Shizuka), quietly sets two emotional trajectories in motion. Yoriko’s studio is filled with wooden portraits carved from live models, yet one sculpture hidden beneath a cloth is modelled after Yuri herself. Through sculpture, Yoriko materialises feelings she chose not to openly express, creating a vessel for emotions otherwise left without form. It is a strategy common to artists across many of this year’s films. Novelists use writing to observe and intervene in the lives of those they study, as in Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales. Photographers turn the camera toward their objects of desire, as in Arthur Harari’s The Unknown and Marie Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster. Film directors write friends and family members into their scripts in search of reconciliation, as in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved and Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas. At its core, artistic creation repeatedly appears as a form of fulfilment, even possession, achieved through fiction. Nagi Notes (Fukada Koji , 2026) Bitter Christmas goes further by examining the way artworks can turn back upon their creators. This dimension emerges through Almodóvar’s elegantly structured screenplay. Within the film, director Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) and the fictional filmmaker Elsa (Barbara Lennie), a character created by Raúl himself, simultaneously engage in acts of writing. Their narratives mirror and interrogate one another. Near the conclusion, just as Raúl finally discovers a way of writing about friends and family that feels both morally defensible and formally satisfying, he smiled. The camera immediately cuts to Elsa sitting on a sofa, gazing at him with something close to judgment. In that moment, the artist’s authority dissolves. By his twenty-fourth feature, Almodóvar appears to have redirected his critical gaze toward himself. A second group of films focuses on the precarious conditions of artistic existence. In Jeanne Herry’s Another Day, Adèle Exarchopoulos plays a struggling actress trapped by alcoholism. In Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s All of a Sudden, theatre director Mari (Okamoto Tao) continues pursuing seemingly impossible productions while dying of cancer. Ira Sachs’s The Man I Love follows an AIDS-stricken artist, played by Oscar winner Rami Malek, navigating friendships, family ties and a complicated love triangle in 1980s New York. Even Thomas Mann in Fatherland, though spared immediate material hardship, finds himself caught between competing ideological camps eager to transform him into a symbolic figure. His son has already sought posthumous vindication through suicide, while his daughter, his closest companion, never hesitates to challenge him directly. Other films feature artists less prominently, yet their presence remains crucial to the narrative. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s A Woman’s Life deconstructs the life of a surgeon (Léa Drucker) into a dozen episodic chapters, a clever device that sidesteps the pitfalls of conventional dramatic structure. In several pivotal chapters, the surgeon meets her temporary true love—a novelist whose creative premise involves observing the surgeon’s life. She is possessed within the writer’s literary imagination, only for the novelist to vanish the moment he secures a Japanese writing grant. The Black Ball, inspired by Federico García Lorca’s unfinished work of the same name, gradually drifts into fiction. Lorca’s late-life companion Rafael Rodríguez Rapún enters the narrative, which imagines a secret emotional bond developing between the imprisoned Rapún and one of his guards during the Spanish Civil War. In the twenty-first century, the guard’s grandson attempts to reconstruct both the lost manuscript and the hidden love story buried within it. Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Sheep in the Box moves into the future, imagining a world where artificial intelligence can resurrect the dead. The architect played by Ayase Haruka spends her life designing ideal homes for others, while her AI-empowered son develops his own vision of home through accelerated learning, ultimately constructing an entirely new one for himself. These films may point toward a tendency worth scrutinizing. Cinema, by virtue of the camera, is built upon a relationship between observer and observed. However, as an increasing number of directors choose to place the artist—a proxy for themselves—into the position of the observed, one may wonder whether contemporary cinema risks becoming trapped in a closed circuit of self-reference. At its worst, it can slide into a form of artistic narcissism. The tendency arguably reached an extreme two years ago with Christophe Honoré’s Marcello Mio. When Chiara Mastroianni plays her father Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve plays Chiara’s mother, the film ultimately becomes a fully internalized act of cinematic fan fiction, no longer a window onto the world beyond itself.

