What Peaches has achieved is no less than to reinvigorate the desiccated husk of feminism-in-rock, ditching its hollow stances, drenching it with X-chromosome juice and putting the sex back into sexual politics Oh, and swearing like a sailor on shore-leave. (Well, apart from the giant inflatable one she throws out tonight…) Her confrontational crotch-thrusts and cold sexual demands could be intimidating to some, but the bisexual singer’s aggressive objectification and commodification of the male as well as the female (exemplified by “Shake Your Dix” and “Two Guys For Every Girl”) is actually welcome and liberating: it’s a game everyone can play.
In 2006 Peaches is in control of the glam rock mothership, looping around planet pop in ever-erratic parabolae (previous captain: Marilyn Manson). Initially making her name on the early Noughties electroclash scene via the Kitty-Yo label, promoting her minimal electro-punk debut album as a one-woman show frontin’ in front of a DAT tape, Peaches has steadily moved, via the more guitar-based Fatherfucker, towards the full-on “Rock Show” she promised on Teaches’ sole rocked-up moment She is now, essentially, a cock-rocker without a cock. For most of her adult life, Nisker worked as a teacher (as wryly recognised with the title of her debut album, The Teaches Of Peaches), dabbling in muckabout bands on the Toronto circuit, until – as a member of The Shit (also featuring Chilly Gonzales) – she had a Damascene revelation, discovered her larger-than-life Peaches persona, and made her way to Berlin. ‘Jenufa’, Coliseum, London (0870 145 1700) to 28 Oct a.picard independent.co.uk. In the flesh, Merrill Nisker is small and slender, but on a stage, as Peaches, she dominates like a colossus.
The toughest female presence in rock ‘n’ roll today? No question. How about toughest of all time? Not that toughness is, per se, necessarily to be celebrated. But Peaches doesn’t deal in the ultimately blank, vacant no-bull stance of, say, a Brody Dalle. Neither is “Cello Counterpoint” (2003), a semi-recorded octet which stifles any opportunity for invention in live performance, to the point of preserving cellist Maya Beiser in the soft-rock leather corset she sports in the accompanying videos. Reich’s memorial to Daniel Pearl is written in four dovetailed sections: two quoting the Book of Daniel in sharp twists of dissonance, two quoting Pearl himself. Like John Adams, whose 9/11 memorial On the Transmigration of Souls used the severe-clear sky of that savage morning almost as a vision of heaven, and whose aria for the murdered hostage Leon Klinghoffer is a passacaglia as lovely as it is terrible, Reich refrains from any crude depiction of Pearl’s murder, instead describing a state of major-key joy in which he is forever the boyish idealist who loved to play the violin.Though the ecstatic figures for strings, exquisitely realised by violinists Liz Lim-Dutton and Todd Reynolds of the Steve Reich Ensemble, are a touching tribute to Pearl, Daniel Variations is not Reich’s finest piece.
I don’t believe that this diligent, self-effacing septugenarian is, as some have claimed, America’s greatest living composer. But he is definitely its most-loved living composer.’Rigoletto’, Grand Theatre, Leeds (0870 122 4362) to 25 Oct; touring. But “Music for 18 Musicians” (1976), perhaps the most beguiling instrumental landscape minimalism has to offer, very probably is, and the applause at its performance was rapturous. Were Bonde-Hansen a less convincing innocent, Gilda’s love for him would be utterly unbelievable.The final event of Phases: The Music of Steve Reich was the world premiere of Daniel Variations. From the baleful opening notes, his interpretation burns with anxiety, sometimes overwhelming the singers.
In the title-role, Alan Opie sings with consummate control and understanding of his character. Doubling as director, designer Charles Edwards has set the opera in the offices of Bambina, a soft-porn magazine owned by “a man known to his cronies as Il Duca”, and a trailer park. Several Aldenisms have bled into Rigoletto – the press of hostile faces at windows smeared like cataracts, the cracking of ceilings like eggshells – but Edwards lacks the discipline of his mentor, is too obviously infatuated with Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and David Chase, and makes poor use of the chorus on a very cramped stage.That the applause consistently came in on cue says much for conductor Martin Andr? powerful account of the score. Her voice is small, almost Mozartian, but she sings and acts with deep feeling.
