Reviews
Matthew Wright
The genteel north London of the Roundhouse isn’t the obvious venue for a ladtronica and bloke rock band. Especially one that’s recently come from headlining Glastonbury and is used to open horizons, and sound systems more dangerously ramped-up than Primrose Hill house prices. By giving a performance that wowed an audience of mainly young couples, Kasabian showed a character and identity that’s more nuanced than the standard hairy bloke depiction allows.They played two sets, with a first set that seemed deliberately lower-key and less spectacular than the second, as if they were supporting Read more ...
graham.rickson
Grieg: Holberg Variations 1B1/Jan Bjøranger, Christian Ihle Hadland (piano), Erlend Skomsvoll (piano) (Simax)This release has a nifty title, and contains three different performances of Grieg's ubiquitous Holberg Suite, each one marvellous in its own way. This five-movement piece began life as a work for solo piano in 1884, the familiar string orchestra version following a year later. The Norwegian pianist Christian Ihle Hadland plays the original incarnation, and phenomenally well; the faster, tricky music made to sound wholly natural and spontaneous. There's something magical about Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Walton’s Façade is not performed very often in London, but this weekend there is the opportunity to hear it four days in a row: on Monday at a chamber Prom, but before that in this enterprising staging, paired with Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King.The original conception of Façade was that it should be performed “in as abstract a manner as possible” but this interpretation is as specific as possible. 84 days after the end of the First World War, the patients at an asylum for those mentally scarred by the conflict gather to perform music together. The reciter’s part is shared Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There’ll be no Lady Gaga tonight. Tony Bennett’s most public performances over the last 20 years have been in duets with such lesser talents, or in Glastonbury’s borderline ironic old-timers’ slot. The crackly recording of Sinatra calling him “the greatest singer in the world” which precedes him has introduced the 88-year-old for decades now, as if he still needed the recommendation of the long-gone Chairman of the Board. But these days, Tony Bennett stands alone. The “saloon singer” Sinatra called him is a vanishing art he embodies. His two nights at the Royal Festival Hall, instead of one Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Imagine The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel crossed with Chocolat. That’s The Hundred-Foot Journey in one, meshing a previous success of director Lasse Hallström with the previously neglected but growing genre of 'the mature person's movie'. After all, old folks like food, don’t they? Well, so do young people. Who doesn’t?The Hundred-Foot Journey is based on the novel by Richard C. Morais and screenplay written by Steven Knight (who wrote and directed the very good Locke with Tom Hardy), this is a filmic cuisine culture clash that benefits from a terrific cast and an alluring story. Shot as a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On the face of it, it's one of the more counter-intuitive pieces of casting this year; surreal stand-up and possible future Labour Mayor of London Eddie Izzard as Robert Watson Watt, the Scottish scientist who helped develop radar. But on second thoughts, perhaps not, as Watson Watt had to overcome prejudice and entrenched opinion to see his vision through.Radar was at first dismissed by Winston Churchill (not Tim McInnerny's finest hour) as a fantastical project - “castles in the sky” - but he later acknowledged its huge importance in winning the war. Watson Watt and his team developed radar Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Appointment with F.E.A.R. is the latest of Tin Man Games' adaptations of the classic Fighting Fantasy gamebook series for smartphones. During the 1980s heyday of choose-your-own-adventure gamebooks, the Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone were arguably the gold standard. A simple role-playing system that presented a multiple-choice story populated by adversaries you could 'fight' using dice rolls at critical points, gamebooks captured the imagination of a generation of kids before being largely obliterated by handheld video games. The series has seen a resurgence in Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Conductor Marin Alsop was welcomed like Britannia herself at last night’s concert, an astute partnership of John Adams’ vivacious hybridism and Gustav Mahler’s colourful patchwork quilt of a symphony. Alsop won the Prommers’ hearts with her successful navigation through the choppy waters of last year’s Last Night, but the ecstatic ovation greeting the conclusion of this performance was for something quite different: she directed the BBC Symphony Orchestra in lean, energetic and for the most part precise accounts of seemingly very different works, which she juxtaposed intelligently.John Adams Read more ...
Sarah Kent
If events in the Middle East, the prospect of the school run or the onset of autumn are conspiring to lower your spirits, then escape to the V&A and immerse yourself in the dreamy elegance of Horst P. Horst’s magical fashion photographs spanning a career that lasted 60 years.One of his most famous pictures (pictured below right: Mainbocher corset © Condé Nast/ Horst Estate) was taken in 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. It's of a woman in a corset – not a promising subject – yet from this banal starting point Horst creates something supremely memorable Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It begins sombrely, with the grave recounting of a shipwreck, but such emotive moments are fleeting: as the drama ratchets up, it only serves to fuel the splendid zaniness of Shakespeare's 1594 farce. Granted, it's not his most nuanced comedy – the wordplay is relatively unsophisticated, and there’s a greater reliance on confusion, pratfalls and repetition – yet in Blanche McIntyre’s spirited production, it is, indisputably, an awful lot of fun.The convoluted plot involves not one, but two sets of separated twins, a baffled spouse, an aggrieved merchant, and a father facing execution. The Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
The task of adapting 1978 novel The Switch by Elmore Leonard - who sadly passed away last year - is given to relatively new director Daniel Schechter who brings together a superb ensemble cast, lush seventies set design and a gritty style. He mostly rises to the occasion thanks to confident camera work and an obvious rapport with his actors.When a scam cooked up by a couple of crooks, Louis (John Hawkes) and Ordell (Yasiin Bey aka musician Mos Def pictured below right), to kidnap the wife of a dodgy businessman goes horribly wrong a waiting game begins. Unbeknownst to anyone the husband Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Well, it’s one way to cure shellshock. The centenary of World War One has produced quite a bombardment of dramas, none quite as curious as Our Zoo. The war is long since over in this new BBC One confection, and men have either come back from the trenches or not. Some have returned but without the full complement of limbs or, in the case of shopkeeper George Mottershead, marbles.You know he’s not quite the full shilling when he takes his daughter to the circus but has to run as soon as cowboys firing popguns. They didn’t go in for the talking cure in those days, not in the tight-lipped north, Read more ...