阅读中文版 Umberto Giordano’s opera Marina, written 138 years ago, was rediscovered during the pandemic and finally given its world premiere at Milan’s Teatro Dal Verme in February this year. The premiere recording, starring tenor Freddie De Tommaso and soprano Eleonora Buratto, was released by Decca Classics at the end of July, allowing listeners to hear the earliest work of the composer who would later write Andrea Chénier. With British and Italian heritage, De Tommaso is one of the lyric tenors to have risen rapidly through the international opera world in recent years. Shortly before the release of Marina, I met him for a drink at the bar of the Royal Opera House in London. That evening, he was due back on stage to sing Rodolfo in Puccini’s La bohème. A year earlier, I had watched him at the same theatre opposite Anna Netrebko in the new production of Tosca. Freddie De Tommaso and Anna Netrebko in Tosca © The Royal Opera 2025 Marc Brenner De Tommaso has a warm, supple voice, but his characterisation is just as striking. His Rodolfo was young, sensitive and slightly awkward in his sincerity; his Cavaradossi was passionate and deeply affecting. When we met, he told me that he had already had experience as an actor as a child. From the age of five or six, he sang in his school choir, played the piano, and later joined the chapel choir and school orchestra. At around 11, his mother took him to Glyndebourne to see Puccini’s one-act opera Gianni Schicchi. He had already heard its famous aria O mio babbino caro many times on the radio and in his father’s Italian restaurant. “Then hearing that in the context of the opera world, it was very exciting,” he recalled. Looking back, he says it was probably in the choir, as a young boy, that he “caught the bug for singing”. Many of the roles he sings are tragic, and he says the challenge is to find a balance between emotional immersion and the demands of singing. “Obviously, if you go too deep into it, then it can affect your singing. And obviously that’s not good. But also, if you don’t go deep enough, you don’t give an interesting performance.” Experience helps. The more often he sings a role, the more it becomes part of his body; once the singing is secure, he can go further into the character. Take Rodolfo. When he first sang the role in 2022, his attention was largely on the singing itself. He has now performed it at least 50 times. “The singing is, you know, it’s completely taken for granted, basically.” That gives him more freedom in rehearsal to develop his relationships with Mimì, Marcello and the other characters, and to find more layers in the role. Freddie De Tommaso in La bohème © The Royal Opera 2026 Ian Hippolyte Marina was a very different experience. There was no established performance tradition and no recording to refer to, so De Tommaso had to look to Giordano’s later works, including Andrea Chénier and Fedora, for clues to the young composer’s musical language. “In its musical style, it is thoroughly verismo,” he says. Giordano was only about 21 when he wrote it, yet already seemed to have “his sound and his style well in his hands”. De Tommaso plays Giorgio, a wounded Serbian soldier, whom he sees as somewhat similar to Cavaradossi in Tosca: “a heroic romantic character”. Much of the music is lyrical, he says, but there are also more forceful dramatic passages, giving the role something in common with the poet and revolutionary of Andrea Chénier. To learn the role, he gave the full score to his London coach Jonathan Papp, who made him a learning track by playing the orchestral part as well as his vocal line. “Then, yeah, we just studied and coached it.” Without an established tradition to follow, the singers had to make their own decisions. “To a point, you can kind of really put your own individual stamp on it.” The first ever album release of Marina by Decca At around 55 minutes, Marina is short enough to make an appealing double bill, and De Tommaso would love to see it on stage. He thinks it would work particularly well with Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana. The two operas were submitted to the same Sonzogno competition in 1888: Cavalleria rusticana won, while Marina came sixth. One went on to become a staple of the verismo repertoire; the other disappeared for almost 140 years. Talking about Italian opera inevitably brings him back to Puccini. “He really understood human nature,” he says. “For romance, for love, he really had it.” He also points to aggression, recalling the second act of Tosca, particularly the confrontation between Tosca and Scarpia. Puccini, he says, understood human emotion and was able to translate it into sound, “possibly better than anyone else”. His own voice, meanwhile, has changed considerably since 2022. “The voice is the muscle. It changes with time and with maturity.” His voice now feels more dramatic to him, ready for heavier repertoire. He still enjoys singing lyrical roles such as Rodolfo, but is looking ahead to larger Verdi and Puccini roles. Born and raised in England, De Tommaso can sound, on stage, unmistakably Italian. Away from the stage, however, he is distinctly English: he likes going to the pub, playing golf and watching rugby. He describes himself as “very much a half-and-half kind of person”. His musical identity feels more Italian, while his everyday life retains what he sees as his Englishness. Freddie De Tommaso in Tosca © The Royal Opera 2025 Marc Brenner He also feels strongly about opera’s place in contemporary culture. Over the past few decades, he says, opera in Britain has become increasingly removed from the mainstream. He