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.

阅读中文版 Pavel Kolesnikov has just been nominated for the 2026 Gramophone Award for his two-piano recording with Samson Tsoy of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps and Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye. On 18 August, at Snape Maltings, I watched him play all 21 of Chopin's Nocturnes in a single evening. Before the concert, we sat beside the reed beds and talked at length. Born in Akademgorodok, the “town of scientists" near Novosibirsk in Siberia, Kolesnikov studied with Sergei Dorensky, Norma Fisher and Maria João Pires. He won the Honens International Piano Competition in 2012, was a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist from 2014 to 2016, and became an Artist in Residence at Wigmore Hall during the 2020/21 season. He has also worked extensively across disciplines, collaborating with artists including David Hockney and choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. With Tsoy, he co-founded Ragged Music Festival, exploring what can happen when music is taken outside the conventional concert hall. His new recording of Chopin's Nocturnes will be released in October. In the conversation below, Kolesnikov talks about the two versions of the C-sharp minor Nocturne, why he decided to perform all 21 in one night, and why he believes Chopin has been “very misunderstood”. He also reflects on growing up in Siberia, leaving Moscow for London, his friendship with Hockney, his partnership with Tsoy, and the continuing influence of visual art on the way he thinks about music. On September 18, Pavel will return to the stage at Wigmore Hall, joining forces with Samson Tsoy, Adrian Brendel and tenor Bogdan Volkov for a concert commemorating the Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov. In Conversation with Pavel Kolesnikov LC=Lucy Cheung PK=Pavel Kolesnikov The Two Versions of the C-sharp Minor Nocturne LC: Could you tell me a little about your new Chopin: Nocturnes album, which is also the programme for tonight? First of all, I’m curious about why there are two versions of the C-sharp minor Nocturne. PK: It’s not entirely clear why there are two versions. It’s a little bit undocumented. Generally, with those early Nocturnes, even between scholars, there are some arguments about whether they are actually in minor or not. There is one that was recorded much later in his life, and the only autograph that we have is a late autograph. I still believe that, stylistically, it’s definitely an early piece. What is interesting is that he was returning to some of the elements of his very early style late in his life. It’s not a very long line, but by the time he was about to die, he was returning to some of those elements. I find it interesting in that respect that he recorded the minor Nocturne. And with the C-sharp minor Nocturne, it exists in a few different autographs. One of them contains a very interesting rhythmic variation. It is slightly different altogether, but it really contains a rather magical and unique variation in the rhythmic arrangement in the middle section, where he crosses into a different time signature without changing it. It’s very interesting, and I came across it only when I was working on this album, so I decided to record it. Also, I find it a very important piece. It was written when he had just left Poland, and it seems probably to have been a kind of letter to his sister. It was sent to his sister. I find it an incredibly personal piece in that sense. It is a very interesting sound world, which is a little bit harsh. It has lots of open fifths and fourths, but very long-distance, kind of empty intervals that ring. It makes me think of Chopin’s voice. It’s so special in particular, and this is why I decided to record it. I recorded the two versions, and then I was thinking, do we need to put them both on? And then I thought, why don’t we put them both on the same level? Playing All the Nocturnes in One Night: A Challenge Inspired by Yohji Yamamoto LC: And when you’re going to play all of them together in one night, you haven’t played yet, but in your mind, comparing with playing them individually, what’s the difference? PK: It’s very different, and it’s difficult. I’m still figuring out what it is like. Of course, it’s very different from recording. Needless to say, I always treat recording as a different kind of process. It’s like making a movie rather than making theatre. Live performance is completely different. You know, we’re using today the piano that I used for the recording of that album. It’s the exact same one. I was just talking to the technicians about how we need to tune it in a completely different way. It cannot be tuned in the same way as it was for the recording because it’s a different process. I need to project into the audience rather than create this world for the microphone. But, yeah, I’m digressing. You’re asking me about playing all the Nocturnes together. It’s a complicated task because these Nocturnes were created over a very long period, the 21 of them. They range from very early teenage pieces to very late and very important pieces. The last three Nocturnes, I think, are some of the most important works that he has done. Some of them are very well known to the audience, extremely well known, and that’s always problematic because the audience has an expectation. It’s very difficult to make a listener really switch on in the moment, to listen to what is happening rather than listening to what is happening in their mind. And that is, of course, a task of performance. Then there are pieces that are almost unknown to the general audience. I’m sure that everyone will find a piece that they were not very familiar with tonight in this set. But they require a lot of concentration, and of course a lot of that music is very introspective. It’s a large performance. It takes about two hours, so it is an intense task. I was very scared of this, and I wasn’t even thinking of doing them in concert altogether until last autumn, when I was on tour and had an invitation to come to a Yohji Yamamoto show in Paris. I wasn’t going to go there, but on the day I suddenly realised I had this free day and technically I could go to Paris and make it. It would be a bit hard, but I could. For some reason, I felt I really must go there. Samson was with me as well. We were touring together. We found on our seats a little card asking us to turn off our mobile phones and not photograph or film during the performance, but to connect to the moment. I thought it was a wonderful idea. I very much sympathised with that. It was done in a very respectful way, and I thought it was the right thing to do. Then the show began, and it was one of the best shows of anything that I have seen. It was exactly that kind of task that I wanted to achieve, because the clothes were extremely rich in detail, and they were all occupying similar emotional territory. But the flow was arranged so that the small change that would keep you afloat would come at exactly the right moment. The pace was never interrupted. It was the most fascinating thing because it was such a risky thing to do. I was sitting there thinking, you can only do something like this if you have been doing it all your life, and whoever told you you shouldn’t be doing it, you simply weren’t listening to them. And that’s when I decided, well, I need to try to do it because it’s possible. It’s actually possible. It just takes a lot of experience and energy, but it’s so beautiful when it works. So I took it as a kind of challenge inspired by Yohji Yamamoto. Pavel Kolesnikov at Snape Maltings © BPA Chopin: “A Very Misunderstood Composer” LC: So when you were talking before about some pieces that the audience are very familiar with, I wonder, were you sometimes worried that the sound of Chopin’s music becomes a cliché, and sometimes it’s too beautiful? Do you sometimes resist the temptation to make it dramatic? PK: I think Chopin is generally a very misunderstood composer. We were just talking about it with my friend Glenn Brown yesterday. I think Chopin is a very misunderstood composer because he is a Romantic composer who used a language which is very centrally Romantic, but the kind of writing, the way he works with ideas, is very much not the central 19th-century thing. It has nothing to do with it, really. It’s much more an early 20th-century, or even mid-20th-century, sensibility that he had. And there is this barrier of beauty. I