Robin Williams bei Gilmour Konzert.

13.04.2006: Der US-Schauspieler Robin Williams saß im Publikum als David Gilmour am 5.4. in der Radio City Music Hall auftrat. Vielen dank für die Fotos und Information an Mitch. Weitere Fotos vom Konzert könnt ihr auf seiner Homepage sehen.

Yes, That is Robin Williams, Above, sitting 3 Rows behind me...

At Radio City, David Gilmour Delivers Echoes of Pink Floyd.

06.04.2006: Bericht in der New York Times von KELEFA SANNEH: When David Gilmour played Radio City Music Hall on Tuesday night, he split his concert in half. The first half, which consisted of all the songs from his new album, "On an Island" (Columbia), was the reason he was there. The second half, stocked with favorites from his band, Pink Floyd, was the reason the audience was there.

Mr. Gilmour is known as one of the most courteous avant-garde rock veterans around (though there's scant competition for the title), and some of that politeness has clearly rubbed off on the fans: they listened happily, sometimes enthusiastically, to the new stuff. And they knew that after an intermission they would get what they paid for: smoke, lasers, "Comfortably Numb."

The pioneering music of Pink Floyd changed shape so many times that it barely makes sense to talk about the band's legacy: instead, there are legacies. You could hear an antecedent of today's freak-folk scene when Mr. Gilmour sang "Dominoes," a song by the singer-songwriter Syd Barrett, who left the band shortly after Mr. Gilmour joined. You could hear a primordial form of metal during the loud squalls of "Echoes," from the 1971 album "Meddle."

And you could hear a thousand hard-rock bands in the grand, note-bending, snail's-pace guitar solos that showed up in nearly every song. Instead of trying to play circles around the music, Mr. Gilmour peels off notes so slowly that the music seems to play circles around him. (Uh-oh. Maybe it's impossible to write about a Pink Floyd song without sounding like one.)

Plenty of newer groups are still exploring the band's legacies. (There is strong evidence of Pink Floyd on new albums by the Flaming Lips and the Secret Machines, to name just two.) Yet Mr. Gilmour doesn't seem overly concerned with staying current. The night's surprise guests were old friends: David Crosby and Graham Nash. They also appear on the new CD, which was co-produced by Phil Manzanera, the Roxy Music veteran. (He was there, too.) And if the CD, his first solo album since 1984, sounds like the unhurried, even drowsy work of a rock veteran who knows that longtime fans will enjoy whatever music he enjoys making — well, that's exactly what it is.

So the concert's first half was self-indulgent by design, devoted to the kind of meditative, ostentatious music that most newer bands don't — thank goodness — emulate. Which was fine with the fans; a musician's least influential tendencies are sometimes the ones that come to seem the most intrinsic. Mr. Gilmour earned a roar when he played slow notes on a saxophone in the introduction to "Red Sky at Night." It turns out that even on a saxophone, he still sounds unmistakably like himself. 

Info: Peter Kaufmann Foto © Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times