sometimes uses social media to introduce opera to younger audiences, but he knows it is a difficult line to walk. “We know that we must do that sort of thing, but also we don’t want to appear cringe.” “There’s so much choice for people,” he says. “There’s Netflix, there’s Amazon Prime, there’s Disney, all this stuff to take people’s attention away.” Opera has to fight for its own space: “Yes, I am still here. I’m still important. You must come.” If opera were to disappear simply because people did not know about it, he says, “it would be a tragedy”. I ask him why he feels so strongly about bringing opera to more people. “Because it is the only way that a human being can sense, literally sense in their body, the vibrations created by another human being.” There is nothing between the singer and the listener: “There’s no piano or violin or whatever. There is no microphone, nothing electric. Nothing.” “It’s me to you. And the air, the vibrations.” For De Tommaso, that direct physical connection is what makes opera so special — and what allows it to move people so strongly. A sound you never get tired of I really like the sound of a match striking. That, like, you know, the— and then as it catches. That’s the sound I really like. The last piece of music that moved you to tears The end of Suor Angelica. Something audiences often get wrong about opera singers That we’re not normal people. We are just completely normal, run-of-the-mill, normal people. And I think they think sometimes that we are, I don’t know, not normal. Bits of it can be glamorous, but a lot of it is travelling by yourself, staying in hotels or Airbnbs, just by yourself with your suitcase. It’s hard. You’re away from your family and loved ones a lot. It’s not all glamorous and fun all the time. Your idea of perfect happiness Peace. Peace, tranquillity. Your most marked characteristic Oh, I don’t know. Cheerful, I would like to say. I would like that to be the case. What are you worst at? Ignoring other people’s opinions. The quality you most value in a person Kindness. The musicians who mean the most to you Well, that’s a really hard question. My wife is a musician, so my wife and several of my best friends are musicians. So, yeah, my loved ones, I would say. The thing you wish people noticed the most Hard work. The most incredible thing that has ever happened to you The most incredible, the best thing that happened to me? My daughter. Your advice to a young singer Get good at singing and then do competitions. That’s how you do it these days. Freddie De Tommaso In 2018, De Tommaso won the Viñas International Singing Competition, receiving the Plácido Domingo Tenor Prize and the Verdi Prize, before joining the Opera Studio of the Bavarian State Opera. In 2021, at 28, he stepped in at short notice as Cavaradossi in Tosca at the Royal Opera House, an appearance that opened the door to international recognition. He has since appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, Teatro alla Scala, the Vienna State Opera and the Paris Opera, and is now one of the most closely watched young tenors of his generation.

Matt Damon as Odysseus and Zendaya as Athena in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) Universal Pictures 阅读中文版 The Odyssey is a thoroughly “big” movie. Its bigness extends far beyond the silver screen. Even outside the film itself, the scale of the conversation it has generated is unprecedented. The film was dated for release and put on advance sale as early as a year before its premiere. This is hardly standard practice for a film. It is more reminiscent of a sold-out Broadway or West End musical, or a Taylor Swift-level stadium concert. Live performances have always possessed an inherent scarcity: they can only take place in one location at one particular time. Film, by contrast, is different. A movie can open simultaneously in tens of thousands of cinemas around the world. By definition, it could never suffer from the same scarcity. And yet The Odyssey has created precisely this kind of concert-like scarcity through its IMAX 70mm version, supposedly the “ultimate format” for cinema. Only 40 cinemas worldwide are capable of screening this so-called “complete” version. As a result, some audiences have taken trains, even planes, simply to experience it. The screenings at London’s BFI IMAX have been almost continuously sold out through September, with only seats in the corners of the first two rows remaining. In France, some viewers have driven hundreds of kilometres to Montpellier simply to see the film at the country’s only cinema capable of screening the “complete” version. Before it became a “big” movie, The Odyssey was first and foremost a “big” cinematic event. If we look back at film history, we find that “big” has never been merely a question of size. In the 1950s, CinemaScope used anamorphic lenses and widescreen projection to show audiences more, but it expanded horizontally. Widescreen eventually became the dominant format in cinemas today. With IMAX 70mm and IMAX GT digital projection, however, “more” has shifted vertically. One is wider; the other is taller. How are we supposed to determine which one is “more”? This is no longer simply a technical question. It is a question of who has the authority to define what “big” means, and to define how a film ought to be seen. Christopher