Reviews
Kieron Tyler
The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground Super Deluxe EditionMGM, The Velvet Underground’s label, didn’t have a clue how to promote the band’s third album. The press kit accompanying its March 1969 release described drummer Maureen Tucker as “not your typical virgin. She looks like a red-headed music hall tart and pounds the drums with the force of a weight lifter. A female Brendan Behan.” Lou Reed was said to have “a face that arouses interest but gives no satisfaction.”So it was no suprise that the album indeed became a poor seller and aroused little mainstream interest, which Read more ...
peter.quinn
Is it just me, or do Guy Barker's orchestral charts for Jazz Voice get more refined, more nuanced, more richly detailed every year? Effectively becoming earworm central last night, the Barbican resounded with tintinnabulating glockenspiels, delicately plucked harp strings, punchy horn charts and luxuriant strings, as Barker sprinkled his arranging magic over the customary epoch-spanning celebration of anniversaries, birthdays and milestones stretching back from 2014.Grounded by the fabulous rhythm section of pianist Dave Newton, bassist Chris Hill, drummer Ralph Salmins and the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Søren Nils Eichberg’s new opera Glare is advertised as a “taut” thriller. It’s actually a short thriller. Big difference.The question of whether or not opera – a medium that wouldn’t win any prizes for sprinting – can successfully pull off a thriller – a genre that lives and, more often, dies in its dramatic agility and lightness of foot – is a very real one. I’ve never seen it succeed yet, but would be delighted to be proved wrong. Glare, unfortunately, is not that proof.We find ourselves in the kind of dystopian near-future that only exists on the operatic stage. You know it’s a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Colin Matthews: No Man's Land, Crossing the Alps, Aftertones Hallé Orchestra, Hallé Choir, Hallé Youth Choir/Nicholas Collon and Richard Wilberforce, with Ian Bostridge (tenor) and Roderick Williams (baritone) (Hallé)Colin Matthews is still best-known for his links with other composers. He worked with Deryck Cooke on an effective realisation of Mahler's 10th Symphony, and assisted an ailing Britten in the 1970s. His idiomatic orchestrations of Debussy Preludes have been recorded by Rattle and Elder. Mahler and Britten are the most obvious influences on the works collected here, the most Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Even before Kate Tempest appears, it’s clear this isn’t going to be an evening of slam poetry jamming. Her band walk on, three guys who attack a line-up of electronic kit with vigour, one wielding drumsticks, alongside Anth Clarke, a striking black female MC, who looks like a 2007 nu-raver in baseball cap, white sunglasses and a crop top. They whip up a hammering electro racket before cutting out abruptly when Tempest walks on, all smiles, flowing blonde locks and a low-key black T-shirt. She breaks into “Marshall Law” from her Mercury Music Prize-nominated album Everybody Down. “Everywhere Read more ...
David Nice
Most pianists never truly master one of Brahms’s two piano concertos, those colossal symphonies for soloist and orchestra, let alone both. To present the two in one concert, then, seems foolhardy – and apparently was when András Schiff went for the marathon at the Edinburgh Festival during the Brian McMaster era. No-one expected anything but true majesty, though, when Elisabeth Leonskaja asked to do the same. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra duly obliged, taking up her suggestion of Okko Kamu, a Finnish master I haven’t seen for decades, as conductor. The result was almost off the Richter scale Read more ...
Simon Munk
What a setting! The history-hopping stealth action series drops into Revolutionary Paris in Unity. Arguably the first game of the "next generation" uses more processing power to render a gigantic, living city teeming with revolting peasants, towered over by Gothic cathedrals and stuffed full of passageways and distractions. Assassin's Creed: Unity looks so real you can almost smell Robespierre's breath. Such a shame, then, that the game fails to engage meaningfully with setting or period.The Assassin's Creed series follows an increasingly ludicrous and labyrinthine plot about memories of our Read more ...
Graham Fuller
More frequently and accessibly than his fellow veteran directors of the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff has captured the pandemonium wrought by Nazism – in in his Palme d’Or-sharing masterpiece The Tin Drum (1979), its quasi-sequel The Ogre (1996), and The Ninth Day (2004). Though Diplomacy, his latest World War II drama, threatens an unimaginable Götterdämmerung that never came to pass – Hitler’s willed devastation of Paris and its population – the tension it generates is undiluted.A movie dominated by talk in a hotel room, it creates indelible mental pictures of rubble mounds Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of this creepy Belfast-set crime thriller generated a mixture of critical enthusiasm and revulsion for its voyeuristic scenes of the sadistic murder of women. This season two opener [****] didn't give us any more of the latter, but successfully re-established the show's atmosphere of claustrophobic menace. It also probed further into the psychological battle between Gillian Anderson's DS Stella Gibson and Jamie Dornan's low-key but intensely deranged killer, Paul Spector.Writer/director Allan Cubitt seems to have found the ideal pace for his narrative, which moves with a kind Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What ought to be a featherweight holiday confection emerges as a charmless slog in the belated West End bow of White Christmas, a title that at this point in November may induce panic in those playgoers who haven't begun to think about holiday shopping. But even the more industrious gift-givers out there will have a hard time stomaching a hefty slab of seasonal treacle, which is nicely designed (and brilliantly played by musical director Andrew Corchoran's ace orchestra) but suffers from a hole at its very centre. Make that two holes, in fact, where a pair of galvanic, charismatic leading men Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine are two-thirds of the talented team (Jo Brand was the other) who brought us the excellent Getting On, now probably lost to UK screens after three series but which will appear in an American format next year. Now the duo have co-written and star in Puppy Love, about a dog trainer on The Wirral; but whereas Getting On - a quiet, gently paced and often moving comedy set in the NHS - delivered its humour with great subtlety, Puppy Love (directed by Susan Tully) is frantic and obvious.Take the slogan emblazoned on the side of Nana V's (Scanlan) van, advertising Read more ...
Naima Khan
Meet Len (Graham O'Mara), a man-child stuck in a world where "gaytard", "bender" and "spastic" are (to him, anyway) harmless insults. He throws them lovingly at niece Jen (Jennifer Clement) to help cheer her up as she struggles to deal with the suicide of her father, who also happens to have been Len's more widely-known brother. As you might imagine, Len's counselling tactics strike a dull note with his 19-year-old niece, but nothing that a couple of cans of cider, Stuart Slade's gently witty writing and some fine performances can't put right. Slade handles grief with a wry smile and a Read more ...