Reviews
Jessica Duchen
About 10 minutes into the Brahms Third Symphony I wanted to check a name in the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s programme. I dared to turn a page. Bad idea. Such preternatural stillness had settled over the sold-out Royal Albert Hall that the gesture could probably have been spotted from the balcony. A motionless, virtually breathless audience is a rarity even at the Proms, where quality of listening is venerated; still, to hold around 6000 people quite so rapt with attention is an extraordinary skill in orchestra and conductor. But then, the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Iván Fischer are no Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Since Big Brother, Channel 4 has become expert at selecting naively self-promoting members of the public, and rubbing their unsuspecting apple cheeks into choice and unsavoury anatomical and psychological corners, for general public amusement. The title of this series suggests only a cosmetic variation on that theme, the question merely being whether it’s Islamists, Russian separatists or the weather that gets them first.In fact, the surprise of this series so far (though there’s still time for disaster...) is how lovely everything is. The scenery is unspeakably beautiful, they’re doing some Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
First, confessions. I’m the dance critic here at theartsdesk. Yes, this is a review of a concert performance of an opera, and no, I haven’t picked up a detailed knowledge of Rossini’s oeuvre as a byproduct of my education in pirouettes and Pina Bausch. I attended last night’s concert as a common or garden punter, and a chance one at that, taking a ticket to save wasting it after its original owner had to give it up because of a work commitment.Alexandra wrote a piece the other week about what opera has to offer the under-30s. Though I’m far from an opera novice, I am in that demographic and I Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Returning to the small town you grew up in after a spell in the big city can often be problematic. Old friends now think you’re a big shot. The familiar is seen in a new light, and not necessarily a good one. There’s a sense that the ties which have been slackened might be irrevocably sheared. In Mystery Road, Aaron Pedersen’s Jay Swan is a cop back in outback Queensland, in north-east Australia, after training. Now a detective, he quickly finds it’s sink or swim.But that’s not his only problem. As an Aboriginal, he’s subjected to racism. He’s one of what’s called “this dark breed.” And as a Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The first of this year's two Proms by the Budapest Festival Orchestra had looked like a rather strange confection, on paper at least. With eleven scheduled contributions, and only two of them destined to make it into double figures, its timings had even given it a passing resemblance to a short but eventful cricket innings (there were also three unprogrammed extra items, but more of those later). The evening's programme, which ranged through the centuries from Mozart and Schubert up to the 1930s and Kodály, by way of one piece by Dvořák and four from the Strauss family, showed off a Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
There’s no rest for the wicked and corrupt in Frank Miller’s sequel to Sin City which sees him team up once again with Robert Rodriguez. A series of uninspired but visually alluring vignettes play out demanding you to question what came before and why such a foul follow-up has taken over nine years to come to fruition.Three stories based on the hard-boiled graphic novels of Frank Miller that date back to the 1990s (with a little new material thrown in) are told via the monochrome, highly stylised images that we first saw back in 2005. Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has a death wish and a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
John Kearns: Shtick, Voodoo Rooms ****London comic John Kearns made history at the weekend, when he became the first comic to win the main prize at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards after winning best newcomer gong, which he did last year That's some achievement.Shtick is in much the same vein as last year's show – lo-fi observational comedy about the mundanities of life given an absurdist twist. But this hour feels a lot more structured and rooted in reality, even if Kearns is again dressed in monk's tonsure wig and ill-fitting false teeth. I suspect, though, that last element of his act may soon Read more ...
Andy Plaice
Fifty-seven minutes into this hour-long programme entitled "Al Murray’s Great British War Films", our host put panellist Dan Snow on the spot and asked him to name his favourite war film. “Does it have to be British?” Snow wondered. For a second it looked like Murray and his other two guests might stick him in solitary confinement for a week, yet Snow’s dizzy reaction was not only (unintentionally) funny but also gave away just how much he’d switched off by now. And he wouldn’t have been alone.For all that it promised – a comedian with a love of history and three panellists sit in lovely Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Even as orchestras began to sound more and more alike, there was the Czech Philharmonic. And many of its notable characteristics remain to this day: a modest, homespun quality, warm and engaging and full of bright-eyed distinction in the woodwinds. In the pithy but immensely passionate overture to Janáček’s last opera From the House of the Dead, under their current music director Jiří Bělohlávek, the rhythmic displacements and precipitously exposed string, brass and timpani writing combined X-ray clarity with a naturalness of expression; later Dvořák in Slavonic mode kicked up his heels Read more ...
Naima Khan
Here's a fun fact: this year the Merriam-Webster dictionary added a new definition for the noun "catfish". As well as the amphibian, a catfish now also refers to "a person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes." Having been popularised by the 2010 American film documentary of the same name, the term is also used casually as a verb, meaning to fool someone online. And so we now have emerging American playwright Kathy Rucker's Crystal Springs (***), which puts the catfishing of a 16-year-old centre-stage without fully coming to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In the current political climate, it would have been grotesquely inappropriate to conclude even the most fictionalised account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with any kind of neat resolution. But even if Hugo Blick’s absorbing thriller had ever dealt in such things, the carefully orchestrated dual-location bloodbath at the climax of its penultimate episode was all the hint one needed that a happy ending was never on the cards.Moral ambiguity makes for more interesting drama, of course, but by its ending The Honourable Woman had turned traditional notions of “good” and “bad” on their head Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Beethoven went deaf at 26, we're helpfully informed near the start of If I Stay in a bit of information that pales next to the tin ear on display in this late-summer romantic tragedy, which aims to position Chloë Grace Moretz as the next Shailene Woodley. (The actresses are all of five years apart, which constitutes a veritable lifetime in Hollywood). Even more than The Fault in Our Stars, the popular book-turned-film that places tragedy directly in the path of teenage love, this latest young adult novel to become a doomladen tearjerker displays a pretty strange set of priorities. I doubt I'm Read more ...