Recital for a World Gone to Sh*t review – full-throttle fury meets beautiful, blistering verse

Kings Place, LondonBridgerton star Adjoa Andoh’s outstanding delivery of poetry from the 2018 anthology was interspersed with excellent, yet slightly overshadowed, performances from baritone James Newby and pianist Joseph MiddletonPoems for a World Gone to Sh*t was published in 2018. The short anthology has no credited editor and urges its reader to “discover the amazing power of poetry to make even the most f*cked up times feel better”. The poems themselves are mostly well-known, short and by 20th-century and contemporary writers: the attention-grabbing, gifting-ready packaging ultimately contains what it might call the “same old sh*t”.Perhaps baritone James Newby and pianist Joseph Middleton imagined that taking this collection as the basis for a song recital would bring new audiences to art song. If so, the half-empty auditorium at Kings Place for this final concert in its Platoon Presents series wasn’t encouraging. Or perhaps the collection’s narrative arc from fury and frustration via calls for action to a recognition of life’s wonders seemed ripe for exploration in song. In that case, it was a shame that the logic for matching songs and poems from the collection – the latter read by Bridgerton star Adjoa Andoh – relied mainly on pivoting between key words rather than mood or meaning. Thus Maya Angelou’s Still I rise (its anthemic power blistering in Andoh’s performance) was followed by Herbert Howells’ song King David: its Walter de la Mare text is galaxies away from Angelou’s poem, but there’s a lovely key change on the phrase “He rose”. Continue reading...

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