Dressed down and defiantly scruffy, with piercing blue eyes and an unkempt mop of hair, Ada Milea is no one’s idea of a typical chanteuse. Nor are her subjects the conventional ones: she has written musicals (for want of a better word) about Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Gogol’s The Nose, and songs about anything from Ceausescu to…
| 11/06/2015
Mydy Rabycad are a four piece group from Prague who describe themselves as an electroswing dance band: a good way to encapsulate their sound. Nero Scartch on drums and keyboards is the mainstay of the band, co-writing the music for ten out of the eleven songs here, as well as writing the lyrics for three…
| 08/06/2015
‘It’s not pretty,’ says Ágnes Kőry, Hungarian-born musician, teacher and researcher in historical musicology, to open her talk marking Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Hungarian Cultural Centre. ‘It’s not a happy story but it must be told.’ The story in question relates to Jewish musicians during that uncertain, troubled and ultimately murderous period of Hungary’s…
| 25/04/2015The Romanian Cultural Institute London has just celebrated the International Week of the Francophonie, an organization that recognizes 57 countries affiliated with French culture, either through having French as mother tongue or through cultural and historical ties. Together with the newly born Rimbaud &Verlaine Foundation in London, the ICR put together an evening of poetry…
| 31/03/2015
Comically large tubas, the wailing wah-wah of trumpets and an exuberant crowd with their hands in the air, it sounded and looked like the circus had come to town. Close, but not quite, it was Fanfare Ciocarlia that had come to Koko Camden. Fanfare Ciocarlia, a Romanian brass ensemble, basking unashamedly in pure showmanship oblivious…
| 22/03/2015
The country that was Yugoslavia might not exist anymore but it lives on in the hearts of some. Katarina Gadjanski and other “ex-Yugoslavians” who came to see her ensemble The Gypsy Fever Quartet at the Hootananny Brixton proved the case, on what would have otherwise been just another Wednesday night. Gadjanski took a packed house…
| 03/03/2015On January 29th at the Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen, Czech singer Lenka Dusilová and her band Baromantika tantalised those unfamiliar with her music, while delivering considerable satisfaction to her loyal Czech fans. Dusilová, who arrived with her newborn baby, has performed solo acts in London before, but this was the first time that she…
| 11/02/2015
The 20th century’s great musical maverick and forerunner of our sampling, appropriating, multicultural world, Béla Bartók may well be the hippest composer in the canon. The first to synthesize the folk elements of his native Hungary with the avant-garde of his day, he was also a kind of proto-ethnomusicologist, collecting and transcribing music from remote…
| 05/02/2015
The story of Bluebeard, popularised by the French writer Charles Perrault in his 1659 version, is among the oldest and best-known European folk tales. It differs from telling to telling, but invariably revolves around the arrival of a young bride at the home of her mysterious older husband, and the discovery of the murdered corpses…
| 03/02/2015
Experiencing a Polish live music event with absolutely no knowledge of the language is simply surreal. At Mister D’s live gig, on Wednesday 28th January, the venue might be London’s edgy-cum-hip Hoxton but the setting is decidedly Polish, so the only way forward is to lose yourself in the moment. Basking in it comes easily,…
| 03/02/2015