Reviews
Florence Hallett
The doctoring of political images became something of a tradition in the last century, with Stalin, Hitler and Mao all airbrushing their enemies from photographs. The latest infrared technology has revealed that something similar may have happened during the English Civil War, with a portrait of Oliver Cromwell apparently having been painted over with an image of the Parliamentarian Sir Arthur Hesilrige, who fell out with Cromwell when he became Lord Protector in 1653. At first glance, the National Portrait Gallery’s Sir Arthur Hesilrige (pictured below right), inscribed with the Read more ...
David Nice
The sprightly tread of Handel’s Queen of Sheba, attended by two wonderful Turkish oboists, wove the most fragile of gold threads between full orchestral exotica and Rameau motets of infinite variety last night. Not that any more links need be found: it’s the addition of the late night events which turns the Proms into a real festival, not the mere concatenation of concerts you might find in the main orchestral season. And no-one could have asked for a higher level of engagement last night from either Austrian live wire Sascha Goetzel and his amazingly high level Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The magically off-kilter Mood Indigo is based on Boris Vian's posthumously celebrated Surrealist novel L'écume des jours (1947), one translated title of which is "Froth on the Daydream" and another "Foam on the Daze". Literally, it means "The foam of the days" or, more ominously, "The scum of the days". As it transpires, director Michel Gondry gradually skims away the froth from the movie's surface to find a layer of poisonous scum underneath.What starts out as a pleasurably light boy-meets-girl fairytale gives way to a Gothic tragedy thick with decay and despair. Although its cause is a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
One of the reasons I always tell ballet sceptics to give Romeo and Juliet a go is that any production with halfway decent lovers and a vaguely competent rendition of Prokofiev’s score should convince them that this art form isn’t just about swans and sugar plums. The venerable Mariinsky Theatre Ballet of St Petersburg ought, of course, to have dancers and musicians much better than decent, and in its revival of the original 1940 Leonid Lavrovsky version it has a production of great historical weight, yet the St Petersburg visitors were met with only lukewarm appreciation the last time they Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The latest production of Tennessee Williams’s sultry, brutal yet poetic masterpiece is mainstream theatre that dares to go out on a limb. Directed by Benedict Andrews, it may occasionally miss a beat, but its risk-taking comes with an innate sense of the play’s scorching pathos and an unnerving, dare one say exhilarating taste for the jugular that matches that of its primal male.Gillian Anderson is Blanche DuBois, the Southern Belle whose sanity is fading with her fortunes, riding the streetcar named Desire to the New Orleans home of her sister Stella (Vanessa Kirby) in a last-ditch bid for Read more ...
David Nice
It should work as pure musical theatre. Yet what precisely is Gershwin’s - or rather “The Gershwins’”, as this title frames it, though Ira wasn’t quite Gilbert or Brecht - Porgy and Bess? An opera? Trevor Nunn made the three-hour-plus score, much cut here, dazzle at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden. Michael Tilson Thomas’s Barbican espousal of bleeding chunks alongside Berg’s Lulu, left as a torso in the year of Porgy’s premiere, 1935, even put me in mind of the sheer generous optimism of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. A musical? This threepenny version made me think rather of Carousel, a Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The pivotal early 1930s period in which Herr Hitler overcame strong if fractured left-wing opposition should make for meaty drama, but the sluggish polemic currently occupying Southwark Playhouse will leave carnivorous viewers unsatiated. American playwright Tony Kusher is rightly celebrated for his Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America, which combines urgent social issues with a moving portrait of humanity, but his earlier work A Bright Room Called Day only hints at that remarkable skill. The aphorism “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce” is solemnly Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Daniel Patrick Carbone is a director who makes his viewers work. That's not meant to sound intimidating at all, because the rewards of his first feature Hide Your Smiling Faces are considerable. But part of its achievement is that by the end we feel that we have assembled the truth, or rather a part of a truth, behind its spare, elliptical story rather in the way the director did in making it.Atmosphere and nuance are far stronger than narrative or dialogue. The atmosphere comes from a rural landscape of woods and a river on the edge of a barely depicted small town community which, given that Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night's Prom offered an intriguing mixture of French music both sacred and profane, with a British world premiere as its centrepiece. Duruflé’s pious Requiem rubbed shoulders with Ravel’s wordly homages to the Viennese waltz, Valses Nobles et Sentimentales and La Valse. Perhaps the most intriguing element was the least familiar, the world premiere of Simon Holt’s flute concerto Morpheus Wakes, written for the soloist Emmanuel Pahud, accompanied by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Thierry Fischer.Simon Holt (b.1958), whose work often has a mythological starting point, describes Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A few years ago I sat high up in a rapt, sweltering Albert Hall as a lone pianist performed for two hours in the round. Neither before nor since has the BBC Proms treated a classical musician like a rock god. But then Lang Lang, whether his music-making causes you to cheer or shudder, was and remains the poster boy of a cultural revolution. A few weeks earlier he'd opened the Olympic Games in Beijing.That afternoon he duetted with two guests: his father on the Chinese erhu, representing China’s musical past, and a nine-year-old pianistic prodigy called Marc Yu representing the slightly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The RAF's renowned aerobatics team found itself at the centre of a political mini-storm last week when it was asked to use only blue and white smoke trails (but not red) at the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony in Glasgow. The MoD briskly quashed the request, prompting dark rumours about an anti-separationist conspiracy in Whitehall. However, I can't imagine the pilots themselves even noticed, so ferociously do they have to concentrate on their day jobs.This documentary followed the Arrows during the six months of training leading up to this year's air display season, which happens to be Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Sir Roger Norrington, 80 this year, produced a masterful St John Passion in the first of his two appearances at this year’s Proms, built around his excellent Swiss chamber orchestra and the Zürcher Sing-Akademie.Predictably, one of the main highlights was tenor James Gilchrist (pictured below). He hasn’t become a one-man Evangelist industry by chance: the ringing tone, faultless diction and projection are his stock-in-trade, but the magic lies in the subtlety of his delivery and master storyteller’s engagement with the text. The distaste when Jesus is struck by the officers; the shivers of Read more ...