Reviews
Kieron Tyler
In 1974, two albums by German kosmiche musicians working with electronics became the first from the seedbed of what’d been dubbed Krautrock to explicitly embrace – and merge – melody and rhythmic structure. One was Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. The other was Cluster’s Zuckerzeit. Once on the record player, each LP instantly made its presence felt more directly than anything either had released previously.For Kraftwerk, this resulted in an unlikely international hit with a single edit of Autobahn’s title track. For Cluster, there were no singles and, consequently, no chance to fluke any chart action. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Nothing anybody over the age of 30 says about the new Mean Girls musical, spawn of Tina Fey’s witty script for the 2004 screen sideswipe of that name, will make any difference. As with all things Barbie, the pink madness seems deathless. Fey’s takedown of the human jungle that is the US high school has since been regurgitated as a film sequel, a film musical and now this stage musical, originally due here in 2018 but waylaid by lockdown. If you blindfolded me and played me a karaoke backing track of its score, minus lyrics, I wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was from Legally Blonde Read more ...
David Nice
“Tradition is sloppiness,” Mahler the opera conductor is credited with saying. But in the case of old master John Cox’s long-serving Garsington production of the greatest of operatic comedes, not if it’s refreshed with the subtlest insights in to human tensions and frailties.This time the house’s brilliant director of Strauss masterpieces, Bruno Ravella, who worked as assistant to Cox at the old Garsington in 2005, has been called in to fine-tune a rather wonderful cast, with relative youthfulness among the leads, and serves up a blissful Mozart evening totally in tune with the environment, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It's a bold move by Regent's Park Open Air Theatre to tackle Frances Hodgson Burnett's children's classic, a story that's been notably adapted into films that pile on the visual beauty of its magical settings. This enterprising venue may be surrounded by trees and foliage, but it offers essentially a big bare stage with few frills.So it's no surprise that the story's main location, Misselthwaite Manor, is going to be represented by a tall blank wall, in which niches hold lights. There's no sign of ivied walls hiding the little door of a secret garden. It soon becomes clear that feats of Read more ...
David Nice
Behind this poignant, simple-seeming hour of music for soprano and lute(s) lay a spider-web of connections between outsiders in the City: rebels, prisoners, immigrants, Black Londoners. Elizabeth Kenny’s programme note wove it all together brilliantly; we could have heard even more of her talking during the concert. Most of us could have done with seeing more than 15 minutes of the wonderful Nardus Williams, too.On the way to the Tower I’d been reading the chapter in Antonio Pappano’s marvellous autobiography where he writes about coaching young artists and declares, “I am merciless that the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Belgian artist, Francis Alÿs has filled the Barbican Art Gallery with films of children playing games the world over. Many of them are familiar; they’re playing five stones in Nepal (pictured below left), conkers in London, stone skimming in Morocco, scissors/paper/stone and musical chairs in Mexico, hopscotch and leapfrog in Iraq, flying kites in Afghanistan and having snowball fights in Switzerland.On one level, then, the show is about the ubiquity of children’s games and it provides perfect entertainment for the kids. But it is also much, much more. Some of the films are pure delight. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Rose has taken a while to get a release in the UK; this Danish comedy-drama opened in Scandinavia back in the autumn of 2022 and won positive reviews in the US last Christmas. Releasing a movie just as the sun finally appears to make spending an evening in a cinema unappealing, seems like a risky choice. But if you harbour a soft spot for Sofie Gråbøl (main picture), the actress who sparked a worldwide run on Faroe Island sweaters when she starred in The Killing, Rose may well draw you back into the dark. Gråbøl here is playing a very different character; Inger Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Unless you were around when The Beatles toured America in the mid-1960s, it’s doubtful you've heard anything like this. In 40 years of extensive gig-going, I have not. Taylor Swift has just performed “Champagne Problems” at the piano (pictured below), a song from Evermore, the second of her indie-folk flavoured COVID-era albums. There’s a rising feminine roar, Wembley Stadium on its feet, the noise grows and grows, an earthquake cacophony of women and girls screaming, so many that, combined with tens of thousands of hands clapping, it fills the head like cosmic hum. It surely cannot grow Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Forty years later, they have haggard faces, grey hair if any, and sorrowful expressions tinged with incredulity at the outrages perpetrated against them. At one point, the burliest of them cries. One who struggled with drink and drugs says four of his colleagues committed suicide.To different degrees these British men, interviewees in the latest documentary by Hillsborough director Daniel Gordon, are suffering from PTSD. Most were born into the generation that fought in the Falklands War – one, in fact, served in Northern Ireland. It’s not as ex-servicemen that they tell their stories to the Read more ...
David Nice
Any programme featuring Gershwin’s top large-scale works might tend to the “pops” side. Bernstein’s West Side Story Overture and even the sweet dream of Florence Price’s Adoration fit that bill. But An American in Paris sounded completely different from usual, its radical side highlighted, following Ives’s Three Places in New England and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Andante for Strings.Enterprising Tom Fetherstonhaugh and the (equally) young professionals of his Fantasia Orchestra have been regular visitors to Proms at St Jude's Music & Literary Festival – to give the full, unwieldy name of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Following the huge success of Benedict Lombe’s Shifters, which transfers soon to the West End, the Bush Theatre is riding high. Now this venue’s latest exploration of the Black-British experience tells a really lively and emotionally deep story about Nigerians in London.Faith Omole, whose first and as yet unperformed play, Kaleidoscope, won the prestigious Alfred Fagon Award last year, arrives with bang with My Father’s Fable. Since Omole is also an actor, and has appeared in the Channel 4 comedy, We Are Lady Parts, it’s no surprise that her debut is both a comedy and an acute look at the Read more ...
David Nice
How much better can a classic get? Sebastian Scotney more or less asked the same question on theartsdesk the last time Giulio Cesare returned in triumph to Glyndebourne. I never saw David McVicar’s justly famous production of what has to be Handel’s most consistently inspired opera live before, but I wonder if every single number can ever have been applauded, as it was last night.Less than a month ago, Ireland’s Blackwater Valley Opera Festival also flourished a Cesare, a much more heavily cut version but strongly cast and just about as good as it could be on a limited budget and rehearsal Read more ...