call it the “barrier of beauty”, which can be almost impenetrable. As a performing art, I think there are certain techniques that you can use to help the listener overcome the barrier and get connected to the music in the moment. Some of those things are very difficult to verbalise, and some of them just have to do with your charisma and stage presence, which you are either gifted with or not. But then there are some purely technical elements, elements of slight disruption. I first started thinking about it, actually, learning again from visual arts. I was reading a book of interviews with Francis Bacon, one of my favourite artists, interviewed by David Sylvester. He speaks very openly and very eloquently about introducing chance into painting and disrupting the painting in this way to make it more real. Ever since, I’ve been experimenting with that and seeing what can be done. I think I developed my own little inventory of small disruptions to the line or harmony during a performance, which I think are mostly unnoticeable. Whenever I do checks on my friends and listeners whom I trust, I never manage to witness them catching it in the process of doing that, but I think that it works. There are certain ways of manipulating the phrase slightly that bring the listener in without them noticing that something is slightly wrong, slightly unnatural. It’s a very big problem, particularly for well-known music. And sometimes there is no way to do it with the music itself. So, let’s put it this way: sometimes it’s more efficient to do something else in order to disrupt or displace this familiarity rather than manipulating the music itself. Actually, here in this hall I made an experiment which was very important for me, and I think was generally very successful. It was a performance that I did for the opening of the festival four or five years ago. It was a kind of theatrical performance inspired by one of my favourite artists, Joseph Cornell. It was a kind of surrealist spectacle, putting together music, a little bit of light, a little bit of film and words, done in collaboration with Sophie Hicks and Martin Crimp. I didn’t have to do anything with the music itself, but the way the stage was arranged and the way the light was done was very subtle. It would not interfere with the music, really, but it was slightly surprising to the audience, I think, and slightly mesmerising. That already put them out of their comfort zone and allowed me to play pieces that were very familiar, but suddenly felt slightly outside their conventional context. And that helps as well. Lots of my programmes function in this way. I think another very efficient way of doing it is creating a programme where there are some unusual combinations, where one piece influences the way you are perceiving the next one. In the last five, six, seven years, I’ve really only been doing those programmes. And this Chopin recital is a very new thing for me because I haven’t done a single-composer recital like that for a very long time. LC: Why now? Is it a timing thing? PK: Yes. I think it’s a little bit of a change of gear. I like the challenge and I like doing something else. I found that I’ve done quite a lot of that, and now I’m doing something that, for me, seems to be a little bit more difficult, actually. And also because I like the idea of presenting all the Nocturnes together. I think it’s an incredible, very poetic, very unique collection of pieces. It’s very impressive, but it’s demanding, both for the pianist — it’s immensely demanding — and I think quite demanding for the audience. Dreams, Memories and Visions LC: I guess the Nocturnes sometimes put a bit of a limitation on the imagination. PK: Definitely. And this is why I split them into three groups. I was trying to find the common threads among those Nocturnes. I figured out pretty early on, when I was working on them, that not all of that is nocturnal music, in fact. There’s a lot of it that is full of light, whether it is reflected light or an internal light, or some kind of fire. That is not necessarily nocturnal. They are Nocturnes in the sense that they are happening, I think, in your imagination. They’re not literal descriptions. I started looking and playing with them, and then I decided — because I like putting things into categories for myself. I think that’s my scientific background speaking in me — that there were three interesting categories which work for them quite distinctly: dreams, memories and visions. Memories, of course, are something that is about looking back. Dream is about being in a moment, or this is how I interpret it in this context. And vision is something that is coming, is looking forward, something that hasn’t happened but might be. I found that these pieces are actually falling into those categories for me. Sometimes the same piece is both a memory and a dream, or a dream and a vision. They flow between those, but I think this is about the right area which they occupy altogether. Growing Up in Siberia’s “Town of Scientists” LC: I wanted to ask you a little bit about your upbringing, and you just mentioned your scientific background. Could you tell me a little bit about your upbringing in Siberia? PK: Well, I was born in a place called Akademgorodok, which means “the town of scientists”. It was an important research centre that was built after the Second World War in the very middle of Russia. It was, I think, a very happy, very free place in Soviet Russia, actually, and very culturally advanced. But I was born in 1989, which was a couple of years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, so I didn’t really experience the place crumbling afterwards, because there was no funding for science at all. And by now it has reinvented itself as an IT centre. But when I was growing up, the place was more of a memory, a bit of a sweet memory. But I still understand, and can still feel, how wonderful it was in its heyday. It was a very idealistic haven in Soviet Russia. My parents were scientists, and most of my grandparents were also scientists. Generally, it was a very scientific circle, and I could have become a scientist probably. It was just a little bit of luck that I... LC: What was music like in your childhood? PK: I think it was very customary for everyone to play a musical instrument in that circle. Everyone had a piano or guitar or violin or accordion. My father played piano, accordion and guitar as well. LC: Classical? PK: No, not only. He did a little bit of jazz and a little bit of, how do you call it, songs and singing with the guitar, and wrote his own music. He also played Chopin. Chopin was one of the first composers I encountered, I think. Some of those Nocturnes were some of the first pieces that I ever heard. So I grew up with that. We had an upright piano, and I started playing it a little bit. Then I had an opportunity to go to a music school because music education was free, as all education was free at the time. So I started studying and, long story short, I became quite advanced. At some point I ended up in a special music school, and then I went to the conservatory. LC: Where? PK: Moscow. From Moscow to London LC: And then you came here in 2011 to continue your studies at the Royal College of Music. I can imagine that was quite a switch of artistic identity, probably in a very different environment. PK: You mean between Russia and the UK? LC: Yeah. PK: Yes, very different. I feel very lucky that I left at that time. It was the right time for me to leave. I had some personal reasons to try to leave, but also it was very much about getting out of that musical circle, which was very rich in Moscow, but also very isolated in a way. When you study at the Moscow Conservatory, you feel you’re in the centre of the world. At that time, at least, it felt like that. It was very self-contained in a way. That meant you could learn great things there and become very accomplished, but it was still quite limited. For me, it felt very one-sided. I didn’t quite know what it was about. But instinctively I felt that it would be good for me to go somewhere else. I ended up here in the UK, and I think it was a very, very lucky decision. It is a very open scene, in the sense that it’s one of the most inspiring musical scenes, in London in particular. It’s very interesting because it’s so broad. There are so many different things happening, and it’s not so well defined as it is in other places. So you don’t feel the urge to specialise so much in one thing or