Five New Classics You Should Have On Your Radar

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Published

September 4, 2014

Produced in association with our mates at Red Bull.

First things first, The Arts are the realest; drop a working knowledge of them into casual conversation and the whole world feels it.

Shoehorned Iggy Azalea references aside, you already know that an appreciation of life’s finer things is integral not only to your conversational repertoire, but also to your reputation as a well-rounded individual who expects the best.

Classical music gets a pretty bad ~rap~ from today’s youths (who are more concerned with snapping iTinders from their Goggle Glass and sending sexts [secular texts, presumably?] to their EmojiPads than with anything remotely interesting) so it may shock you to learn that quite a number of youths – at least five! – have devoted their lives and careers to modernising time-honoured art forms for a contemporary audience.

Herewith, a quick survey of iconoclassical new classicists from home and abroad who are redefining the forms of yore; five innovators putting a decidedly modern twist on various forms of artistic expression that you’d be well blessed to have on your radar.

THE Q BROTHERS
One of many highlights from the lineup on this year’s ever diverse Sydney Festival lineup was The Q Brothers‘ and the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s hybrid retelling of Othello, aptly-dubbed, Othello: The Remix. Written by two brothers who bill themselves as “two guys who share parents and rewrite Shakespeares plays into hip-hop musical add-RAP-tations”, G and J Qaiyum are to experimental musical theatre what Sparknotes were (are?) for attention deficit teens for whom Early Modern English and three hour play running times are anything but ‘trill’.

With a previous Australian tour of Funk It Up About Nothin’ already under their belt – their take on Much Ado About Nothing – you can no doubt expect to see The Q Brothers’ spin on A Midsummer Night’s Dream on a festival bill near you in the near future.

For now though, this is The Remix:

AMADEUS LEOPOLD

Now twenty-eight years old, Korean-born violin virtuoso and classically-trained performance art provocateur, Amadéus Leopold (born Hahn Bin), was accepted into the University of Korea at age nine as its youngest ever intake. Educated at Juilliard under the tutelage of the legendary fiddler Itzhak Perlman, Leopold weaves Bach with Bowie, Warhol with Stravinsky, and Rachmaninov with Rick Owens to create a genre of music and performance that is at once both classical, avant-garde and entirely his own.

COLLARBONES X SYNERGY PERCUSSION

Unearthed by means of another highlight from 2014’s local festival landscape – this time from VIVID – comes a new classic in the form of the sweet musical congress that occurred when Sydney two piece Collarbones and Australia’s “oldest contemporary musical ensemble” Synergy Percussion came together to create the percussive, cinematic landscape that became New Wave: Sound. The fact that their union culminated in a one off performance can’t stop, won’t stop us from including both parties in this arbitrary pantheon of future classics to look out for.

ESA-PEKKA SALONEN x TECHNOLOGY

By no means a newcomer, the tech-savvy Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen warrants a mention here for his chic (and presumably handsomely remunerated) work composing a new Violin Concerto classic in this typically great iPad Air TV spot from earlier this year, highlighting the features of The Orchestra, a compositional app he developed with the London Philharmonia.

The Orchestra app is part of a larger campaign for Salonen to redefine what ‘classical’ means for contemporary audiences: “Prejudice is the biggest problem in terms of classical music. There is this idea that it’s something for old people. You have to behave in a certain way, you have to wear certain types of clothes, you have to be kind of hopelessly boring.

And none of this is true.”

RED BULL FLYING BACH

Returning this month after last year’s sell-out run of shows in Sydney and Melbourne and a year long global tour is the paradigmatic new classic, Red Bull Flying Bach.

A harmonious merger of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’ and the balletic Berlin-born breakdance crew Flying Steps (est. 1993), Red Bull Flying Bach thrives off the tension that arises when dynamic choreography and words like ‘urban’ and ‘street’ are forced into a dance off with the harpsichord and the piano stylings of a 1722 composition.

It’s like Save The Last Dance but infinitely better due to the hypnotic ability of the Flying Steps dancers, Bach’s timeless score and, well, watch for yourself: