Reviews
Florence Hallett
A retrospective is often a daunting prospect for all concerned, not least the poor visitor who must prepare for a gruelling marathon, visiting every forgotten cul-de-sac of an artist’s career. Putting together a retrospective of a living artist whose output shows no sign of slowing up certainly lessens the obligation to be definitive, and in this refreshingly sparse look at the career to date of sculptor Richard Deacon, one can sense the curators enjoying the opportunity to pause and reflect rather than catalogue his career.With just 30 objects on display, it is certainly tempting to infer a Read more ...
David Nice
“A little skill, a little heart, that’s all,” wrote the 70-year-old Rossini as epigraph to his late, not so small and not always solemn mass. It’s not all, of course. This last major self-styled “sin of old age” (péché de vieillesse) stands in a similar relation to his final, epic opera Guillaume Tell as Verdi’s Falstaff does to his Don Carlos. Only in Rossini’s case the gap was longer, nearly 35 years, and no Otello intervened (Rossini had composed his own operatic version of Shakespeare’s play back in 1816).The original forces are all that’s petite about this messe – chamber choir, four Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Bach, Duke Ellington and free jazz improvisation met at Cafe OTO last night, and joyously warped some minds. Composer Alexander Hawkins’ BBC Radio 3 commission, the nonet piece "One Tree Found", was part of last year’s Baroque Spring season. It takes the three-part structures of Bach’s trio sonatas for organ, adds echoes of Duke Ellington’s (known, Hawkins notes, as "The Hot Bach" at the height of his fame) numerous three-way orchestrations, and completes the creation with improvisations both contemporary and baroque in style.Last night’s was only its second London performance, but thanks to Read more ...
David Nice
If you don’t believe in the angels, or at least the good, of Don Giovanni, don’t stage it. Mozart may well be telling us, as Kasper Holten partly seems to be, that the antihero is a void, a mask-wearer and a creature of thrusting appetites, on his way to the abyss. But he also gives the young avengers, bent on punishing the libertine for his murder of Donna Anna’s father, music of such diamond-cut beauty that only someone bent on the text alone would ignore its force (whether we happen to be more compelled, dramatically speaking, by the rake’s enigma is irrelevant). To shed all but the last Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Suzanne Vega clearly likes her new album, Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles. Either that or she’s got this promotional lark down to a fine art. Tonight we were treated to seven of its ten tracks, which is not something you might expect of someone who began their recording career in 1985 and has since released seven other albums and a fair few hit singlesPlacing a black top-hat on her head to complement her bohemian head mistress attire, Suzanne kicked things off with debut single “Marlene on the Wall” and the wonderfully rich “Caramel”, from 1996’s Nine Objects of Desire . Then Read more ...
terry.friel
Three years ago this month, the first protests against the brutal dictatorship of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi broke out. On October 20 2011, the tyrant was finally caught, and mobile phone footage of his bloody and abused last minutes went viral. His regime, in power since 1969, was no more. For a while, the streets of Tripoli were filled with optimism and hope. All thought peace and change had come.Those were heady days, which already seem remote: Libya has again fallen into a new, different kind of despair. Christopher Olgiati’s remarkable Storyville film, Mad Dog: Gaddafi’s Secret World, made Read more ...
William Drew
Canadian playwright Matthew Edison's award-winning 2003 play The Domino Heart receives its European premiere in rather reduced circumstances. As a Sunday to Tuesday production at the Finborough (directed by Jane Jeffery), it takes place on the set of another play (Chris Thompson's Carthage). Luckily the play itself is essentially a shared act of storytelling. Three characters deliver monologues to the audience while the others read, write, doodle and generally act as if they're not hearing one another. In the world of the play, they're in different geographical locations and different moments Read more ...
Aimee Cliff
When the red curtain opens - or drops with delicious melodrama - on the second night of Taylor Swift’s residency at the O2 Arena, the first thing you notice is her eyes. We’re a crowd of thousands, packed into the second largest stadium in the UK, and with our monumental collective gaze directed at one person you wouldn’t expect such intimate details to translate. But Swift need move only her eyes to elicit screams like you’ve never heard in your life. She swoops them oh-so-slowly to the right, pauses, then to the left, pauses, smiles. She is choreographed down to the retinas, and she is Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
An all-British programme – with plenty of Italian flavours – opened to a sold-out Barbican Hall with the overture In the South (Alassio), composed by Elgar during a stay on the Italian Riviera. It isn’t one of his most memorable scores, but it still provides plenty of interest with typical Elgarian exuberance, an unexpected martial episode (imagining the Roman army), and a muted viola solo. It flits from scene to scene like a holiday scrapbook, and Antonio Pappano handled the fluid tempo and dynamic changes with aplomb.Maxim Vengerov’s commanding performance of the Britten concerto came next Read more ...
Heather Neill
In 2011 Tim Pigott-Smith gave us an impressive, humane King Lear at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Here he is again, a patriarch learning how "sharper than a serpent's tooth" it is to have thankless children, but this time his character decides to do something about it and to acknowledge his own failings. The result is good-natured comedy rather than tragedy.Lester (Pigott-Smith), a Long Island television repairman, has had a stroke and is bedridden in a care home. His wife has recently died and his fractious family - two sons and a daughter - has been drawn together by circumstance almost Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A woman tramps the streets of Paris looking for a man. It’s night. It’s raining. She pops into bars asking for him. Everyone knows who he is. He’s been seen, but not recently. Earlier, early in the evening, she was supposed to meet him but he hadn’t turned up. She doesn’t know it, but he’s stuck in the lift of an office block. He thought he’d be in and out of the building in moments. While trapped, the car he’d parked across the street has been taken by a leather-jacketed young tough who brings his girlfriend from a florist’s along for the joyride.Lift to the Scaffold has three strands, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kitty Lux is one of the founders of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. Her performance of Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love" sums up their wonderful act. Sat strumming stonily stationary, clad in black with a red scarf around her short dark hair and an expression of seen-it-all hangdog boredom on her face, she delivers the song beautifully, her compadres adding the sweetest harmonies. There is, however, an injection of silliness when the orginal's memorable backing vocal, a descending trio of notes, becomes a ridiculously emphatic "Bing! Bang! Bong!" in the cheesiest barber shop style. The Read more ...