another. That was absolutely suitable for me. That’s exactly the thing that I think is right for me. Pavel Kolesnikov at Snape Maltings © BPA David Hockney and the Influence of Visual Art LC: You have collaborated with visual artists and painters, like David Hockney last year. PK: Yes, and some of my big projects were for David, and it’s fascinating. In general, working with David has become a very important — life-changing, really. LC: Did he influence in any way your perception of, for example, light and colour in music after that collaboration? PK: I think obviously there is influence. Whenever you’re working with someone, there is influence. I’m very sensitive to other influences. I feed on influences. I’m very open to them. Whenever I’m working with another artist that I respect, I notice that I change, and sometimes it’s very difficult to verbalise how I change. For instance, I worked with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, a great Belgian choreographer and dancer. I worked a lot with her. I know that she is really now in my system. I’m very conscious of the fact that Anne Teresa is somewhere in my blood, and that continues. And with David, it’s the same thing. There is an influence of his colour and his way of seeing, and his curiosity. But I think mostly, for me, with David, it has been a very affirmative influence. I was so fascinated from the very first time that I saw a big retrospective of his in London in 2015, I think. I was so fascinated and encouraged by his daring curiosity, his ability to get out of his own way, and his fearless experimentation. It can be very hard for an artist. The fear of losing yourself is a very big fear. And the fear of doing something that is not as good as what you have done before is a great fear, and it’s a very difficult thing to fight. I think from a rather early age I was conscious of that counterproductive energy in an artist’s life. And with David, particularly when Samson and I met him in his last years, it was incredible to witness how there was nothing that stopped him from doing yet another different thing, just trying to see if it worked or not, and being very courageous like that. I think that, for me, is the greatest affirmative power of the last few years. It’s just so encouraging to go and try things. LC: How did you meet? PK: We met with our friend Norman Rosenthal. David wanted to hear us, but he wasn’t strong enough to go out to many concerts. So we paired up with Yamaha and decided we were going to bring our piano to David’s studio. We brought a grand piano, similar to the one that I’m using today, to his studio and played The Rite of Spring for David. He was so happy. He really loved music, understood it very deeply, and was one of the great, great music lovers. For him, it was so exciting. That was a few years ago. Ever since, we stayed in touch and worked on this retrospective. We were also working on something else for David, for his show at the Serpentine, but unfortunately he passed away and it never happened. I didn’t expect David to leave us so soon, to be honest. He was so full of energy and looking forward to the new things that he was going to do. LC: Is music visual to you? PK: No, I think that’s the wrong way to put it. I think music, for me, is incredibly interconnected with every other art form. I think, in a way, it’s easier to understand an art form by comparing it to other things, seeing what the similarities are and what the differences are. I don’t think that I visualise it. Of course, sometimes visual associations come to you. But more importantly, I can see that there are certain things in music that work in a very similar way to how painting, or any visual art form, works. Take composition, for instance. It’s easier to understand composition in music when you are thinking about it in visual terms. Because music is something that develops in time, and I think for us it’s generally a less natural thing to grasp as a whole — something that develops in time. We struggle with that. But something that we can see in a single moment, we can analyse more freely in terms of its form and structure. So that is one example. But I think in our times we tend to separate one thing from another too much, one area of life from another too much. For me, the ideal way of living and being as an artist or not an artist is a kind of giant, constant work where everything is connected. There isn’t much direct separation between different things. LC: What about between genres of music? Do you feel the same way? PK: Yeah, I feel the same way. In terms of quality, of course, classical music contains just an extraordinary amount of artworks of extraordinary quality. Other genres may not have been around for so long, or may have developed in slightly different ways. They didn’t develop that amount of material. But generally, I don’t make much distinction between good music of one or another genre. I happen to be more knowledgeable, of course, about classical music because that occupies most of my time in life and so on. But the more I live, the more I really can’t see a distinction. Richter’s Influence LC: Is that the cross-discipline, that inner connection between art forms and music genres? Was it after 2011, after you came to the UK, that you realised that, or did you already have it? PK: Well, I first got a sense of it reading about Sviatoslav Richter and reading his diaries. I think for him it was very much like that. He really just didn’t disconnect one thing from another. He happened to be a pianist, but he could have been any other artist. In fact, I think he treated the piano as his instrument rather than viewing himself primarily as a pianist. In that sense, he was a musician and not a pianist. I remember I was about 15 years old when I got my hands on those books about him, and I learned those books by heart. I read them so many times, him talking about music and then switching to art, and everything coming together so naturally and in such a fascinating way. I found it such a fascinating world, such a beautiful world where everything was vivid and connected, and one thing would activate another in such an unpredictable, beautiful way. I think that became part of my system, and I started figuring out my own way in that kind of world. “From the Very First Time I Heard Him (Samson) Play, I Was Fascinated” LC: And then you met Samson here? PK: No, we met in Moscow in 2016, and we came here together. We do a lot of work together. Ever since COVID in particular, we really formed the duo during COVID because we were locked in the same apartment. We were trying to see what we could do, and we had time to work on this. Of course, it’s a very hard form of ensemble. You need to spend a lot of time together in order to be able to play four hands on one piano or two pianos, just because I think it’s particularly difficult for both players. And ever since, it became a big part of our lives. We do, I think, about 30 per cent of our concerts together now. We’ve already done our third recording, and we’ve done a lot of other things. LC: So this close partnership, how does it influence your own artistic identity? Do you see it as a separate thing, or do they feed each other? Do you challenge each other? PK: Yes, we challenge each other. But we have a very long history with that. It all started in Moscow, when we were regularly playing to each other. We learned from each other. I always feel that I learned so much from Samson. Maybe this is why we can play together so well, because we were observing and sort of finding our way for so long before we really started working together. We had already influenced each other a lot. I was always fascinated by his playing from the very first time I heard him, and I realised that he was a very different kind of musician, that he could do things that I found very difficult to do. I didn’t know how to do that, and I was really keen to learn. It took a lot of time. For many years, we would very often play to each other and ask for feedback. And we learned how to give feedback to each other, which is very difficult, particularly when you’re so different. I think Samson would probably say the same about me. He also appreciates that I’m a completely different kind of artist, in a way the opposite of him. But somehow, because we’ve been developing side by side for so long, really tracking each other’s progress and taking part in it in a way, I think we grew close. And this is how it became possible for us to