Reviews
Hanna Weibye
The challenge was already in the title for me: as both a dance critic and a strongly visual person, in the normal order of things I see the dance first and hear the music second. Last night's show, the second of the Sadler's Wells Composer Series of productions (the first was with Mark-Anthony Turnage in 2011), set out to challenge that order of perception by marrying dance and music in a partnership of equals: the formidable musical heft of Thomas Adès and the Britten Sinfonia on the one hand, and on the other dance works by four major contemporary choreographers, including new commissions Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Rediscovered work offers aficionados a tantalising piece of the puzzle. Terence Rattigan’s callow debut, reborn after 80 years in obscurity, bears the hallmarks of his later plays, notably closeted ardour and the torment of unequal passion, but is more study than finished painting: ideas sketched, colour yet to be filled in. It does, however, have the distinction of at least partial veracity, inspired by the influx of theatrical luminaries to the Oxford University Dramatic Society while Rattigan was a Trinity College undergraduate.One of those luminaries, the inimitable Peggy Ashcroft, is the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's been much talk about Late Turner, to co-opt the name of the exhibition now on view at Tate Britain covering the last 16 years in the English artist JMW Turner's singular career. And as if perfectly timed to chime with those canvases in celluloid terms is Mr Turner, the ravishing film that stands as a testimonial to what one might call Late Leigh. The writer-director Mike Leigh has made period pieces before, most notably Topsy-Turvy in 1999, but even by his own exalted standards this cinematic profile of one artist by another stands a league apart.And just as Topsy-Turvy was as Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Madness is a favourite trope of opera, less so of ballet. There’s Giselle, but her insanity lasts only a few minutes. There’s Kenneth MacMillan’s delusional Anastasia, who believes she's the daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, but the advent of DNA testing destroyed the story’s credibility. In his Mayerling, Prince Rudolf’s drug habit muddies the waters, likewise the brown ooze in Arthur Pita’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It takes a brave choreographer to tackle mental illness head-on, not least when it's his first full-evening commission for the Royal Ballet.And there’s Read more ...
David Nice
You know what to expect from a standard programme of masterpieces like this, led by two great performers in careful control of their repertoire, and those expectations are never going to be disappointed. You’re not going to hear the kind of new-sound Brahms side by side with the more recent end of the German musical tradition – Zimmermann, say, or Henze; that’s the provenance of a fresh thinker like Vladimir Jurowski. But while last night’s kind of old-style concert format may not be with us for ever, we might as well treasure it while it lasts from the likes of Mitsuko Uchida, a pianist who Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ireland has had not just an economic meltdown in the past few years, but also a social one. The country that thought it had seen the back of emigration going back several generations has had to deal with its young people once again leaving in droves – albeit this time to staff schools, hospitals and television programmes with teachers, doctors and presenters, rather than men and women to build roads or clean floors, as so many of my parents' generation did.This very painful ending of the Celtic Tiger period of modern Irish history is the starting point for Fiona Doyle's first full-length play Read more ...
Simon Munk
If Splot looked any more like Angry Birds, it'd have to call itself Bouncy Birds. But looks can be deceiving – this is a fairly shrewd attempt to merge the visual style of the record-breaking mobile series with something far more traditional in videogame terms – the platformer.Platform games such as the Mario series, most famously, see you jumping from point to point around a level, trying to reach an end goal (often against a timer) and dodge the hazards in the world. Frozenbyte, the developers of Splot, previously made the Trine series – an attempt to update the classic platformer in a Read more ...
fisun.guner
Georgie Fame opened the evening with a five-piece band, including the singer on his old Hammond organ. Favourites such as “Yeh, Yeh” were belted out to pleasing effect, as well as covers that included Van Morrison’s “Moondance” (Morrison played the packed-out BluesFest the previous evening). It was a strange, “extended” version that paid homage to a Paul Robeson number – Fame boomed out an African chant that bookended the song. I’m not quite sure the unusual arrangement worked, but the band were superb and Fame’s voice – it’s been exactly 50 years since “Yeh, Yeh" was a major hit for him – in Read more ...
David Nice
ENO may not always have matched the Royal Opera in the Great Puccini Voices stakes. But it's served up many of the classiest Mimìs, with Valerie Masterson, Mary Plazas and Elizabeth Llewellyn as top seamstresses. Californian former beauty queen Angel Blue, an acclaimed Musetta in the previous revival, now joins them. Unlike Llewellyn, still awaiting the international recognition she deserves, Blue is also among the favoured roster of young sopranos who, after an interregnum where we wondered where all the best black opera singers had gone - whether the spell of Leontyne Price and Jessye Read more ...
stephen.walsh
At least three composers have set about turning The Fall of the House of Usher into operas, including most famously Debussy, whose abortive attempt, completed by Robert Orledge, was brilliantly staged by Welsh National Opera in June. But there is a good argument that Poe’s story – short on incident and character, long on visual image and atmosphere – lends itself better to film than to the stage. So I was intrigued by the chance of seeing Jean Epstein’s 1928 silent film, complete with a new accompanying score by Charlie Barber, at Malvern’s Forum Theatre, halfway through a tour set up by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Adapted from the cult novel by Joe Hill (son of Stephen King) and directed by Alexandre Aja, Horns can't keep itself on an even tonal keel for more than a few minutes. Part policier, part doomed romance and part gothic nightmare, I suppose it might even have created its own nano-genre.Nonetheless I enjoyed it quite a lot, even with its over-optimistic two hour running time. But this probably isn't the film which will carry Daniel Radcliffe across the great divide from boy wizard to mature screen actor. Partly it's the nature of the piece, which frequently finds itself trying to straddle the Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Arcadi Volodos is a relatively rare visitor to London these days. Although the Russian pianist, 42, rose early to fame, his development has perhaps taken him in a direction that startles those who were initially seduced by the astounding virtuoso transcriptions – many of them his own – in which he initially established his reputation.Anyone hoping for a taste of those at his Royal Festival Hall recital last night had to wait until his third encore. This programme had a very different focus, one that could scarcely have been more intimate and pure-hearted: an early Schubert sonata, Brahms’s Read more ...