Nolan and the media discourse surrounding him have transformed IMAX from a technical format into a standard of viewing. Their voices are like the Sirens’ song, luring audiences toward IMAX cinemas. In recent years, the release of a Nolan film has always been accompanied by this kind of “format chaos.” The Odyssey exists in at least three aspect ratios, from “big” to “small”: 1.43:1, 1.90:1 and 2.39:1, with the latter two cropped from the former. The 40 cinemas worldwide capable of screening IMAX 70mm film, together with a small number of IMAX GT cinemas supporting the 1.43:1 ratio, can show the so-called “complete” version. The remaining tens of thousands of cinemas can only screen the cropped versions. Traumpalast in Leonberg, Germany, has the largest IMAX screen in the world, yet it can only show the cropped 1.90:1 version. And so we return to the same question: what, exactly, counts as “big”? The Odyssey in 1.43:1 Universal Pictures Another question follows. Leaving aside whether such aggressive vertical cropping actually affects the perspective of the image, there is nothing inherently impossible about projecting a 1.43:1 image onto most widescreens. The only problem is that the image cannot fill the entire screen, leaving blank space on either side. At least in Europe, many older cinemas still have motorized curtains in front of their screens. These not only provide the ceremonial pleasure of the curtain slowly opening at the beginning of a film; they can also physically adjust the effective size of the screen, allowing it to accommodate different aspect ratios. In other words, the screen adapts to the film, rather than the film adapting to the screen. The difference becomes particularly apparent at film festivals such as Cannes, Berlin and Venice. The same screen may show dozens of films over the course of several days, possibly each with a different aspect ratio. The curtains can be adjusted from film to film, giving every aspect ratio the full space it deserves. Respecting the integrity of the frame is also a way of respecting the film itself. The paradox of The Odyssey, however, is that Nolan has gone to enormous lengths to shoot with IMAX film cameras in pursuit of an image that reaches “from floor to ceiling,” yet only a tiny fraction of audiences will ever see that image in its entirety. For the vast majority of viewers around the world, what they see is a cropped Odyssey. Another aspect of The Odyssey that became a talking point long before its release was its casting. Discussions surrounding the casting of a “Black Helen” and transgender actors as Greek soldiers had already become heated well before the film opened. A simple analogy might be this: can a non-Western actor play a character in Shakespeare, a ballet by Tchaikovsky, or an opera by Puccini? The answer has long been self-evident. In opera alone, the Chinese soprano Hui He has performed across Europe for years in Madama Butterfly, Turandot, Tosca, La Bohème and Aida, playing Japanese, Chinese, Bohemian and Ethiopian characters respectively. In recent years, opera has also seen an increasing number of transgender performers. The American transgender singer Lucia Lucas is a typical example. She presents as a woman and has a baritone voice, and therefore frequently performs male roles in opera, such as the bullfighter Escamillo in Carmen. So why does similar casting in film still provoke such controversy? Perhaps because film is a more mass-oriented art form? And perhaps the “bigger” the film, the more it is expected to represent some notion of “popular” identity, history and culture. The Odyssey (2026) Universal Pictures As a filmmaker, Christopher Nolan can no longer make “small” films. From Oppenheimer to The Odyssey, he first used the “father of the atomic bomb,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, to tell a story about the end of civilization, before travelling back to the period in which The Odyssey is set—the origins of Western civilization. Yet, as many critics have already pointed out, The Odyssey is undoubtedly a continuation of Oppenheimer at its core. Nolan has achieved a curious synthesis here: using an epic about the origins of Western civilization to tell a story about the destruction of civilization. That destruction begins with the violation of Zeus’s law. And the violator is none other than the “great hero” Odysseus. Odysseus spends more than twenty years slowly making his way home, enduring one ordeal after another and overcoming each through his ingenuity. In The Odyssey, however, Matt Damon’s repeated “tricks” trigger wars and conflicts that result in the deaths of civilians and Greek soldiers. The “great hero” therefore seems perpetually steeped in sorrow, as if he had wandered in from a Terrence Malick set. At this point, the anti-war impulse of Nolan’s The Odyssey becomes unmistakable. Naturally, it is easy to read this as political allegory. Odysseus could be Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, or even Musk. But obviously, none of these “great men” are going to change because of a film. The true recipients of the film’s message are therefore still ordinary people like us, who have no ability to influence the course of events. What The Odyssey offers us is a form of spiritual consolation: through an entirely safe, lowest-common-denominator anti-war