play together. We also like working on projects together. Most of those out-of-the-ordinary projects that we’ve been doing in the past six or seven years, we’ve been working on together, including the records. And it’s great because we have very different perspectives. A Festival That Happened by Chance LC: I’m quite curious about the Ragged Music Festival. Can you tell me more about it? How did you conceive the idea, and what did you want to do with it? Did you want to do something that a traditional venue or music festival couldn’t do? PK: I think the Ragged Music Festival happened by chance, really. Our dear friend Erica Davis asked Samson and me to do a concert at the Ragged School Museum in East London, which is a beautiful, wonderful place. In some way, it’s not dissimilar from the situation here. It’s not so extravagant, but the essence is very strong. When she asked us to do it, we started looking into the logistics and realised that bringing the pianos there was very difficult because they needed to be lifted through the window with a crane. The window had to be dismantled, and it was becoming a big operation. So I told her, if we’re bringing a piano, maybe we should do at least a couple of concerts. That’s what happened the first time: we did two concerts. We found it so inspiring, and the atmosphere so different and stimulating, that we wanted to do more. The beauty of that situation is that we can programme without looking at programming trends or worrying about ticket sales, because there aren’t so many tickets to sell. It always sells out quickly. We wanted to do things that were more difficult, or impossible, to do in a concert hall. It became a kind of small artist community, which I find really pure. It’s very difficult to achieve that on a larger scale. The beauty of it is that it remains small, so we can put experimental programmes together in different ways. We can also programme very late. Early programming is a little bit of an inevitable evil of our industry. We have to plan, and that planning goes very far ahead. When I started, I had some experience working with the fashion industry, for instance, and I was so envious because they were working only a little ahead. That means they can really be in the moment of creation. For us, it’s all this planning. You’re thinking, “What am I going to play in three years?” Well, I don’t really know what kind of person I’m going to be by then. So this is a unique opportunity that we’re able to explore. We were a little surprised, and very flattered and inspired, by the reaction of the audience, who really got it. We were surprised by its success. But then it became something a little bigger, because we realised that we could work in the same way in a different, interesting space, and create something specifically tailored to the energy of the place. That became a thread through all my work, more or less. I cannot get it out of my system, this way of working. Whenever there is a possibility, I consider what kind of circumstances the performance is going to be in. With the Ragged Music Festival, it particularly pointed to this idea, so we started doing these travelling editions. The festival was done at the Muziekgebouw, which is a very different setting. It’s a bigger setting. We still keep it very small in terms of the group. There are no more than eight artists in every edition, I think, and everyone takes part in every concert. Everyone is playing to get everything together. It’s mostly chamber music in different formations. The whole programme grows out of the energy of the place, how we understand it, and that particular moment. LC: So if you’re going to do something in London in winter, is it going to be something quite spontaneous as well? PK: Well, we’re only now starting to talk and think about it, and seeing which of our favourite collaborators could take part. From there, we’ll start putting together a programme that feels right for the time and the moment and the place and the light and the weather and so on. Writer Lucy Cheung

阅读中文版 “Miles Davis could easily have stopped after Kind of Blue in 1958. But he didn’t.” Last night, American jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire joined conductor Miho Hazama and the BBC Concert Orchestra as trumpet soloist for a Proms concert marking the centenary of Miles Davis. It was one of the most popular concerts of this year’s Proms, with even the standing areas completely full. Just minutes before the performance, a long queue had formed outside the Royal Albert Hall among those still hoping to get hold of returned tickets. The programme included several Gershwin classics suited to the Royal Albert Hall’s all-ages atmosphere, alongside Blue in Green, one of the defining pieces from Kind of Blue. It also brought together classical works such as Falla’s El amor brujo and Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, newly arranged for big band. Several of the arrangements drew on those by Gil Evans, one of the most influential orchestral arrangers in the history of jazz. Yet whenever the solos and improvisations emerged, their sharp, forward-looking edge seemed to pierce through the gentle, nostalgic sound of the orchestra. Ambrose Akinmusire in Royal Albert Hall Photo: Lucy Cheung Akinmusire’s own quartet also joined him on stage. Though this was, after all, a tribute to Miles, he made no attempt to imitate Miles’s trumpet playing. Instead, one could hear an improvisational language deeply rooted in spirit and inner expression, unmistakably pointing towards the present moment we are living in. I first encountered Akinmusire’s music through A Rift in Decorum: Live at the Village Vanguard, the double live album he recorded with his long-standing quartet at the legendary New York jazz club in 2017. The recording was widely regarded by jazz critics that year as one of the best live recordings of the year. The bassist on that album, Harish Raghavan, was also on stage last night. Earlier this year, Akinmusire appeared with Sullivan Fortner in a duo performance at Wigmore Hall. It was a deeply thoughtful and illuminating encounter, one that stayed with me for a long time. This November, he will return to London with his new quartet for the London Jazz Festival, performing music from an album they had just finished recording in June 2026. Ambrose Akinmusire at BBC Proms Photo: BBC/Andy Paradise In Conversation with Ambrose Akinmusire: The Tradition of Jazz Lies in Constant Evolution LC = Lucy Cheung AA = Ambrose Akinmusire LC: I wanted to start with the duo, actually—the collaboration between you and the pianist. I had never heard Sullivan Fortner live before, and what really struck me was the amount of space you leave for each other, and especially the trust you seem to place in each other. You’ve obviously collaborated with different pianists. How does each of these people bring out a different voice in you? AA: I’ve been really lucky to collaborate with a lot of great young pianists. You mentioned Gerald Clayton. There’s also Aaron Parks—we’ve played a lot of duo together. The pianist in my band, Sam Harris, is another one. I’ve even had the chance to play with Kenny Barron. But for me, the process isn’t so different from when I play with my quartet. It’s really just submitting, and hopefully collaborating with people who believe in something higher than us as humans. I’ve been really lucky to be around people like that. Sullivan is definitely one of those people, as is Gerald. LC: I suppose it’s quite difficult to put that into words, because music is already so abstract, especially jazz. But could you try to describe that process a little more? When you talk about something “higher”, what does that mean to you? And how do you inspire each other? Where does it start? AA: It starts—I would love to just say it starts in trust, but I think it starts even before that. Maybe it starts in learning each other, and creating a space where both people feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable. It’s a space where right and wrong don’t really exist. I think the act of letting go, and the act of being vulnerable, is actually the music. Once you get into that space, the notes don’t really matter. LC: I guess the obvious question here is about the jazz tradition. What does the tradition mean to you today? And how do you differentiate jazz from improvised music? AA: That’s a great question. I think when people—when most people—refer to jazz tradition, they’re speaking specifically