Duo Ruut: Ilmateade review – soft psych-folk channels hazy days and snowy rides
Their ambitious second album Ilmateade (Weather Report) explores the powerful yet under-sung connections between the weather and emotion. It begins with the minute-long Intro, a track that builds gorgeously on the scratchy, dying notes of their 2021 EP, Kulla Kerguseks (From the Lightness of Gold), implying both continuity and metamorphosis.
Then we're in Udu (Fog), lulled along on thick, beautiful clouds of shifting time signatures, before Vastlalaul (The Sledding Song) slows and speeds, glossily, through the snow. These songs are rhythmically complex and have solid, ancient roots, but fans of ambient, Balearic dreaminess and the softer sides of indie pop and psych-folk will find woozy comforts here.
Good entry points include the earwormy melancholia of Vilud Ilmad (Gloomy Weather) and the itchy handclaps, in five beats to the bar, propelling us through Suvi Rannas (Summer on the Beach), in which we're told, in Estonian, of days hot with horseflies and a sky broad and bare.
Other Estonian artists brought into the fold provide different depths. Guitarist Erki Pärnoja's solos swirl around the women's wordless melodies on Interlude, while poet EiK 2509 adds spoken-word contributions to the mesmerising Enne Ööd (Nightfall). All together, these 12 tracks create a hypnotic shipping forecast transplanted to the Baltic Sea, carrying us along on its eddying tides.
Jennifer Reid's The Ballad of the Gatekeeper (self-released) is a full-blooded fantastic debut from a singer who researches 19th-century broadside ballads, has acted in BBC Two's The Gallows Pole and supported Pulp and Eliza Carthy on tour. Mixing centuries-old working songs with new material about fast fashion, climate breakdown and Covid, she's a striking talent – her a cappellas especially full of bite. Brìghde Chaimbeul's Sunwise (Tak:til/Glitterbeat) eerily transports us from high summer to songs of midwinter. Her smallpipe drones are less abrasive than on 2023's brilliant, abrasive Carry Them With Us, but her canntaireachd singing (a style deliberately vocalising bagpipes) is more propulsive, heavy and completely compelling. Similarly bewitching are Norwegian trio Hekate. Their new album, Evigheten Forestår (Eternity Imagines), collects slåttetralling (Norwegian vocal dance tune improvisations) from across their homeland, their tones by turns spiky, perky, sad and sacred.
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Overheated opera singers faint on stage: ‘It's like Squid Game'
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Times
a day ago
- Times
‘It's like Squid Game': overheated opera singers faint on stage
Italian opera stars belting out Verdi while dressed in helmets and heavy costumes have become the latest victims of Europe's heatwave as they faint mid-chorus. Unions representing singers at Verona's open-air arena said performances this week of Verdi's Aida and Nabucco were more like a dystopian television show in which the stars were risking their lives for entertainment. 'Performers have the feeling they are taking part in Squid Game, the series in which almost all the participants in a competition meet a nasty end,' the unions stated, referring to the South Korean Netflix hit. Verona has been placed on alert this week as temperatures soar above 30C, and by 10pm, when shows at the city's ancient Roman amphitheatre take place, have dropped only as far as 29C. A source of grief for performers has been the daring costumes designed for performances of Nabucco, which feature astronaut helmets and wearable LED lights. 'The lights weigh 10kg, they cut into my shoulders and I needed to wear a towel underneath them,' one singer told Corriere della Sera. 'And I need to sing, with a helmet, cape and visor on. It's inhumane. The stage is searingly hot and the costumes are so rigid they force you to sing with your chin up.' Unions reported that after a performance of Nabucco on Saturday, four performers sought medical attention due to the heat. Heavy costumes worn during performances of Aida were also fuelling discontent, they said. A singer fainted on stage during a performance on Sunday and two others needed to be seen by a doctor after the show. Stefano Trespidi, the personnel director at the arena, said that from this Sunday, performers would wear wristbands monitoring their pulse rates, and layers of costumes could be removed depending on the temperature. 'The wellbeing of our staff is priority,' he said. As Italy swelters through the European heatwave, regional governors have ordered outdoor manual labour to halt during the hottest hours of the day after one worker in Emilia-Romagna died of possible heat stroke. But unions said the Verona Arena had yet to step in to help opera singers buckled into hefty costumes in the evenings and demanded health inspectors pay a visit. Formerly used for gladiator battles in the Roman era, the venue today can host 15,000 opera fans and staged a performance of Aida in 1953 with live elephants, horses and camels. The authorities have considered covering it with an awning to keep rain off but have not figured out how to cool it down.
