When the wolf seizes the grandmother, there is just enough suggestion of rape before she wraps herself in a sheet and makes a ghostly retreat. Then Riding Hood, explicitly invited into bed by the disguised wolf, suffers the same fate. A moral in verse follows, lightly but chillingly updated here to rhyme "Leicester" with "molester". Aperghis has set it for six musicians, who also tell the story and act it out. The members of the Continuum Ensemble wear concert dress and are unable to do without music stands - it's quite intricate stuff - out of which Arden has made a virtue, having them and the pianos moved gracefully around the stage to reinforce the mounting unease of the events.Compounding it further, the narrative proceeds in repeating and overlapping phrases, so that it takes two steps forward and one back.
That's until the final stages, when it switches into fast-forward to reinforce the shock of Riding Hood's unfamiliar demise.Apart from the pianos, there are three high woodwind and a violin, a deliberately limited sound-palette that has a cumulatively claustrophobic effect. From time to time, one player activates a tuba through several metres of plastic tubing to make scary sounds, to which the audience reacts with hollow mirth.The show's distinction is in its staging and vocal delivery. It takes quite something to turn a bunch of modern-music specialists into confident actors. But Arden has the musical experience and nous to bring off the adventure.There was a great atmosphere in the Almeida, too: let the kids in, and the usual new-music endurance test is transformed into a proper evening out.. F?d by critics and adored by a small but growing band of devotees, Rilo Kiley have spent seven years inching towards a breakthrough. At last, the signs are there: this show had to be moved from the modestly sized Scala to the 1,800-capacity Koko to cope with ticket demand. Formed in Los Angeles around the former child actors Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett in 1998, Rilo Kiley are hard to pigeonhole.
The only thing was, at first, people thought we were a girl group - they'd say, 'Where's Miss Rose?'"Gender mis-assignments aside, Wagner didn't care if people saw the ghosts of older bands in his band. So, meeting him has been like a revelation, because I think he is a brilliant songwriter."A studious one, too. Wagner is as much bookworm as musophile, and it was the time he spent brushing up on music history in his local library that got his band a name. Just when he and Foo needed her, he came across a book with a heroine named Ravonelle. "He thought the name was very beautiful," says Foo, "and I said, 'Yes, but what can we do with it?' Then somehow it changed to The Raveonettes, which was perfect, with the Buddy Holly 'Rave On' connection and the girl-pop thing.