of the bebop era. They think of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie; they don’t even think about Dixieland music or the blues, or things that came before that. But for me, jazz started in Africa, as clichéd as that is. I don’t know if the question is “What is jazz?”, but it sounds like it’s hinting towards that. For me, jazz is really music that is about community and improvisation. Let me just say the obvious: I think jazz is about expressing African American history sonically. It started off as a way of expressing African American history through sound, with the blues, and so on. Now, is there a difference between jazz and improvised music? For me, no. When I hear music from Nigeria or Mali, that could also be considered jazz to me. When I hear hip-hop and somebody is freestyling, that’s also jazz. So for me, no, there isn’t a difference. Even when I listen to Bach sometimes, it still sounds like jazz. LC: In what way? AA: Just knowing and understanding that most of it was improvised—with chord changes, figured bass, things like that. LC: What about the new generation—or perhaps not so new anymore—of European jazz musicians who are very aware of the tradition but don’t feel bound by it? How do you hear what’s happening in European jazz today? Sometimes it feels as if musicians are trying to move away from that African sound, towards something very minimal or something else. AA: I think that here, in parts of Europe—or really all over Europe—there are very valid jazz scenes now. And that’s been the case since I’ve been a part of it. You go to Spain, Italy, France, Germany, you come here, and there are great players everywhere. I think it’s very natural to evolve. This notion of moving away from tradition is also hard, because I think there’s something about Blackness that is always about evolving. I think it’s very natural to evolve. It’s the most natural thing for humans to do. So moving away from tradition just is what it is. Recreating tradition. I think when people talk about jazz, that part is forgotten. No one talks about Sonny Rollins living in the past, everything one’s been talking about Miles Davis changing every year. A lot of the masters died young, so we didn’t get to see what they would have done. Coltrane died at 40, Clifford Brown at 25, Booker Little at 23. But the ones who stayed alive, most of them continued to evolve—Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, even Roy Haynes, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie. Dizzy wasn’t playing the way he was playing in the ’30s and ’40s. So I think it’s very natural to evolve. It’s just that most people don’t do it. LC: One of the people I was thinking about is Miles Davis, especially because tonight you’re leading a Proms tribute to him. You’ve already mentioned his commitment to evolution. He kept reinventing himself. Do you think that continuous reinvention is also at the core of what jazz is? AA: For sure. LC: But when you keep pushing yourself against something—a voice you’ve established before, or a sound that you admire—do you ever feel conflicted by that? Is there ever a feeling of betraying tradition?, I mean, is there ever a sentiment that you might be moving too far away from something that came before you? AA: No. The tradition is evolution. You know, a record is a snapshot. It’s just like a photograph. That’s all it is. But in real time, it’s evolving. There’s no way to capture that, right? (laugh) So, no, I don’t feel like I’m betraying it. I’m always going back and checking it out and stuff, but I’m hyper-aware that these people kept evolving. I don’t think they would sound the way they did if they weren’t reaching towards the future. Ambrose Akinmusire and Miho Hazama at BBC Proms Photo: BBC/Andy Paradise I just like things that are not about self. LC: It is intangible, but can we talk about where some of these ideas come from? Could you tell me a little about your upbringing and your influences? What was that first sound that you remember, and that you’ve carried with you all these years? AA: To be honest with you, the first thing I remember as a child was not sound. It was colour. I can remember sitting in a closet, and there was this sort of stained-glass window in the closet. I remember just looking up at it and watching all these beautiful lights come down on me. Somehow, that is my first musical memory—it’s actually a visual image. Then the next thing was going to my grandmother’s church. It was a Black Baptist church, and I remember, as a kid, seeing and experiencing the power of community sonically. I was always impressed that individually, the singers weren’t necessarily so amazing, but when they came together, even with the dissonances and the wrong notes, there was something beyond that. I learned that at a very young age, when I was four or five years old. I played gospel music, and then when I heard Art Blakey in seventh or eighth grade, it just sounded like the stuff I had been hearing in church, but played on instruments, with Lee Morgan and the others. So it was a very natural progression. Those are some of the early sounds I remember. LC: Did you start reading music at a young age? AA: Yeah. I started at a very young age—reading music when I was five years old. LC: I was wondering about your relationship with the score and improvisation. AA: The score is just for suggestions. It depends on the context, of course. At best, it gets 95 percent, for me. In the music that I play, like when I’m writing for my band, it really is just a suggestion. LC: I know you also listen to classical music. What do you like to listen to? AA: Oh, man. I go through phases. The last thing I was really into was Kurtág. LC: He’s already a hundred years old now, isn’t he? The same age as Miles Davis. AA: Yeah. I really love the stuff with his wife. (Játékok) You know, it’s so easy to call it “simple”, but it’s not. Like the Arvo Pärt stuff. There’s something about pure beauty. That’s what I’ve been into for the last six or seven years. When I released a solo record called Beauty Is Enough, I’d been trying to get inside, to centre the centre of everything. That’s what I hear when I hear Kurtág, and that’s what I feel. What else? All the normal stuff, right? Ravel, Bach, Glenn Gould playing Bach, all that stuff. But I go through phases. LC: What do you hear in classical music that you don’t hear in jazz? AA: Nothing. LC: So when you talk about Beauty Is Enough, and you listen to Kurtág a lot, is there a relationship there? AA: I was listening to other stuff too. Music from Mali, music from Iceland, jazz, a lot of blues. I don’t think it’s specific to genre. I think there are purveyors in each genre who are committing to beauty. LC: Tell me about that. AA: My favourite—there was this touring choir from Bulgaria, a very large women’s choir. When I was younger, I went to a performance in Berkeley. It was in ’93 or ’94—I was very young. And that reminded me of the gospel, the Baptist church. Then, when I learned more about it and understood that they picked women from different areas of Bulgaria who came together and rehearsed, I just thought that was really beautiful. And music from Mali—one of my favourite singers is Oumou Sangaré. I got to do a project with her two years ago. That was amazing. All for the same reason. Joni Mitchell, too. But you see, there’s a single thread there. These people are amazing technically and musically, but they’re connected to something higher. They’re making sounds, and they’re... I don’t know. It’s otherworldly, I think. LC: Is that also connected to a sense of community? You mentioned that quite a few times. Does it perhaps remind you of your roots? AA: I just like things that are not about self. When you start talking about community, you’re only as strong as the whole. I really love that. You can practise and become technically really great, but there’s something about when you join together with somebody and you point towards this thing that is really beautiful for me. I never thought I would have a career. I was interested, again, in playing whatever the source told me to play. I was interested in creative music from a very young age. I wasn’t thinking about having a career. I was just interested in the music and in committing to it. I can stay home and practise because that’s all I ever wanted to do—to commit to the music. Not become famous. So I kind of do what I want. LC: Is that one of the reasons for you to leave Blue Note Records a few years ago? It, as a label, is perhaps more associated with that kind of jazz-star identity. AA: look, Blue Note is a jazz label. No matter how you bend it, even when you see somebody who’s not from jazz on Blue Note, they become a jazz musician. