| | | Ichiko Aoba: Windswept Adan review – hypnotic, ghostly psych-folk | | by Emily Mackay Dec 12, 2021 | | An imaginary island and sparse instrumentation unfold together as the Japanese singer-songwriter conjures her latest alluring soundworld The Japanese composer Ichiko Aoba’s seventh record, the first to be released outside her country, offers a timely hidden door to another, quieter world. Drawing on her experience as a soundtracker of theatre productions and video games such as The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Windswept Adan finds Aoba moving beyond the simple voice-and-guitar arrangements of her previous releases to create, in collaboration with Taro Umebayashi, AKA Milk, a psych-folk sci-fi story set on Adan, a fictional island based on the Ryukyu archipelago. From Prologue, with its deep drone, wash of waves and circling, priestessly choral voices to the closing Adan no Shima no Tanjyosai and its sparsely plucked guitar and elegiac strings and flute, the album casts a still, soothing spell. Anyone charmed by the deep delicacy of Nick Drake, Joanna Newsom or Isobel Campbell’s the Gentle Waves will find many byways to wander, from the graceful Easter Lily, in which slow kalimba and guitar arpeggios build twinkling layers that shift subtly, revealing shadows, to Hagupit, an eerier, ghostlier thing with a keening melody. It’s a remarkable feat of musical world-building that will pull you back to Adan’s shores again and again. Continue reading... | | | | | Essential recipes from Nigel Slater, Claudia Roden and Ottolenghi: the best food books of 2021 | | by Allan Jenkins, Molly Tait-Hyland, Holly O'Neill, Killian Fox, Tim Hayward, Clare Finney and Gareth Grundy Dec 12, 2021 | | Perfect presents for friends, family and fans of Stanley Tucci, Rachel Roddy, and Anthony Bourdain Med: a Cookbook
Claudia Roden
(Ebury, £28)
More than 50 years after her groundbreaking, genre-defining A Book of Middle Eastern Food, Claudia Roden has produced another triumph that this time travels around the Mediterranean. The most revered of living food writers (by me at least) has relaxed. The recipes are simple and of course immaculate, the writing is effortless. Read and cook from it often. AJ
Buy it for adding to your Claudia Roden collection
Order your copy at guardianbookshop.com A Cook’s Book
Nigel Slater
(4th Estate, £30)
Subtitled The Essential Nigel Slater, this is 500 pages of new and revisited recipes, interwoven with writing that evokes a life’s work. Of course the words are as comforting as the dishes – there’s a definitive roast chicken with roast potatoes and roasting juice. If you were to only have one Nigel Slater cookbook in your life, this is the one. AJ
Buy it for reading aloud to yourself in the kitchen
Order your copy at guardianbookshop.com Continue reading... | | | | | L'Enfance du Christ review – full of colour and character | | by Erica Jeal Dec 12, 2021 | | St Martin-in-the-Fields, London
John Eliot Gardiner assembles top-flight soloists as his Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique take on Berlioz
A stone’s throw from the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, in the National Gallery, you can see what the old Flemish painters made of the story of the holy family’s flight into Egypt. Here, with John Eliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique giving their first concert in their new home venue, you could hear Berlioz’s take on it. L’Enfance du Christ is full of Berlioz’s characteristic moodswings and grand, colourful gestures: it’s an oratorio that sounds as though it desperately wants to be an opera, perfect for the characterful period winds and brass of Gardiner’s orchestra and for the top-flight cast of soloists he had assembled here. Michael Spyres’s glowing Narrator, Ann Hallenberg’s beatific Mary and Lionel Lhote’s desperate yet noble Joseph – it would have been good to hear more of all three, but Berlioz doesn’t put the spotlight squarely on any one soloist. The smaller roles were taken by singers from the choir; Alexander Ashworth made especially vivid work of the Ishmaelite who takes the family in. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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