Reviews
Sebastian Scotney
Jordi Savall has spent half a century combining instrumental performance on the viola da gamba with being the leader of ensembles of pioneering scholarship. Now in his early 70s, he has certainly had the recognition he deserves: a Grammy (he has made over a hundred albums), an honorary professorship (he has taught since 1974), and the Légion d'Honneur. These days he is also a prominent public figure supporting the “Catalunya should have the right to vote” campaign. His solo recital at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse last night showed what a lifetime of patient endeavour can achieve.In Savall's Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The BBC might have convinced itself that the only thing that will change in the way it caters to the youth market next autumn is the method of delivery, but Murdered By My Boyfriend makes the case for retaining BBC Three as a channel that can be idly flipped onto on a Monday night. Previews of the short drama, inspired by real-life events, were full of the usual cliches: the story that writer Regina Moriarty told was both “tragic” and “depressingly familiar”. But the fact remains that young women between the ages of 16 and 24 are statistically most at risk of being abused by a partner; and Read more ...
David Nice
Rolling hills with beech-rich woods sloping upwards from a wide valley: the Wormsley Estate has more than a little in common with glorious Hukvaldy in Moravia, where Janáček was born and ended his life, and where in old age he once again saw "his" vixen. With an admirable independence of mind that seriously underrated director Daniel Slater has gone against the grain inside the fabulous pavilion where Garsington’s operas now resound. Instead of extending the natural scene, Robert Innes Hopkins’s simple but original designs paper the walls of the inn where most of the action takes place Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Director Jim Mickle and writing partner Nick Damici made a big splash on the horror scene back in 2007 with fierce debut Mulberry St. Since then they have impressed with low-key apocalyptic vampire flick, Stake Land, and a reimagining of the well-regarded Mexican cannibal horror, We Are What We Are, which they turned into a story of female empowerment and a slight on organised religion. Cold in July may not be what their ever increasing fan base expected them to do next but that’s exactly what makes it so satisfying. Mickle and Damici’s daring attitude, passion and knowledge of genre, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Celebrating the 80th anniversary of opera at Glyndebourne, this 90-minute documentary was fascinating when it delved into the house's history, but started to lose its bearings when it came back to the present day and dwelt at laborious length over this season's new production of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. It was as if nobody could decide what sort of film to make, so they made two and cut chunks of them together.What might be called the "origin story" of this most resplendently rural of opera houses took us back to the post-World War One era, when decorated Army captain and Wagner Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Given how easily some seem to dodge the latter, Benjamin Franklin’s oft-quoted epigram could do with a little modification. Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxis? That, at least, is the premise of A Cabbie Abroad.This series is a spin-off from BBC Two’s show Toughest Place to Be…, in which Brits in everyday professions – midwife, paramedic, binman etc – were sent off to see how their job is done in another part of the world. In series four, they stuck a London cabbie in the middle of Mumbai.Mason Read more ...
David Nice
“I feel so alone I could cry”. As the keynote of Adam Smallbone’s Passion in the breathtaking third series of Rev, that unspoken sentiment provided a passacaglia bass line to the failure of St Saviour’s. Made explicit In the mouths of possibly 600 Londoners just around the corner from that noble edifice, in reality the relatively thriving St Leonard’s Shoreditch, it felt paradoxically uplifting and – I feel myself sucked in to use the word now that I'm signed up to Spitalfields hip – empowering.Arnold Circus, the heart of London’s first major housing project now graced by beautiful planting, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: NME C86, The Motown 7s Box – Rare and Unreleased Vinyl Volume 2With music – or anything really – few things develop or evolve neatly, and British grassroots music from the mid-1980s is a case in point. When, in 1986, the NME issued a cassette tape of 22 current and (hopefully) up-and-coming bands the stylistic jumps it presented were jarring. Beefheart-style herk-jerk sat side-by-side with Sixties-derived jangle pop. Dance-music polemicists battled it out with bands saturated in far too much of The Fall.The C86 cassette caught the rag-bag nature of what infested pub Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
The windows of Hepworth Wakefield command some attractive views, and for the present show looking out the window might even be a valid alternative to looking at the work. Curator Eva Badura-Triska reports that Austrian artist Franz West was a believer in the aura or the atmosphere of an art work. It hardly matters where you look. As if to prove the point there are installations which include chairs facing away from the work, or sofas angled to provide little point of focus. Sit still for as long as you want and soak up this extensive exhibition.Where is My Eight is the gallery’s largest Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Fall of the House of Usher is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s mistier tales, and although it has been turned into opera a few times, there are obvious difficulties. Debussy struggled for a decade to materialise a drama out of its haunting, neurotic atmosphere, and in the end failed, I would argue, because he was unable to distance himself enough from the central characters to construct a stage action about them. He sketched, though, a good deal of fascinating music, and out of this material the musicologist Robert Orledge has put together a performable work that, if not entirely convincing as Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It is not often we hear Bruckner’s colossal Eighth Symphony in its longer and far quirkier original version (1887 ed. Nowak) and when we do hear it in either of its two incarnations it invariably stands alone. That Fabio Luisi chose it for his debut with the London Symphony Orchestra was in itself more than a little revealing and the fact that he added Mozart’s 23rd Piano Concerto as an apéritif seemed to suggest that he had something to say about Bruckner’s uneasy quest for the kind of classical perfection that Mozart took for granted. The young French pianist Lise de la Salle (pictured Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Given that Jersey Boys is about a singer, Frankie Valli, whose voice - or so we are told within the first five minutes - constitutes "a gift from god", it's a shame Clint Eastwood's film of the stage musical smash hit doesn't feel more heaven-sent. There are thrills to be had across the two hour-plus running time and enough Italian-Americanisms to make audiences feel as if they may have wandered into Goodfellas-lite. But the film stints on precisely that aspect of the show that sends theatre audiences to their feet every night - namely, the music, which largely gets sacrificed on the altar of Read more ...