Reviews
Mark Sheerin
On the morning I visited William Forsythe's installation there was a fire truck parked up on Circus Street. Its crew were all in the Old Municipal Market, taking in the art and, like everyone else, interacting with the kinetic sculptural elements. It is the stuff of arts outreach programme fantasies.Forsythe is an American choreographer and sculptor who lives and works in Germany. He made his name at the helm of Ballet Frankfurt and has since proved himself an able visual artist, along with a radical director. Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time No 2 previewed in Essen, began life as a Read more ...
fisun.guner
The best, and funniest, interview I’ve ever read – and I confess it’s attained almost mythic status in my memory – was an interview with the Chapman brothers by Lynn Barber. The brothers notoriously run rings around respectful journalists, but Barber isn’t one of those. So as she tried to elicit some properly confessional stuff from the former YBA artists, the interview got more and more surreal. In fact, it was pretty much a car crash, but a car crash that, through some writerly alchemical process, turned into pure interview gold. That interview was genuinely cringe-making, in the best Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Jazz pianist Chick Corea put a bomb under his reverential “rare solo concert” billing at the Barbican last night, with an outrageously showmanlike variety performance that seemed to take in everyone from Keith Jarrett to Gareth Malone. Corea’s two ECM albums, Piano Improvisations (1971 and 1972), blazed a trail for similar work, music that was cerebral, even austere, from Paul Bley and the arguably even more distinguished Jarrett. Anyone expecting a similar experience last night will have left reeling not just at moments of sublime musicianship, but also at Corea’s multifarious Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When I first heard that the new play from Out of Joint was about the NHS I thought this might be a delayed result of the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics: all those prancing nurses surely deserve a play of their own. In fact, the emotional fuel behind Stella Feehily’s new play comes from nearer home. In 2006, Max Stafford-Clark, her husband and the play’s director, suffered a stroke, which means that much of this drama’s depth of feeling comes from first-hand experience.The play tells the story of one family. When Nicholas James, a widower, begins to suffer prostate problems, he seeks Read more ...
David Nice
Is this the same Tatyana whose life depended on every word of her letter to straw idol Onegin at the 2009 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition? Then, Ekaterina Shcherbachenko – she’s since dropped the first “h” in transliteration – gave the most convincing, nuanced interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s famous Letter Scene, his reason for setting Pushkin’s verse-novel about youthful idealism and lost illusions. She enjoyed some success in Dmitri Tcherniakov's strangely compelling Bolshoi re-think. Now, though she looks ideally young and vulnerable, it’s all semaphoring gestures and telephone- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For some reason this year's telly-Baftas felt a bit flat and weary. Host Graham Norton seemed to labouring for laughs (when he wasn't moaning about his own show not winning anything), and anything resembling a surprise was thin on the ground. When Aaron Paul, Breaking Bad's Jesse Pinkman, stepped onstage to present the Comedy and Comedy Entertainment award (one of the ones Graham Norton didn't win, since it went to A League of Their Own), at least you knew B Bad was going to win something. This turned out to be the International award, which was by far the strongest category of the night Read more ...
ronald.bergan
For decades, film audiences have known the craggy-faced Tommy Lee Jones as an actor, mostly playing pugnacious, oddball, characters, way beyond the borders of respectability. Here, in his second film as a director, consolidating his credentials as a director-actor after his impressive directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), which drew favourable comparisons with Sam Peckinpah, he portrays a bitter, seen-it-all outsider, cajoled into helping a lonely 35-year-old, "bossy and plain" virgin (the splendidly unplain Hilary Swank) transport three insane married women back Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
No quibble about the result. Pianist Martin James Bartlett deservedly became BBC Young Musician of the Year 2014 at Usher Hall in Edinburgh last night. The 17-year-old, a student at the specialist Purcell School in Hertfordshire, and at the Junior Department of the Royal College of Music took the title with a very strong performance of Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. He was watchful, alert to every nuance, playing idiomatically, and with a very convincing sense of the shape of the piece right through to the final pay-off. He also established a lively partnership with the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Swansea's much-mythologised son would have been 100 in October this year, but he died in New York in 1953, from a list of medical problems exacerbated by his colossal intake of alcohol. Thomas's doomed, chaotic trajectory could almost qualify as the first rock'n'roll death, since the New York that lionised him would soon hail the Beat poets, the Folk Revival and the Bob Dylan whose adopted name and freewheelin' versifying both bore Thomas's imprint.This film about his final days and death in New York was involving and hugely watchable, with Tom Hollander tackling the title role like a pocket- Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Favourite of the Coens, John Turturro’s fifth turn at the helm is a surprisingly lively, enjoyable fable of male prostitution. After the shuttering of the New York City bookstore where he worked for Murray (Woody Allen), Fioravante (Turturro) is talked into being the male meat in a female sandwich between Selima (Sofia Vergara) and Murray's dermatologist Dr Parker (Sharon Stone). Meanwhile, Fioravante doesn't fall for either of his lady-pals. Instead, he finds himself drawn to untouchable Hasidic widow Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), she herself shuttered since her husband's death. To add to the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A blow to the head provides the catalyst needed for Abby (Robin Weigert) to re-think her life in Concussion, writer-director Stacie Passon's acute American indie about a lesbian couple coming adrift and the new life charted by one of the two women, in particular. Would Abby end up welcoming (female) sexual partners for pay to her freshly purchased high-end Manhattan loft had her young son not accidentally sent a baseball winging its way to her head, thereby jolting her reality? Who's to say: among the multiple virtues of Passon's smart, subtly revealing film - this director's debut feature - Read more ...
David Nice
What spontaneous use might a silver rose take on after its formal presentation by a chubby cherub of a cavalier to a bartered bride-to-be? This and a thousand other score-co-ordinated details are things you never can predict in the hands of that chameleonic yet rigorous director Richard Jones. He throws out most of the meticulous stage directions in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s rococo libretto for Richard Strauss and finds his own. You may not like them – I mostly did – but you can’t say that this isn’t quality work in tandem with a team of near-ideal Glyndebourne singers and beautifully if often Read more ...