narrative, Nolan, himself a member of the cultural elite, places himself alongside the masses. Nolan clearly believes in the righteousness of anti-war sentiment, and there is of course nothing controversial about that righteousness. Yet the ending of The Odyssey inevitably reminded me of the ending of Spielberg’s Disclosure Day: Emily Blunt is about to reveal to the world the existence of extraterrestrial life, and Spielberg seems to have such faith in the universality of this revelation that he has the entire world watching the livestream simultaneously. Nolan is, of course, not quite that single-minded. After an exhausting and chaotic indoor fight scene, he has Odysseus and Penelope speak to each other through a closed door. This is not a monologue but a dialogue; not a declaration addressed to the entire world, but an almost private act of self-examination. Through Odysseus, Nolan says what he feels he must say, but those words do not, and cannot, extend beyond the realm of confession and atonement. In the famous interview Nolan did with a Chinese influencer, he defended the film by arguing that even if you recognize the conventions of a movie, that does not mean those conventions invalidate themselves. Of course. This is a familiar, success-manual style piece of rhetoric, grounded in the fact of his own already proven success. Or perhaps, from Nolan’s perspective, it is simply the way an elite figure attempts to communicate with the masses. But it is precisely these conventions that make the film feel bland. Alongside this blandness, the film attempts to generate tension through action sequences in which one man takes on dozens. The problem is that such tension is almost impossible to sustain, because audiences either already know, or have already anticipated, that Odysseus will not die here. Anne Hathaway’s performance is similar. She appears spicy, even faintly feminist, but the performance is relatively one-dimensional. At the moments when the audience is supposedly meant to empathize with her, it is precisely the attitude she projects—that of someone who seems to believe “the whole world owes me something”—that blocks the emotional connection. Matt Damon may claim that he got into much better shape for The Odyssey, but his Odysseus is a character lacking both charisma and the traditional aura of a hero. And so this “big” movie finally manages to justify itself: it has an enormous production scale, an enormous cast of stars, an enormous screen, an enormous market, and an enormous theme. In the end, all these forms of “bigness” converge on a very safe, very familiar moral conclusion. Samantha Morton as Circe in The Odyssey (2026) Universal Pictures Yet The Odyssey is not without its memorable set pieces: the terror of the Cyclops’ cave; the visceral horror of Circe, played by Samantha Morton, turning soldiers into pigs through practical effects; the flashes of humor that Robert Pattinson’s Antinous occasionally brings to a film otherwise steeped in tragedy; and Charlize Theron’s Calypso, who has the goddess-like glamour of a perfume advertisement, though that quality will undoubtedly divide audiences. Circe in particular—the bodies, skin, food, fur and animal hides, and the tangible, unclean physicality of her contact with the men—made me realize something: images that are truly alive do not necessarily have to be the biggest ones. That is also why, after watching The Odyssey, I found myself missing “small” films. Radu Jude’s The Diary of a Chambermaid is one of them. It too is an adaptation of a literary classic, and it too possesses a strong sense of modernity, yet it is much “smaller.” It does not attempt to represent civilization. It does not attempt to become a global event. Nor does it require some supposedly “ultimate format” to prove that it is worth watching. But it is closer to our lives, and closer to our history. Amid flashes of brilliance and an overwhelming sense of blandness, the nearly three-hour journey of the simplified Odyssey came to an end. The Odyssey is, of course, a great product of the film industry. It has given audiences around the world a reason to reconsider the cinema. It has allowed a somber blockbuster, one not particularly driven by entertainment, to earn more than a billion dollars at the global box office. And it has once again made the cinema a place worth making a special trip to. This is Nolan’s gift to cinema. Three weeks after its German release, on a weekday afternoon, I went to see a non-IMAX digital screening. The aspect ratio was 2.39:1, in an ordinary cinema.