The Guardian
7 days ago
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The Tempest review – drama in the heavens adds real magic to tumultuous tale
Outdoor theatre is by nature vulnerable to the weather, but there is a sense of a grand coincidence when an almighty storm whips up around this Poznań street performance of Shakespeare's play, threatening to upstage its tumultuous drama. Teatr Biuro Podróży's production at the Stara Rzeźnia, a former abattoir turned into a cultural space, was delayed by half an hour. But the elements provided a sublimely atmospheric accompaniment to the drama. Thunder within the soundtrack became indistinguishable from the real thing. As lightning cracked across the shipwrecked boat carrying Antonio, who fetches up on this enchanted isle, it seemed like part of the lighting design. The company, which has long staged outdoor works across the world, spun its own magic, the actors sodden but heroically undeterred. Directed and co-written (with Marta Strzałko) by company founder Paweł Szkotak, this production is inspired by Shakespeare's text rather than being a straight-up enactment. After the opening storm, the set is cracked apart and swivelled around to form promontories on the island, as well as the grounded remains of the boat. Stumps of trees scattered in the foreground are visual symbols of eco damage. Łukasz Matuszyk's magnificent score reflects an island full of aural enchantments – 'sound and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not' – switching the tone between storybook delight and electronic rumbles, dread groans and pumping house beats. The Tempest is part of the outdoor offering at Malta festival, a multidisciplinary programme in its 35th year, and the show is travelling to the UK as part of an international tour. The festival this year is celebrating tradition and reinvention. This company give a microcosmic homage to this paradoxical mission in its early faithfulness and late disruption of Shakespeare's text. It is mostly told through mime, music, physical theatre and inventive visual spectacle. Prospera is a female magician, Caliban her indentured slave in a suit with sinister bandages around his face. He is forced by Prospera to extract natural resources from the isle, hacking away at tree stumps with his tools (the eco message of the show has been carried through in production values, with much of the set crafted from reclaimed materials, including salvaged doors from Poznań tenement houses). Ariel is an imposing fairy on stilts. All hover between the delightful and dreadful. The seven-strong cast (Bartosz Borowski, Łukasz Kowalski, Paweł Stachowczyk, Marta Strzałko, Karolina Wensierska, Tomasz Wrzalik, Maciej Zakrzewski) bring stunning physicality to their parts. The drunken scenes involving Trinculo, Stephano and Caliban play out with surprising freshness and wit, involving beer and a wheelbarrow. The romance between Miranda and Ferdinand is water-bound in its motifs – the latter emerges out of the storm in bikini bottoms like a parody of a James Bond love interest – and there is lovely use of a pair of flippers. Endearing chemistry is created through the dances they do around and with each other. The show stays faithful until the closing scenes, when there is a coup orchestrated that is far bigger than Caliban's planned rebellion. The sound of a helicopter is heard as a giant plume of smoke envelops the audience, from which emerge military figures bearing machine guns. It is as if we, the audience, enter into the dream world as the smoke drifts over us and the tone switches once again. There is no tidy redemption for the sorcerer-coloniser. Her magical creatures flee or are caught and caged, like zoo animals. Some loose ends are left dangling: Ariel seems simply to disappear; the young couple at the heart of the play, cocooned in their romantic bubble, seem impervious to the assault on Prospera's isle. Maybe the message here is that only love will survive. The rain has cleared by the end of the night and despite the razed ground of this new ending, you are left with a delightful sense of invention, play – and, yes, magic. Malta festival runs until 28 June. The Tempest is presented by Watermans, at Bell Square, London, 19-20 September as part of the UK/Poland Season 2025. Arifa Akbar's trip was provided by the Polish Cultural Institute and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, partners in the UK/Poland Season 2025 organised by the British Council.
