Reviews
Jasper Rees
The Village got its commemoration in early. While the First World War has been on every broadcaster’s to-do list 100 years on, Peter Moffat’s portrait of rural life covered 1914-18 in 2013. The first series was not, it may be safely contended, a lot of fun. So all-encompassing was the miserablism that after six hours you weren’t sure whether to swallow a bottle of anti-depressants or throw a brick at a mansion.The good news is the war is over and things may just be looking up. In one giant stride The Village has caught up with Downton Abbey and entered the roaring Twenties. You know the sort Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The ballerina claque wars that generally accompany visits here by the Mariinsky Ballet are raging particularly feverishly this year, but it all falls silent when Uliana Lopatkina makes one of her increasingly rare appearances. So much noise is focused on legginess or hip flexibility of these size-zero ballerinas, and yet the Mariinsky knows more than any other company in history that it is not body but mind that matters in the final analysis. Their luminous historical legend Galina Ulanova was nothing to look at physically, until she started dancing.Lopatkina once set the new bar for Read more ...
David Nice
After the European Union Youth Orchestra hit unsurpassable heights last week, the Proms plateau of excellence remained available to another youth carnival of weird and wonderful 20th century monsters. If the EUYO showed us that Shostakovich’s bewildering Fourth Symphony, for all its grim trajectory and ultimate annihilation, is also an orchestral showpiece, the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain demonstrated that the same could be said, with freedom and character encouraged by conductor Edward Gardner, for Stravinsky’s Petrushka before Lutosławski, following Bartok’s example, Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” declares Lord Darlington in Act II of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. He’s the classic Wildean cad - unprincipled, facetiously witty and in this production, possessed of the vilest pencil moustache, and yet the playwright gives him the most memorable line of the whole play. Why? To demonstrate that nobody is too completely good or bad not to be redeemed by beauty.irst performed in 1892, Lady Windermere’s Fan was Wilde’s first society comedy and its success set him on the way to becoming one of the most popular Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"There are 32 ways to write a story...but there is only one plot - things are not as they seem" - wisdom, courtesy of author Jim Thompson and ominously quoted in We Gotta Get Out of This Place by Sue (Mackenzie Davis) before she's swept into a nightmarish story of her own, one that takes the shape of a Thompson-esque crime thriller where things, and more specifically people, are most certainly contrary to how they appear. The film is the confident directorial debut of brothers Simon and Zeke Hawkins, working from a knowing, double-cross-laden script by first-time screenwriter Dutch Southern. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Front Line – Sounds of RealityA month after The Sex Pistols sighed their last in San Francisco in January 1978, their label boss Richard Branson flew ex-frontman John Lydon and his entourage to Jamaica. Sid Vicious would hurtle towards oblivion while fellow former Pistols Paul Cook and Steve Jones headed to Brazil to trash their legacy by larking with on-the-lam criminal Ronald Biggs. Lydon’s mission was to scout talent for Branson’s new reggae imprint, the Virgin subsidiary Front Line.Front Line was launched in March 1978. Over its less-than two-year lifespan, it Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
God it’s good to laugh in an opera house. Not a hear-how-clever-I-am-to-get-the-laborious-operatic-joke laugh, or an I-realise-this-is-supposed-to-be-funny-so-I’m-playing-along one, but a real, spontaneous laugh that tickles into sound before you’ve even had time to register its approach. Back for its second appearance, Robert Carsen’s Glyndebourne Rinaldo is ingenious and witty, joyous and completely over-the-top, and the best possible ending to this year’s summer opera season.Back in 2011 the show was great, but still felt like a work-in-progress. Three years on, and Rinaldo is back and Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The levels of refinement now exhibited by the Hallé, the stylishness and elegance of the playing, define the special relationship that they and Mark Elder have cemented over the last decade and a half. The opening bars of Berlioz’s Le corsaire came off the page like a manifesto for French sensibilities with rapier-like strings parrying airborne woodwinds like the most flexible of swashbuckling foils. The whole overture was so light on breath and string as to be positively balletic. Elder’s work with period instruments had properly informed both characterisation and sonority; there wasn’t an Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The extraordinary beams of light shooting miles into the air from Victoria Tower Gardens may be the most viewed piece of conceptual art ever. Spectra, visible from high points miles away like Primrose Hill, is the extraordinary work of Paris-based artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda, and is produced by art facilitators Artangel. For 20 years or so, Artangel have been doing – what? Struggling to describe what they do in a few words the best I can say is that they are “purveyors of magic.” They create unusual, often poetic experiences that lift us from the mundane, from Rachel Whiteread’s Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
On paper this was an interesting programme. The Edinburgh Festival traditionally opens with a major choral work, but while the international audience would probably be happy with endlessly recycled requiems and masses, festival directors have often felt obliged to venture into more challenging territory. So for last night’s opening concert the chorus had prominent roles in two separate works on either side of the interval: Scriabin’s Prometheus, The Poem of Fire, and Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien. While there is a superficial resemblance between the hazy tonal landscape occupied by Read more ...
geoff brown
“That,” she said, “is what it must be like when you enter heaven.” And I knew just what my wife meant. The organ was in full regalia, revelling in the marshmallow glory of the chorale theme in Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony, with the orchestra trumpeting behind. The Royal Albert Hall itself proved pretty impressive, even when the gentleman in the row in front spent most of Franck’s Symphonic Variations eating a tub of ice cream. It was that kind of Friday night, with a packed and enthusiastic audience ready to enjoy everything that the BBC Philharmonic and their Conductor Laureate, Gianandrea Read more ...
Marianka Swain
For those who have spent the past few months nodding along to World War I conversations while desperately trying to remember who killed that archduke and why, Rolf Hochhuth has kindly supplied a solution in the form of a dramatised European history lesson, making its English-language premiere at the Finborough.But beware: this beneficence requires payment in kind. Controversial German playwright Hochhuth is feverishly devoted to his distorted viewpoint, and he won’t be satisfied until he has ground you into submission. Thus his “documentary theatre” is spiced up with a liberal helping of bias Read more ...