Coffee-Table Notes

Edinburgh Playhouse Four stars There's something deeply moving when the Von Trapp family take flight from the Nazis at the end of at Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's evergreen musical, featuring a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. It’s not just the power of every song that's gone before, but the sheer seriousness of their plight that makes one wonder what it must have been like when audiences first witnessed it in 1959, just twenty years after the end of World War Two. The liberating force behind the show's sentiment, of course, is free-spirited singing nun Maria Rainer, played in Martin Connor's new touring production for Bill Kenwright by Lucy O'Byrne. Once Maria leaves the convent and becomes governess to not so merry widower Captain von Trapp's brood, emancipation from their regimented lives comes through progressive schooling, creative play and the power of song. Maria even cuts up her bedroom curtains into frocks and inadvert...

It's mid November, and in a cluttered upstairs rehearsal room in the Gorbals, Vanishing Point theatre company are sat around a long table talking earnestly about their forthcoming production of their new show, The Destroyed Room. The co-production with Battersea Arts Centre opens at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow at the end of February prior to dates in London and Edinburgh, but in November at the end of a week of development, what is advertised as being a show about voyeurism and witnessing things through and beyond a TV screen has yet to find out what it is. The rehearsal room set-up itself, however, gives early hints of what The Destroyed Room may or may not end up as. As actors Elicia Daly, Pauline Goldsmith and Barnaby Power, designer Kai Fischer and four others talk, with the all-seeing eye of director Matthew Lenton at the table's head, it gradually becomes apparent that, among the flight cases and speakers that litter the floor, four video cameras mounted on tripods st...

Norwegian guitarist Haftor Medboe has been a low-key fixture of Edinburgh's jazz scene for some years now, having released seven albums in various guises and with different collaborators over the last decade. These include Places and Spaces, recorded in 2012 with a quartet that included Anneke Kampman, vocalist with spectral electronicists, Conquering Animal Sound. This latest outing sees Medboe lead a trio of pianist Espen Eriksen and trumpeter Gunnar Halle. Both of Medboe's countrymen come with an impressive international pedigree as both band-leaders and side-men on a host of recordings. This makes for a crisp and starkly melodic alliance for a set of seven original pieces. Composed by Medboe with the distance exile brings with it, each one taps into his Nordic roots with an ornate chamber jazz that leaves plenty of space to contemplate the view. Recorded the day after the trio's live appearance at the 2015 Edinburgh Jazz Festival , the album ebbs and flows from th...

Edinburgh's Hogmanay Four stars “Four hours isn't enough,” said a giddy Emma Pollock at the end of a marathon shift fronting a five-piece supergroup at Chemikal:Land, one of eleven stages at Edinburgh's Hogmanay's now annual New Year's Day derive around the country's cultural riches. As exhausted as Pollock and her Chemikal Underground Records label-mates undoubtedly were after three sets of dove-tailing between each other's material, she had a point. While it was possible to sprint between the venues dotted around Edinburgh's Old Town, a more relaxed approach was key to the day's enjoyment. This was the case at Sea Bird:Land, hosted by the Stornoway-based An Lanntair arts centre at Old Saint Paul's Episcopal Church. Here, fiddler Aidan O'Rourke, guitarist Graham Stephen and drummer John Blease provided a live soundtrack to Dalziel and Scullion's environmental film installation, Tumadh is Turas: Immersion and Journey. Beamed thro...

It's been quite a Christmas for Kim Moore. Last week saw the Glasgow based composer's score for Little Red, Barrowland Ballet's dance theatre take on festive folk tales, praised on these pages. Barely pausing for breath, Moore has just released Black Rabbit, a digital only split single put out under the name of WOLF, the electronically inclined solo guise Moore has worked under since 2012. Both of these are a long way from Moore's five year tenure as co-vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and arranger with Zoey Van Goey, the playful chamber pop trio she formed with Matt Brennan and Michael John McCarthy. Where Zoey Van Goey's narrative vignettes mixed melody and off-kilter charm, now Moore's work is more about atmosphere, as she combines her voice with a swathe of studio-based technology. For Little Red, Moore's composition and sound design was led by the moves of the three dancers choreographed by Barrowland Ballet's Natasha Gilmore to a script by Rober...

Edinburgh's Hogmanay Four stars Atmosphere may have been to the fore in the build up to Biffy Clyro's first live show in over a year, but when astronaut Tim Peake beamed down a pre-bells message from space, it all but stole everybody's thunder. By that time Idlewild's impeccably mannered frontman Roddy Woomble had predicted that it was too cold for even Biffy's vocalist and guitarist Simon Neil to take his top off, only for Neil to prove him wrong. With be-jerkined bass player James Johnston being the only band member to be sporting anything above the waist, what there was of Neil's billowing outfit gave him the appearance of a genie who had just burst free of his bottle. Prior to this, Honeyblood's duo of singer and guitarist Stina Tweedale and drummer Cat Myers offset any potential for boys club machismo with a set of raw, drawled-out pop-rock bounce, while Idlewild's surprisingly funky brand of literate Celtic-tinged rock was the sound of a ban...

When theatre director Annet Henneman came to Glasgow in the summer of 2012, she and her international collective of activists and performers that form her Teatro di Nascosto (Hidden Theatre) company worked with refugees from Sri Lanka, Africa and Kurdistan to create a new performance piece. Created over several days of improvisation, and using techniques inspired by Polish theatrical guru, Jerzy Grotowski, Refugee School was devised with Henneman leading a group who couldn't speak each other's language, but who went on to create a series of presentations that enabled them to find common ground by acting out and sharing their stories. By the end of the first day of what was an understandably emotional experience for all involved, the group, who had only met hours before, were dancing in unison to recordings of Kurdish music. For those involved, it was both a relief and a joy to indulge in such seemingly simple pleasures which they'd previously been denied prior to their f...