Yuja Wang © Julia Wesely 12 August, pianist Yuja Wang made her debut with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) at the Edinburgh International Festival, in a world premiere. The programme was jointly curated and selected by Wang and Wynton Marsalis, with ten arrangers reworking jazz classics by Art Tatum, Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck and others. Wang performed transcriptions of works by these jazz piano titans, accompanied by newly commissioned band arrangements created specifically for each transcription. What captivated Yuja was not simply the jazz, but its sense of community and play. Classical music, she says, is usually centred on a soloist, or a soloist with an orchestra, and as a solo musician there can be a certain sense of solitude. This was different: “We rehearse together, everyone writes music together, everyone arranges together.” There is a sense of everyone participating, she says, rather than striving for perfect precision. “Good music is a sense of play.” This is my third interview with Yuja. When I first met her in 2009, she was 22 and had just stepped into the international spotlight. When we met again in 2014, she had already begun talking about jazz and contemporary art. More than a decade later, she has gone much further: collaborating with jazz musicians, exploring conducting, taking part in Latin music projects, working with David Hockney on an immersive art experience two years ago, and more recently bringing her playing into a VR project now being presented internationally. Yet classical music still makes up the majority of her more than 100 performances around the world each year. From this autumn, she will also be an artist in residence at Vienna’s Musikverein, performing a series of concerts. She continues to admire pianists such as Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who combine deep musical study with an open mind. “I didn’t change direction, I just expanded.” She does not like looking back at who she was ten years ago. Everything that happened simply brought her to where she is today. What interests her now is what she can do with everything she has accumulated along the way — and where it might take her next. We also talked about her teacher Gary Graffman and her friend and mentor Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT), both of whom passed away over the past year. MTT was part of Wang’s life from the age of 17 into her 30s. “He could understand me without saying anything,” she says. People like that, she feels, are increasingly difficult to find. She has also come to understand that life outside music matters: the richer her life is, the more she has to express when she sits at the piano. Our conversation therefore began with jazz and ended with music and life — and with the question of where a pianist who has spent more than two decades at the very top of her profession might want to go next. Good music is a sense of play Music is still what gives me the greatest pleasure. A while ago I played some Latin music. Two years ago, my friend Teddy Abrams — we have been very close friends since our days at the Curtis Institute of Music — took me to hear Latin music one summer. I felt that the musicians on stage had such a love for music and for life. Everything came through the music — very directly, very naturally, and with such infectious energy. I was completely drawn in, and I thought, I wish I could play with them one day. And eventually I did. We have four concerts this summer, all at fairly big music festivals, but in smaller venues. A lot of things are different from what I am used to. We need amplification; two trumpets and two percussionists can already be very loud. There is also improvisation, although most of it is written out, and I have one improvisational section too, which is mostly written down beforehand. It is completely different from classical music. I have played the piano since I was a child, and before I play, I read the score, so my music is very visual. Theirs is very auditory. I have to turn off the visual first and then listen. It is completely different. I don’t have that experience, but I also don’t think I necessarily need to. I just want to be immersed in it, to be with them. For me, there is only good music and bad music. There are no boundaries between genres. Listening to jazz is a little like reading Haruki Murakami. It takes me somewhere else. I don’t know if you would call it escape, because it takes me somewhere else, where I don’t have to think about my own life for a while. There is something deep in it that speaks directly to the soul. I never really separated jazz and classical music, because my father used to be a percussionist and played jazz. So I was exposed to these things from an early age, and I have always liked them. To me, they were never two completely different worlds. On stage, it is not about everything having to be perfectly precise. It is just that everyone is playing around together. Classical music is usually a solo recital or a concerto, and as a solo musician myself, I sometimes feel a little isolated. This is different. There is a real sense of participation: we rehearse together, everyone writes music together, everyone arranges together. I like that. I started conducting around 2018, when I began working with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. It feels like a community, with everyone serving the music together. I think there is a misunderstanding about conducting: people think the conductor is standing in front and leading everyone. But I’m not a leader. It’s just like chamber music with a bigger group. The cello, the violin, and the piano should be in the middle. It is a sense of community, everyone playing the score together. From Hockney to VR: finding new medium to experience music For many years, I have been thinking about whether there are new ways for me to express myself through music, and whether there are new media through which music can be experienced. I recently did a VR project, Playing with Fire. A lot of people said, “Oh, artificial intelligence.” But it had