Reviews
Marina Vaizey
Francesca Woodman killed herself at the age of 22, the biographical fact that colours her work and which it is de riguer to mention. She left behind paintings, it is said, as yet publicly unseen, and literally hundreds upon hundreds of negatives and 800 proofs of black and white pre-digital photography. And since that very early death – and early death, whether suicide, accident, disease or murder has been sometimes seen with rabid cynicism as an outstanding career move – she has, over the past two decades, become something of a cult figure. Or rather her imagery has, collected by the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You may have had to search for his name in the closing credits of this final episode of series two of The Village, but all plaudits were due to its composer Adrian Corker, who gave us a great score which majored in atonality. The acting here remained top class, and the landscapes were still unsurpassable (more on which later), but for conveying a sense of unease in the air, it was the music that brought the atmosphere home.And there was a lot to be uneasy about as this second series closed, even if the more depressed narrative of the opener seemed rather behind us. The Twenties have brought Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This excellent documentary considerably deepens the Nick Cave we know. If there is a Cave other than the spiritually and intellectually ravenous rock star with the raven hair, bone-dry wit and shamanic showman seen here, a bumbling secret identity behind the crafted persona, co-directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard don’t want to know. The junkie punk whose bands The Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds once thrived on confrontation and chaos only has a walk-on part in this portrait of the artist who survived those white-knuckle, white-powder days.Visual artists Forsyth and Pollard’s first Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“There goes my hero,” sang the Foo Fighters at the end of the Invictus Games last night. True to form, the Foo Fighters’ performance was a barrage of energy and goodwill, which closed the games - characterised by much the same - on an all-round high. Rather touchingly, and with a sensitivity to context not all rockers are known for, the band had selected songs from their catalogue which best reflected the spirit of commitment, resolution and endurance that the games were celebrating.The Olympic Park appeared to be full to the rafters - or to Anish Kapoor’s peculiar red spiral, which is the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
At the end of this absorbing documentary about the art – and life – of Paul Nash we visited his tombstone in a Buckinghamshire churchyard, accompanying writer and presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon as he laid sunflowers on the grave. He reminded us that Nash saw the sunflower as a symbol for the soul, turning to the sun; indeed one of his last paintings was “Solstice of the Sunflower”.The final phrase Graham-Dixon used about this highly literate and intelligent artist was that he had been haunted by life, haunted by death, and by the ghosts of war. Unusually, Nash was an official war artist in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
From one great operatic storm to another. 2014 opened at English National Opera with David Alden’s Peter Grimes, gale-tossed and wet with sea-spray, and now the director turns his attention to Verdi’s Otello. Restlessly urgent, Edward Gardner’s opening assaulted us with timpani thunderclaps, stabbing into the silent auditorium as Otello himself would do just a few hours later. Tragedy is written into the musical fabric of Verdi’s opera, and in Alden’s new production we have a pervasive emotional horror that matches it blow for blow.2014 marks Alden’s 30th year working with ENO. Anyone feeling Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
If only the Last Night of the Proms could just be about the music. If it were, then the story which I would want to tell would be about Janine Jansen. A crowd which mainly turns up to wave its vast array of flags, to bounce its beach-balls and generally to step free from the shackles of adulthood, was mesmerised into a concentrated hush by the magnetism of the Dutch violinist. She drew the huge audience right in to her playing. She made the cavernous Royal Albert Hall feel like an intimate space. She tamed the crowd and (almost, briefly) silenced the bronchially challenged.But the Last Night Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
It was Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers that first really got Mulatu Astatke major Western attention – in same way that Angelo Badalementi’s music for Twin Peaks gave a rich and strange dimension to David Lynch’s TV epic, there was an even greater sense of wonderful disorientation, or as Brian Eno put it “jazz from another planet,” with Astatke’s music.While Astatke values the back catalogue (he played on the same bill as Duke Ellington in front of Haile Selassie in the early 1970s) he has really seized the opportunity that opened up for him to create some genuinely terrific new music.This Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law is back in British cinemas 28 years after it joined Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It and Lizzie Borden's Working Girls in galvanising the embryonic American indie movement.The original catalyst was Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), an affectless account of a young Hungarian visitor (Eszter Balint) to Manhattan who short-circuits the hostility of her downtown slacker cousin (John Lurie) on their road trip with his friendlier gambling buddy (Richard Edson). The writer-director's second film, it led critics to re-mint words like "deadpan", "laconic", and " Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Game Theory: Blaze of GloryThe news of the death on 15 April last year of Scott Miller was a shock. Although hardly a household name, he was one of pop’s great auteurs. The California-born songwriter may no longer be with us, but the music he made with his bands Alternate Learning, Game Theory and The Loud Family will forever testify to his originality, single-mindedness and, above all, way with a tune and a meaning-filled snarky lyric. The structure of his songs twisted and turned, but they were always melodic. He was clever, eloquent, sarcastic and, in person, always charming. All of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Blondie may have been around the block a few times since they got together in New York in 1974, but they seemingly have no intention of settling into a comfortable existence of just playing the hits to ever-diminishing artistic returns. Their present set-list features large swathes of recent album Ghosts of Download, as well a fair amount of other unlikely surprises in between the tunes that provided a soundtrack to the teenage years of many of their now-greying audience. That said, those who came along to hear the highlights of classic albums, like 1978’s Parallel Lines, or unforgettable Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The silliness of the Last Night is really just a postscript to the penultimate night of the Proms, traditionally given over to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was a tradition restored yesterday evening when Alan Gilbert and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra returned for their second concert of the season. For anyone whose stomach is liable to turn at extrovert jingoism and excess, this was the perfect antidote.Febrile and urgent under Chailly, the orchestra found rather different colours in Beethoven’s final symphony for Gilbert – cooler, quieter, more understated. I’ve never Read more ...