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not something I’ve ever felt completely comfortable with. Yeah. I play jazz, but I also write string quartets. I write film scores. I do hip-hop. I do so much. I’ve always done so much, and I just wanted to have room to do those things if I wanted to. LC: Is it that you don’t want to be restricted by the term “jazz”? AA: Almost. I’m not restricted by it because I don’t care about it. It’s more about how I’m seen and how that affects the opportunities that I have—the projects that I can release. Ambrose Akinmusire in Royal Albert Hall Photo: BBC/Andy Paradise On Miles: “It’s really his effect on the future.” LC: Let’s talk a little more about Miles Davis. Tonight you’re the leader and the trumpeter, so you’re taking on a role that people may naturally associate with him. What is your relationship with his music? Is there a particular period of his career that you feel closest to? AA: No. It’s him as an artist. Like we said earlier, it’s his commitment to evolution. Just even realising that Miles Davis started with Charlie Parker, and we all know those recordings, and then to think that he ended in the ’80s with Tutu and Marcus Miller, and everything in between—it’s just like, wow. This guy was totally committed to evolving, continuously. It’s the same thing I love about Joni Mitchell. There’s something about an artist who continues going forward, who continues searching when they’re successful. Miles Davis could have stopped in ’58. He could have done Kind of Blue for the rest of his career and been very, very famous—maybe even more famous. But he kept evolving and bringing young musicians into the scene. I think that’s also something I want to do. If you think about all the people who have been associated with Miles Davis—Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock—it would take forever. They’re all A-list jazz musicians. That’s also part of his legacy. Those are the things I’m really impressed by and influenced by with Miles Davis. It’s not the trumpet playing or the improvisation, which is really amazing. It’s really his effect on the future. LC: What was the first Miles Davis record you heard? AA: It was actually a compilation. I had it on vinyl, and it was all his recordings from Prestige Records. I remember listening to “If I Were a Bell”, just listening to how beautiful it was—the arrangements, the articulation. I didn’t hear Kind of Blue until later. LC: My first was Kind of Blue. AA: Yeah. That’s the first Miles Davis record for a lot of people. LC: And how are you going to approach tonight’s performance? AA: The same. My approach to improvisation doesn’t change. It’s to try to be selfless and connect to source. That’s it. I’m here to do what the music says to do in every context, and that’s that. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Proms or the Village Vanguard. It’s kind of the same for me. LC: It is a rather unique format—a tribute to a late musician at the Proms. Did you choose the programme yourself? AA: Miho and I got together a while ago and talked about what we would play. We thought about the context, and there are a lot of boxes to check, right? It’s the BBC Proms, so there’s a lot of stuff that a lot of people know, the popular songs. But I’m an improviser, so we’ll see. LC: Speaking of the Village Vanguard, I really enjoyed the live album A Rift in Decorum: Live at the Village Vanguard, and I think a lot of people do. Do you feel that period is something you’ve grown out of? AA: Great question. No. That’s just the band. We are getting older, and so we have families. Justin (Justin Brown) plays with Thundercat, Harish (Harish Raghavan) is now playing with Charles Lloyd, I’m teaching at Stanford and doing a bunch of stuff. It’s just hard to get us together. But we did record a CD in June, and we’re going to release it next year. So I’m going back to playing more quartet. I’m looking forward to that. These are my guys. We’ve been a band for—wow, I don’t even know where to start—but over 16 or 17 years. Justin and I grew up together. Justin and I have been playing together for 30 years. It’s crazy to say that. Harish and I have been playing together for over 20 years, and the same thing with Sam. So that’s what you’re hearing on those records, and it’s hard to recreate that. It’s hard to get that to come together just because of life. LC: You’re coming back to London in November. Is that going to be with the quartet? AA: Yeah, that’ll be a different one. LC: Will you be playing material from the new album? AA: It’ll be a mix. I’m thinking a lot about introducing young players into the scene, just taking that role of giving opportunities—mentorship, kind of like Miles Davis. So I think I’m going to have a younger band for that. LC: You’ve worked in many different formats—your quartet, duos, solo projects, collaborations with other musicians. Do these different forms feel fundamentally different to you when you’re making music? AA: No. For me, again, my role is the same. It’s the same. Of course, different people bring out different things sonically because the conversation changes. But my role is the same. I have to think of it like that, or else I think I would get very stressed out, because I’m doing so many different things all the time. Ambrose Akinmusire at BBC Proms Photo: BBC/Andy Paradise Academia as the New Jazz Club LC: Can we talk a little about your teaching at Stanford? AA: Yeah. I took on the position last year, and I’m starting my second year as director of jazz at Stanford University. I’m trying to build a programme there, but I’m looking more to have Stanford feel like a hub—a place where a community can grow, where discussions can happen, and where students who are interested in other things can also explore the power of connecting creativity and improvisation with whatever it is they’re interested in. It could be computer science and improvisation. I’m trying to create a place for those kinds of discussions. LC: What do you actually teach? AA: Whatever I want at the beginning of the year. I get to pick. But I’m overseeing the whole programme. Last year I taught theory and improvisation, and this year I’m teaching composition, theory and improvisation. I’m also creating a history course that covers the whole spectrum of Black music. LC: Stanford didn’t have a jazz programme for a long time, though? AA: That’s what a lot of people think, but they’ve had a jazz department since the late ’70s. LC: Really! We’ve been talking about this intangible side of jazz, and how difficult it can be to pin down or analyse what jazz actually is. In a higher-education setting, do you think that makes it particularly difficult to teach? AA: I think it’s becoming less difficult, because what you’re doing is getting players to run institutions now, and I think that’s great. As you said, it’s hard to teach that, so a lot of it you have to show. It’s just like the music was passed down—you learned back in the day by being next to somebody, through apprenticeship. I think now academia is starting to become the place where that happens. LC: Do you see yourself as part of academia? AA: Yes. Yeah. It’s funny to say, yes. LC: Jazz originally developed far away from academia, and now the two seem to stand shoulder to shoulder. AA: Well, the institution—the jazz institution, academia—has taken the place of what the clubs used to be. There are a lot of clubs that have closed down. Just as meeting places, places where young people can come and sit down next to each other. Bradley’s and all these other clubs used to be that. They don’t exist anymore. So that’s the way I look at jazz academia: it’s just a place for like-minded people to meet, young musicians. LC: So perhaps it’s not so much that jazz itself has to change, but that the university has to change its understanding of what jazz education can be. Otherwise, institutionalised jazz can sound quite intimidating. AA: I think, again, it is changing. You have Sean Jones leading at a school, Walter Smith III leading a woodwind department, Rudresh Mahanthappa at Princeton. I could go on and on—Terell Stafford, Ingrid Jensen at Manhattan School of Music. People who can actually play, people who really love this music, are now the heads of departments. It’s