nothing to do with artificial intelligence. I spent a very long time recording on site. First, I played every piece live and recorded it in full. Then I played it again based on those live performances and recorded footage of how I played. So it really took me a very long time. The “me” in it is always really me. There was no machine involved, and we kept adjusting things and trying to make everything as good as possible. It is just that the music was eventually put into another medium: you have to put on the glasses to enter that world. I really liked the immersive project I did with David Hockney at Lightroom in London. That was very inspiring to me. I feel that after playing the piano for so long, I really need to absorb nourishment from other art forms, otherwise my playing might lose its soul. Playing with Fire took that one step further. With Hockney, I was there and Hockney was there. This time, I had already recorded everything and then went back to see it. Later I wanted to add smell as well, so I found a perfumer who works for Dior. He is also interested in music, so we recorded a video together. There are about seven or eight pieces in it. He first had me smell several different scents, and then I chose one for each piece. The theme was fire, but fire can be bright, or a little frightening, or warm, like a fireplace. For each piece I used a more abstract feeling, and chose it together with the director. There was also an Icelandic artist I had never met before. He listened to my music and then painted what he heard. The first time I put on the glasses and saw the finished project, I had something close to an out-of-body experience: seeing myself seeing myself, and it felt very real, while I could also see other people. I think it is at least quite creative. It is like combining a music video with immersive art. The classical music world has changed generations now. In terms of age, I used to look up, and now I look down. These new concerts and new things are very easy to misunderstand. People always seem to want to define something first, as if they need to define it before they can understand it. But if you don’t understand it, I think you should just enjoy it first. There is no need to define it. Yuja Wang with JCLO at Edinburgh International Festival © Andrew Perry I never set out to break the rules I never deliberately wanted to break the rules, but sometimes I really feel constrained. I never deliberately set out to do these things, but somehow I always end up doing them. I’m really only thinking about the music. I’m on my own all the time. I have to prepare musically, and before I travel I have to pack. I pack smaller dresses, because it’s easier, I can bring more dresses, and I am visually creative, so I don’t want to wear the same dresses all the time. And I do think about acoustics, how the hall is, the walls, how the piano is. There are so many things to think about on site, but in the end, it all gets reduced. Sometimes I wonder if it is because I am a woman, and this is all people can remember. If that is really the case, it is very sad. They remember the way I bow, how I wear heels, but that has nothing to do with what I am trying to do. I want people to be moved by the music I want people to come to the concert and be moved by the music, even have their souls touched by it. And then I walk off stage and they say, “Oh, she dressed in a really short dress.” That is really soul-crushing. I don’t know if it is because I am a little older now and everything is more easily accepted, but these things do take time. Now, when I do recitals, I am actually influenced by jazz. Like these two concerts in Edinburgh, each one an hour: Wynton warned me in advance that we might change the order of the programme on stage. We have a set of pieces, but we don’t know how many we will play, or in what order. What’s funny is that he only told me this yesterday, but this is exactly how I have been designing my own recitals this year. I say, 60 to 70 minutes, and I don’t want the audience to clap in the middle, because that breaks the concentration. My programme has a structure. The piece before affects how you hear the piece after it; they are actually connected. For me, it is a little like a film director building the structure of a programme. But I don’t want to do it the same way every time. So I said: 60 to 70 minutes, no applause in the middle. The first reaction is usually, “What? Then how are we going to print the programme?” I say, you don’t need to print it. The tickets are already sold. People are coming to hear me, and I promise them good music. And afterwards, people really liked it. I did it this way in China and Japan, and just now in Boston. After tomorrow’s concert, I am going to Salzburg. As soon as they hear Salzburg, they say, “Oh my God, Salzburg! We need to print the programme!” As soon as you are not completely following the usual way of doing things, as soon as you are a little flexible, there is so much unnecessary noise around it. But if I believe this is the way I can make music, now I can actually do it. Remembering MTT: “It was almost like telepathy” My teacher Gary Graffman passed around last Christmas. Then MTT left us, and David Hockney passed away. It really feels like a generational change. Before, if I had something going on in my life, something