Reviews
Veronica Lee
Kerry Godliman is livid, she tells us. Spider webs catching in her hair, the state of the world, her teenage children; you name it, they – and much, much more – irritate her. But she’s hoping it’s a temporary state, as she puts her current maelstrom of emotions down to the fact that she’s going through the perimenopause. And while it may not be a barrel of laughs for her, it provides plenty in Bandwidth.From the moment she skips on to the stage, Godliman delivers a high-energy set, bouncing between ideas at a mile a minute and fizzing about this and that – from her husband’s inability to pack Read more ...
Helen Tyson
Writing in her diary just over 100 years ago on 19th June 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote: “In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense”.Set on a hot day in London in the middle of June in 1923, Mrs Dalloway might at first appear to be about very little – a middle-aged woman and survivor of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, wife to a conservative MP, is going to give a party. She buys some flowers; she repairs her green silk dress; she has a Read more ...
David Nice
Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra last seared us in Britten’s amazing Violin Concerto, with Vilde Frang as soloist, on the very eve of lockdown in 2020. The work’s dying fall then was echoed by the spectral drift ending Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony. This time Frang’s equal as the greatest of violinists, Janine Jansen, faced the daunting solo role fearlessly, and the riproaring end of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony proved that this team is here to stay. There were telling links with Thursday’s concert, too. Britten’s emotional demands are as challenging as Read more ...
David Nice
Between bouts of that far from shabby, still shocking masterpiece Tosca, Royal Opera music director Jakub Hrůša went for fleshcreep: too little of Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin – given a chorus, he could have done the half-hour ballet, not just the suite – and too much of a spooky thing in a big Dvořák cantata.The Spectre's Bride was last heard in London at the Proms conducted by Hrůša’s late master Jiří Bělohlávek. I’d only previously heard Rozhdestvensky feature it in a 1991 Prom, and was racking my brains to remember why it didn’t stick. Here’s the reason. Imagine, Read more ...
David Nice
Why are the Irish such good storytellers? The historical perspective is that the oral tradition goes way, way back, allied to the gift of the gab. On the psychological level, is it partly an evasion, an escape from telling the truth about oneself? The transition from fantasy to honesty in Conor McPherson’s first play of 1997, so much better than his latest, suggests as much.This new staging of a long-running hit, directed, like that well-acted disappointment The Brightening Air, by the playwright, sustains the atmosphere of curious meetings in a rural Irish pub saloon (perfectly designed by Read more ...
Robert Beale
Concerts need to have themes, it seems, today, and the BBC Philharmonic’s publicity suggested two contrasting ideas for the opening of its 2025-26 season at the Bridgewater Hall. One was “Fountain of Youth” (the programme title and also that of Julia Wolfe’s nine-minute work that began its orchestral content) and the other “Grasping pain, embracing fate” (used as a kind of strapline).Given that the latter phrase must have been meant to reflect something in the music, I was wondering – and still am – where pain came into it. Perhaps it was actually a reference to the pre-concert show: Read more ...
Justine Elias
What's going wrong with teenage boys and young men? Like the lauded Netflix series Adolescence, Steve – the second film collaboration between star-producer Cillian Murphy and director Tim Mielants – takes a bold and intriguing approach in its search for answers.Adapted from Max Porter's novella Shy, the film focuses on teachers as well as students, and it's an apt vehicle for Murphy, whose parents are both veteran educators. Where Adolescence found fault with toxic social media and an education system that treats students like prisoners, Steve is set in pre-social media 1996 at the fictional Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The remarkable The First Family: Live At Winchester Cathedral 1967 represents the first-ever release of a previously unheard recording of a 26 March 1967 Sly and the Family Stone live show. It is the earliest document of Sly and Co. to surface.At this point, the band had not yet signed with Epic Records. The release of their debut album A Whole New Thing was just-over seven months away. "Dance to the Music" would – in its second wind, following its November 1967 release – became a US hit single in March 1968. After this: world-wide success, Woodstock and everything else. The First Family Read more ...
David Nice
35 years ago, persona-now-non-grata John Eliot Gardiner revealed how performances of Mozart’s Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito allying period instruments with great voices could electrify in a new way. And here we were last night with Pablo Heras-Casado, a conductor as at home in Wagner at Bayreuth as he clearly is with the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, stunning us with a consistently vigilant and alive Mozart Requiem.The programme was typically inventive. It started with the ultimate joyburst, Bach’s Singet dem Herrn – “singet" as in zing it – with Heras- Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If a classic story is going to be told for the umpteenth time, there is a good bet it will come with a novel spin on it. So it proves with a new Dracula by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, directed by Emma Baggott. Here, the Count makes just one heavily disguised appearance, and the focal character is Mina (Umi Myers). After a predictable scary start – a sudden thunderclap and total darkness – Mina appears with a lantern. She is our narrator, sole survivor of the terrible events that she and her team of five helpers are going to re-enact. Fear, she tells us, will be her focus, the anxieties that Read more ...
David Nice
It was a hefty evening, as it needn't necessarily have been throughout, since Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony can conceal more darkness between the lines in a lighter take. In his second full concert of his second season as the wildly successful and popular Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, Antonio Pappano spared us none of the hard-hitting.Nor did the phenomenal pianist Seong-Jin Cho in Prokofiev’s colossal Second Piano Concerto, drawing as usual crowds of his fellow South Koreans. It was neither Pappano's nor Cho's fault if I’d recently heard interpretations of that and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Hot on the heels of Goodnight, Oscar comes another fictional meeting of real entertainment giants in Los Angeles, this time over a decade earlier. Michael McKeever’s The Code is a period piece, but one with a resonating message for today’s equivalents of the Hayes Code and the House Un-American Activities Committee. It’s 1950, on the eve of the opening of a sword-and-sandals number starring Victor Mature as Samson, who, when not waving at Hedy Lamarr’s Delilah, will apparently be seen wrestling a taxidermied lion. At least, that’s the on-dit in Hollywood, gleefully relayed by one of its Read more ...