not just an administrative role anymore. These are actual artists heading schools. I think that’s really beautiful. Ambrose Akinmusire at BBC Proms Photo: BBC/Andy Paradise LC: Your albums often seem to have very different moods. What mood are you in at the moment when you’re creating music? Do you consciously think about it? AA: No. I don’t consciously think about it. It’s whatever life throws me in. Recently, both of my parents passed away. So now I’m in this recovery. That’s what this era of my life is about: recovery. How do I recover? How do I endure? So that’s what the music is going to sound like. It’s just what it is. I don’t know that until I’m looking back. I only look back after I’ve already recorded the music. I sit down and ask myself, What does all of this mean? What is the CD? What is the music? What was this era of my life? So I’m not really in control. I’m not forcing myself. I’m not doing it. Life does what it does. I’m just dancing with it. LC: I guess what I was asking was what's happening to you recently is already becoming part of the music. AA: Yeah. I think it’s grief. LC: I’m sorry. AA: No, it’s okay. It’s part of life. It’s part of the dance. LC: Do you go back to old places—to places from your childhood, where you grew up? AA: Yeah, a lot of the time. I live where I grew up. I moved back. I see people that I’ve known since I was a kid. LC: Is that Oakland? AA: I live in Berkeley. I moved back to Oakland, and then I moved to Berkeley when it was time for my son to go to school. So it’s just one city over. LC: Does he play music? AA: Yes, he plays piano, but it’s Suzuki method. He’s not doing jazz. LC: I also wanted to ask about Herbie Hancock. Did you work with him before? Did he influence you in any way? AA: Nice. Yeah. I met Herbie and Wayne when I was 22, 23, at the Thelonious Monk Institute. We went on a few tours with them. And then later on—I don’t know how it happened; life is crazy—but I would go to Wayne’s house and meditate. I also became close with Bennie Maupin. So I’ve known them for now 20-something years. LC: And you also taught at the Herbie Hancock Institute? AA: Yeah. I was an artistic director. I’ve done a lot of teaching there. LC: What did you teach? AA: Life. I mean, the same way that I just try to continue what Herbie and Wayne were doing. They weren’t teaching music theory. They were teaching about how to become a better human being and citizen of the world. So I try to impart those lessons to the students—not because I’m special, just because I’ve been around them, and I’m trying to continue that. Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet performs at Kings Place on Sunday 15th November 2026. For more info, please visit: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/jazz/ambrose-akinmusire-quartet/ Writer Lucy Cheung

阅读中文版 In 2020, the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, Quatuor Ébène had originally planned a series of performances to celebrate the milestone, but most of them were cancelled due to the pandemic. Nevertheless, they completed an ambitious project: the release of a complete recording of Beethoven’s string quartets on Erato label in 2020. The project had been years in the making, with the quartets recorded live in seven cities around the world, beginning in Vienna and continuing through Philadelphia, Tokyo, São Paulo, Melbourne, and Nairobi, before concluding in Paris. The monumental world tour also came to China, with the Quatuor Ébène appearing at the Shanghai Music in the Summer Air Festival in 2019. With another Beethoven anniversary year approaching in 2027—the 200th anniversary of his death—the Quatuor Ébène has once again embarked on a worldwide tour of the complete Beethoven string quartets, with stops in cities including New York, London, Paris, and Berlin. In August 2026, they came to the Musikfest Bremen, performing all 16 of Beethoven’s string quartets over six evenings. If I could choose only one of the six concerts, I would choose tonight’s without hesitation. Beethoven was only around 28 when he wrote the String Quartet No. 6 in B-flat major, a work suffused with lightness and wit. In the Scherzo, he displays a remarkably forward-looking approach to rhythm through syncopation, displaced accents, and cross-rhythms. In the finale, meanwhile, the abrupt shifts between melancholy and lightness in “La Malinconia” point toward the bolder musical language that would emerge in his later works. By the time of the String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, this practice of moving between radically different emotional, temporal, and musical states had been taken to an entirely different level. Most strikingly, in the famous third movement, the long, contemplative, almost religious “Molto adagio” repeatedly alternates with the life-affirming “Andante—Neue Kraft fühlend” (feeling new strength). Beethoven is no longer merely setting contrasting moods against one another; he makes the very process of moving from suffering toward renewed strength part of the musical structure. The movement’s full title—Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart (Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian mode)—already says it all. Quatuor Ébéne © Julien Mignot Pierre Colombet needs only to brush his bow lightly across the strings to produce a warm yet resonant sound; with just a little added pressure, a radiant tone bursts forth from the body of the violin. From time to time, I could even hear his familiar, deep breathing—the same breathing captured on their recordings. Gabriel Le Magadure’s wrist appears relaxed, forming an obtuse angle with his arm as he draws the bow upward, yet it remains ready to tense at any moment. This is the kind of rapid responsiveness chamber music demands. Quiet and unassuming, he nevertheless knows exactly when to step forward. Yuya Okamoto, seated on the right side of the stage, is the most active collaborator of the four. His eyes constantly move between the score and the other three musicians, as if continually picking up signals from his colleagues and shaping those immediate, ever-changing exchanges of sound. This was particularly evident in the Scherzo of the B-flat major quartet, where such responsiveness seemed to become part of the music itself. Marie Chilemme, smiling for much of the performance, seemed somewhat removed from it all. It was as though her spirit had stepped back from her body, watching the music unfold before her with a warm, contemplative gaze. And is that not, in some sense, the very essence of the third movement of the A minor quartet? When I interviewed Gabriel years ago, he told me that playing in a string quartet was an exercise in democracy. The number four is unlike three or five; in many cases, a democratic vote among four people cannot even produce a majority. “But if you can accept yourself, you can also accept others.” More than two years ago, Quatuor Ébène underwent a change of personnel: cellist Raphaël Merlin departed, and Yuya Okamoto joined. Tonight, in the third movement of the A minor quartet, Okamoto made me hear, perhaps for the first time, melodies—in a work I cherish so dearly—that had long remained buried beneath the singing lines of the violins and viola. They finally emerged, listening to, yielding to, and completing one another within the other voices. Perhaps this, after all, is the result of the “exercise in democracy” Gabriel spoke of. Quatuor Ébéne © Julien Mignot And it was at precisely this moment that reason and emotion began to wrestle with each other. Should I briefly detach myself from the music, pick up my pen and record what I was feeling, allowing this moment to acquire a kind of “eternity” through words? Or should I surrender to the current of emotion and let the music carry this “instant” away in time? After the second “Neue Kraft fühlend,” Pierre returned to the Molto adagio. His body no longer swayed gently with the music as it had earlier; instead, he remained almost completely still, his expression growing ever more resolute, bringing the final song to its close with an extraordinary concentration. And my emotions, too, were repeatedly drawn back to earth and then lifted toward heaven by Beethoven and the four musicians of Quatuor Ébène. When the music ended, I realized that my body had been tense throughout. Quatuor Ébène performed Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 6 (Op.18/6) and No. 15 (Op.132) at Die Glocke in Bremen on the evening of August 17, 2026.

