Reviews
David Nice
A trio of Rosenkavaliers: what more could one want as we near Richard Strauss’s 150th birthday? Well, more of the less often performed operas, for a start. But as this is the Straussian cornucopia, it’s not going to tire those of us who love it beyond reason, and Andris Nelsons’ concert performance with his devoted City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra eventually delivered as much in its rather peculiar way as the Barbican excerpts earlier this month and Richard Jones’ gobsmackingly original, disciplined take at Glyndebourne.So it was time again to forget the wigs, and at first it looked as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Oasis: Definitely Maybe“His onstage presence is supernatural, a good looking boy exuding primal sexual allure while standing stock still, hands behind his back, all effort going into his big chested, raw throated pure and essential singing.” The beyond-hyperbolic liner notes to Deluxe Box Set edition of the 20th-anniversy reissue of Definitely Maybe, the first Oasis album, read like a parody. Liam Gallagher may be many things. But supernatural?Elsewhere, they gush that “the holy grail of British pop music is surely a bunch of longhaired boys with guitars playing swaggering, melodic rock Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Schoenberg’s last, unfinished, opera, seldom staged, might almost have been written for the Welsh. At its heart is some of the most refined and intricate choral writing since Bach, but linked to stage directions so complicated that one wonders whether the composer had any idea of the technical difficulties he was putting in the way of a fully realized production. The fact that this new WNO production funks most of the stage business is not the fault of the company’s truly marvellous chorus, whose musical performance alone would be worth twice the ticket price.As a conception, Moses und Aron Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Not a lot gets spoken in Run and Jump, the gently eloquent first feature from San Francisco-born filmmaker Steph Green, a dramatic strategy that leaves the actors to charge the unsaid with meaning and the audience - not to mention Ireland, ah Ireland - to do the rest. That the result is as finely honed as it is honours not just the unforced beauty of a country that looks especially gorgeous soaked in rain. (The specific locations here are Counties Wicklow and Kerry.) Green to her credit knows how to turn understatement to advantage so that we feel as if we just might be watching life as Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
In French, when you want to end a digression and get a conversation back on point, you say "revenons à nos moutons". It's a commonly used idiom, meaning literally "let's get back to our sheep", the sheep representing the actual subject under discussion. It also offers a way of looking at David Mamet's one-act play Squirrels, too, for no matter how far away their flights of imagination take them, the characters will always find their way back to their original theme, with a little help from an improbable animal – a squirrel, not a sheep, but you get the idea.The action concerns Arthur, a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The veteran South African jazzers Adam Glasser and Pinise Saul transformed the gleamingly elegant Crazy Coqs cabaret den into a throbbing township jazz club last night, with an exhilarating programme of original South African jazz, seasoned with standards and township folk. Joining forces with the percussionist Marcina Arnold, a relative newcomer to their ensembles, they roughed up this venue’s urbanity with unfamiliar fires of passion and yearning.As well as playing piano with a gallery of South African jazz greats, Glasser is noted for his work on the chromatic harmonica, and last night’s Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes it feels as though modern music has lost its magic – that the more that's produced the more ordinary it seems. Last night, however, down the Bohemian end of one British seaside town, the crowd sat expecting something pretty special. They had good reason. These days 67-year-old Emmylou Harris, with her long silver hair not only looks Southern gothic but sounds it too.Harris is over to celebrate the reissue of 1995’s Wrecking Ball. The original was an alt-country landmark in which Emmylou swapped her trademark quavering harmonies for an ageless, spectral sound. U2/ Bob Dylan “ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten, Weinberg: Violin Concertos Linus Roth, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin/Mihkel Kütson (Challenge Classics)“I am a pupil of Shostakovich. Although I have never had lessons from him, I count myself as his pupil, as his flesh and blood.” Mieczysław Weinberg's close, complex relationship with his senior mentor continues to affect how we perceive his own music. Which is maddeningly inconsistent, and the jury's still out as to whether he's one of the great Soviet composers. But, when Weinberg is on form he can be terrific, and this 1959 Violin Concerto is a magnificent beast. It Read more ...
Heather Neill
"Johnny get your gun" was a popular American recruiting call in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries and, according to the Irish-American song "When Johnny comes marching home, Hurrah, Hurrah", there should be celebration for him after battle. The Johnny of this story, Joe Bonham, an ordinary "Joe", got his gun alright, but there is no happy ending for him. Aged 20, one day in September 1918, he is saved from an exploding shell but reduced to a silent, faceless torso, lacking all four limbs and the ability to hear, see or speak. In the 120-seat Little studio, Johnny Got His Gun Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
“We want to be the most creative and the most loved ballet company in this country,” Tamara Rojo told the audience in the Barbican Pit last night. “We want you to love us.” The director of English National Ballet knows a thing or two about gaining the love of audiences, something she has excelled at in her own dancing career, but it has been nothing short of jaw-dropping, over the 18 months she has been at ENB, to watch how skilfully she can work the same magic on a far larger stage. Under her leadership, ENB’s company atmosphere and public image now vibrate with passion, frankness, Read more ...
ronald.bergan
There is a very old joke about a Hollywood actor, waiting to hear whether he has landed a plum role in an upcoming production, who gets a call from his agent. "I’ve got some bad news for you," says the agent. "Your mother has just died." "Oh, thank goodness!" says the actor. "I thought you were going to tell me I didn’t get the part." That says everything there is to know about the cutthroat world of the movie business, something that takes David Cronenberg almost two hours to say in this redundant and pointless evisceration of contemporary Hollywood.The television soap opera plot - which Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Somebody had to be Bikini Kill, otherwise we would have culturally starved to death.” The quote typifies the deferential The Punk Singer, a bio-doc on the driven Kathleen Hanna, the feminist front-person of the American bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and, most recently, The Julie Ruin.In contrast, Hanna herself was never and isn't deferential. Her vital importance to cultural and rock history is set in stone as, for the former, she initiated the Nineties feminist musical groundswell riot grrrl and, for the latter, she sprayed the words “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” (a deodorant brand) on Read more ...