about the human side of being a person, I would talk to them about it. But one by one, they are gone. Those people accompanied you through the first half of your life, and then suddenly all those shared memories and shared experiences are gone. MTT was with me from the age of 17 into my 30s. He watched me grow up. He could understand me without saying anything, almost as if there was some kind of telepathy. It is harder and harder to find people like that now. MTT’s teacher was Bernstein. When I was 11, I watched Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts and felt that he could make classical music so interesting. Later, MTT had Keeping Score, talking about Mahler and Beethoven, explaining the logic and emotion of the music so that you could understand it both intuitively and rationally. Learning music with him was like that too. I remember the first time I played Ravel with him. When we got to this part, he started singing jazz. Then when we got to this part, it was the Can-Can, and he started dancing. He made the music so vivid. So they connect music with everything in life, and make you feel that music is an expression of life. That is why I also want to have a very rich life, with many things that I can express through music. I learned all my concertos with him. He didn’t just talk to you about music; he connected music with life. Touring can be very boring, but he and his husband Joshua would take me to the Grand Canyon, to the San Diego Zoo. What he left me was not just music, but a way of life. Otherwise, you just sit at the piano in a little dark room, and you never know what is happening in the world outside. Later, MTT developed a brain tumour, and in his final years it became difficult to talk to him. So over roughly the past five years, I have also slowly learned to rely on myself. I have been playing for such a long time. Before, I was always absorbing so much nourishment from music, but now I need to absorb things from other art forms, from film, from other areas. I feel that Latin music, jazz, Hockney and VR will all stay with me and eventually become part of my music. Yuja Wang © Rolex / Christopher Anderson Open-mindedness and deep study go hand in hand Of course I still like pianists such as Pierre-Laurent Aimard. That hasn’t changed. It is completely different; it is just expanding. I really like his state of mind. He is always open-minded, and he studies everything he does very deeply. Open-mindedness and deep study are really two sides of the same coin. I still play classical music, and classical music still makes up a large part of my performances. I live in New York now, but next year I will be an artist in residence at the Musikverein; in fact, it starts this autumn. I will play Barber, Bartók and Prokofiev. So the things I liked before are still continuing. I haven’t thrown them away. I just want to keep expanding. I still love Schubert, as always. And I still love listening to Chopin. I like listening to Schubert and I like playing Chopin. But if you see me in ten years, please don’t quote me on this. Because I am not a fixed person. Ten years ago feels like another lifetime. I change every day. Every morning I look forward, not back. I don’t really understand the concept of a “vacation” What happened in the past has happened. It brought me here. What I need to focus on is: now that I have all these resources, what can I do with them going forward? If you keep looking back and comparing yourself with who you were ten years ago, you fall into a very big black hole. I like Paris, I like museums, I like absorbing things, and I like walking in parks and looking at the city. I have been to Edinburgh several times. This time I stayed the longest, but had the least time to myself. When I go back to China and I’m not performing, I like shopping and going to the cinema. I also like Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Every city in China is so different. There are still many places I haven’t been to. I have never been to Sichuan. I would also like to see Xi’an; it is so fascinating. Tang poetry and Song poetry are also very fascinating to me. There are so many treasures in China. I have been living and performing outside China since I was 16, so it has been more than 20 years. I feel a little tired of Europe and America. I have been to most of the cities in Europe and America. I would like to go to New Zealand, Southeast Asia, Egypt, Africa — places I haven’t really been to. I want to eat Chinese food every day. I love it so much, but Chinese food abroad is still different from Chinese food in China. I don’t really understand the concept of a “vacation”. If I’m in a good place, not performing every day and not too busy, that’s fine, because I need music to survive. If I had 20 days of vacation, I would go crazy. I would think, what am I going to do? Of course I want a vacation, but how do I know whether three years from now I will want to perform? That’s the crazy thing about classical music: you may have to start preparing for a concert two years in advance. The stressful part is really the travelling — going through security, dealing with so many people. It is really stressful. But I don’t usually think of playing the piano as work. So why do I need a vacation? I hope my love of music will never change. That is the most important thing.