John Shand | Music & Other Spheres Posts

May 20, 2018 / Concert Reviews - Archive

Blue Mountains Theatre, May 4 7.5/10 You know when you turn the gas down low, so the flame has that singular violet luminescence? Joseph Tawadros’s solo oud features have that quality. Like a cello, the instrument has an innate, dignified melancholy. Meanwhile Tawadros crafts a note’s shape and weight, along…

May 19, 2018 / Concert Reviews - Archive

People’s Republic of Australasia, May 2 9/10 I’ve lived through earthquakes, cyclones, blizzards, floods, bushfires and now a Peter Brotzmann concert. On the one hand the veteran German saxophonist’s playing is of such ferocity as to seem a force of nature, and yet on the other it is so profoundly…

May 16, 2018 / Theatre Reviews - Archive

Hayes Theatre, April 28 7.5/10 They were both married, so it was just a brief affair in the Mexican summer of 1937 between the political revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, 57, and the artistic revolutionary, Frida Kahlo, 29. “What,” asks the eccentric musical Carmen Live or Dead, “if that affair had resulted…