When 2026年8月28日 Where 不来梅圣史蒂芬尼文化教堂（Kulturkirche St. Stephani, Bremen） Who 声乐与器乐合奏团：拉斯波泰尔乐团（Ensemble la Sportelle） 人声乐团：杰苏阿尔多六人组（The Gesualdo Six） 指挥：欧文·帕克（Owain Park） What 阿沃·帕特： 《深渊之中》（De profundis） 《我们的父》（Vater unser） 《我们的主耶稣基督依约翰所述的受难曲》（后简称“约翰受难曲”，Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi secundum Joannem） 不来梅圣史蒂芬尼文化教堂 摄影：马光辉 记一笔 首先听见的是管风琴。帕特最具辨识度的Tintinnabuli（钟鸣）作曲法，从第一个声音便已经建立起来。帕特在经历了早期先锋派、十二音音乐以及一段漫长的创作危机之后，于20世纪70年代中期逐渐形成了钟鸣这种高度简洁的语言：以一个基本音或旋律声部，与围绕三和弦运行的Tintinnabuli声部相结合。 坐在圣史蒂芬尼文化教堂里，这种声音具有空间上的意义。前方是合唱团与乐队，身后高处则是管风琴，但它并没有显得遥远。声音从后方、前方以及教堂本身的混响中同时存在，形成一种包围感。《深渊之中》开始时，只有一个声部唱出诗篇的开头；随后逐渐增加到两个、三个声部，最后由完整的四声部男声合唱唱出最后两节。这是帕特音乐重要的力量，他习惯让极少的东西在时间中逐渐获得重量。 之后是《我们的父》，假声男高音阿拉斯代尔·奥斯汀（Alasdair Austin）声音纤细、轻柔而温暖，却并不缺乏光泽；在某些音符上，那种光泽甚至恰好与夕阳穿过教堂彩窗投下来的光线融为一体。奥斯汀演唱时眼睛睁得很大，一直望向前方，脸上有一种近乎纯真的神情。这首作品简单而抒情的旋律仿佛独立于帕特庞大的精神世界，在教堂中温暖地存在着。 然后，《约翰受难曲》开始。帕特在作品开头直接让人声唱出完整标题，从这一刻开始，管风琴与合唱将听众拉入一个只有信仰不可动摇的世界。一场接近80分钟的、冥想般的精神苦程就此开始。 不来梅圣史蒂芬尼文化教堂阿沃•帕特《约翰受难曲》现场 © Patric Leo 舞台正中央的合唱团唱出故事的背景：耶稣跨过汲沦溪，犹大带着一队兵丁和差役来到那里。随后，欧文·帕克从舞台右侧缓缓走上台，以沉着而缓慢的声音唱出：Quem quaeritis?（你们找谁？）众人回答：“拿撒勒人耶稣。”舞台的基本戏剧结构也由此建立起来。乐手们坐在舞台前方，四位独唱歌手共同承担福音书叙述者的角色；合唱团则承担群众以及彼得等次要人物。耶稣由欧文·帕克演唱，之后将从舞台左侧登场的男高音约书亚·库特（Joshua Cooter）饰演彼拉多。帕特对于人物的音乐塑造克制，但也有明确的规则。耶稣的音乐明显比其他人物缓慢。节目册中解释，慢速象征着永恒。彼拉多则在不同速度与不同声部关系之间转换，这种音乐上的摇摆，体现出他的矛盾。无论是耶稣，还是处在另一边的彼拉多，在演唱时都有管风琴陪伴。 欧文·帕克承担戏剧兼歌唱角色，在大部分时间里，他无法兼任现场指挥。因此，这是一场高度室内乐化的演出。乐手、歌手，以及位于后方高处、背对着他们的管风琴师，几乎依靠彼此之间细微的呼吸、聆听和反应，共同度量音乐的时间。帕特几乎在每个乐句结束处都留下沉默，在这些沉默里，几乎可以看到歌手们的呼吸。沉默被计算，也被当作音乐。教堂的混响留住了余韵。 《约翰受难曲》文本取自《约翰福音》第18和第19章，有叙述文字，也有直接引用。帕特将文本重新组织成四个部分，每个部分都从一个声部开始，随后其他声部逐渐加入，织体不断扩张；达到完整音响之后，又反向逐渐减少，最终重新回到单一声部。教堂的声场绝佳，在一些二重唱的段落中，身体甚至可以意识到耳膜的振动。到了群众与管风琴共同喊出：Crucifige, crucifige eum!（把他钉在十字架上！把他钉在十字架上！），能量让人感到胆寒。而此时，天色也已经完全暗了下来，彩色玻璃窗外只剩下一片深蓝。 四位福音书叙述者中，最出彩的是假声男高音盖·詹姆斯（Guy James）。他的声音清澈，带有一种近乎神性的质感。在四人合唱中，他的延长音夹在另外三位歌手之间，显得异常漂亮：气息稳定，却又有一种几乎吹弹可破的脆弱感。他很少试图让自己的声音从整体中“跳出来”，相反，他非常善于把自己的声音“淹没”在旋律的走向之中，在此起彼伏中彼此交替，又彼此让位。 欧文·帕克 © Andrew Wilkinson 近80分钟的精神苦旅，终于在耶稣说出“成了”——Consummatum est——之后接近尾声。欧文·帕克卸下耶稣的角色，走到舞台中央，开始指挥。此前一直被限制在a小调世界中的音乐，在这里突然转向D大调。乐团、合唱、独唱声部与管风琴同时涌出，声音第一次真正意义上地向外扩张。死亡被战胜。 这部作品虽然讲述的是一段极具戏剧性的故事，但帕特在音乐上几乎完全拒绝传统意义上的戏剧化。听起来，它甚至有些“轴”。音乐不断返回相似的声音材料，似乎原地打转；旋律拒绝向传统意义上的戏剧高潮快速推进。但也正是在这种近乎固执的重复中，声音开始获得一种不同于戏剧的力量。这在一个越来越把“变通”视为优点的时代里，多少显得格格不入。我不由得想起一部很喜欢的电影，《隐秘的生活》（A Hidden Life）。电影主人公弗朗茨·雅格施泰特是一名奥地利农民，在纳粹时代拒绝为纳粹德国服役，最终被处刑。影片也使用了帕特的音乐，《空白》（Tabula rasa）。 从奥地利阿尔卑斯的群山深处，到波罗的海边的苍绿森林，帕特的音乐深深扎根于宗教与信仰，但又与自然保持着某种难以言明的联系。也许是一棵树，一些云，一个有雾的清晨，露水，或者风。 Writer Ma Guanghui