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Theartsdesk
Friday, 31 January 2025
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.It followed some hectic and intensive months when a disparate and eclectic...
Justine Elias
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
Despite Rossini’s banger of an overture and a Looney Tunes cartoon starring Daffy Duck as William Tell, I’ll wager that few non-German-speakers can recite the precise details of...
David Nice
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
When Vladimir Jurowski planned this typically unorthodox programme, he could not have known that a disaster even greater, long-term, than 9/11 was going to befall the USA two days...
Miranda Heggie
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
Once again, Glasgow’s annual winter festival of traditional music from all parts of the world is formed of an astonishingly packed programme of music, dance, trails and...
John Carvill
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
The blurb that accompanies this Criterion Blu-ray calls Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which co-stars John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as scuzzy, low-ranking gangsters on the run...
Nick Hasted
Monday, 20 January 2025
David Lynch’s final two features mapped a haunted Hollywood of curdled innocence and back-alley eeriness. Mulholland Drive (2001) seemed the ultimate LA noir, till Inland Empire (...
Rachel Halliburton
Monday, 20 January 2025
It took a while for journalists to identify the chain-smoking, Machiavellian figure who was a permanent presence at early...
Aleks Sierz
Monday, 20 January 2025
Most Brits don’t know much about South Africa today, but we do know about house values, so this new comedy by South African...
Veronica Lee
Monday, 20 January 2025
Ben Elton loves a scrap. The Motormouth of yesteryear, who made his name attacking Margaret Thatcher and her policies (and...
Liz Thomson
Monday, 20 January 2025
It’s been five years since the last studio album by the inestimable Mary Chapin Carpenter, the lyrical and intimate The Dirt...
Kieron Tyler
Sunday, 19 January 2025
On 26 September 1966, The Twilights set-off from Australia to Britain. The journey, on the liner the Castel Felice, took six...
Rachel Halliburton
Saturday, 18 January 2025
What better way to start a season about the Earth than by looking back on it from an astronaut’s perspective? At a time when...
Tim Cumming
Saturday, 18 January 2025
The Lovell sisters Rebecca and Megan can be heard supporting Ringo Starr on his new album of country songs, while at the...
Adam Sweeting
Friday, 17 January 2025
Being unknowable has been almost as much of a preoccupation for the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman as writing songs. Previously...
Robert Beale
Friday, 17 January 2025
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. But in Love Life, Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s musical...
Helen Hawkins
Friday, 17 January 2025
Another new release opens with the sounds of people in bed playing over the credits, but these are not Babygirl’s sighs of a...
Joe Muggs
Friday, 17 January 2025
Of the big UK indie bands of the 00s wave, Bloc Party were always the most austerely art-rockish. Where Arctic Monkeys,...
Rachel Halliburton
Thursday, 16 January 2025
Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela took the Barbican by storm last night with a thrilling...
David Nice
Thursday, 16 January 2025
This was always going to be Jakub Hrůša’s night, his first at the Royal Opera since performances of Wagner’s Lohengrin won...
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Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
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tv
What's the Matter with Tony Slattery?, BBC Two review - absorbing but troubling search for answers
RIP TONY SLATTERY How mental illness cut short a brilliant showbusiness career
American Primeval, Netflix review - nightmare on the Wild Frontier
Peter Berg's Western drama is grim but gripping
Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, Sky Atlantic review - Colin Firth stars in gruelling dramatisation of the 1988 terror attack
Will we ever hear the full story of what happened to Pan Am Flight 103?
film
William Tell review - stirring action adventure with silly dialogue
The Swiss folk hero gets an epic update
David Lynch: In Dreams (1946-2025)
The director, who has died aged 78, rewired cinema with nightmare logic, an underground ethos and weird, wondrous innocence
new music
Album: Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis & Karine Polwart - Looking For the Thread
It's only January but this is an album of the year
Music Reissues Weekly: The Twilights - Twilights Time The Complete 60s Recordings
Australian pop group which recorded at Abbey Road but remained a local sensation
Album: Larkin Poe - Bloom
Heavy blues-rock riffery guides the Lovell sisters’ introspective new songs
classical
Tiffin Youth Choir, London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, Jurowski, RFH review - perfect detachment suits public statements
Poised Haydn and John Adams in a surprising sequence
Celtic Connections: Orchestral Qawwali Project, GRIT Orchestra review - two concerts showcasing the cross-genre power of an orchestra
Orchestral music imagined in many ways in Glasgow's global music festival
Sun Rings, Sacconi Quartet, Festival Voices, Kings Place review - lift-off for an exhilarating voyage into the unknown
A suitably radiant interpretation of a Terry Riley epic
opera
Love Life, Opera North review - Lerner and Weill's blast into the past
Time-travelling tale of love and despair - the first 'concept musical' revived
Jenůfa, Royal Opera review - electrifying details undermined by dead space
Knife-edge conducting and singing, but non-realistic production is weaker in revival
theatre
Kyoto, Soho Place Theatre - blistering, darkly witty play raises more questions than it answers
The script turns dry-as-dust diplomatic detail into nothing less than an adrenaline sport
A Good House, Royal Court review - provocative, but imperfect
South African satire about racism, sexism, home ownership and community politics
Oliver!, Gielgud Theatre review - Lionel Bart's 1960 masterpiece is Bourne again
An intimate staging and superb casting make this a superior West End production
dance
Nutcracker, English National Ballet, Coliseum review - Tchaikovsky and his sweet tooth rule supreme
New production's music, sweets, and hordes of exuberant children make this a hot ticket
comedy
Chris McCausland, Winchester Theatre Royal review - Strictly winner as cheerfully cynical as ever
Back to the day job telling gags
Books
Best of 2024: Books
As 2024 comes to an end, we look back at the books that have thrilled and enthralled us
William J. Mann: Bogie & Bacall review - beyond the screen
Why we're still in love with Bogart and Bacall, and their legendary Hollywood romance
visual arts
Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Tate Modern review - an exhaustive and exhausting show
Flashing lights, beeps and buzzes are diverting, but quickly pall
latest comments
Nowhere near as good as the original. Shallow....
Though now living in Toronto we witnessed...
Thank you!
Agreed. No real french dynamic, thin story...
It is on BBC Opera on 3 on February 8 https...
How about a track listing for a 'lost album'?
Will the performance be recorded in entirety?...
You've obviously made your mind up about this,...