Reviews
Jasper Rees
The Saga saga is over. An eco-terrorist plot to kill off the top tier of Europe’s environment ministers has been foiled, with nails bitten to the quick. Various Nordic marriages are in tatters, like a boxed set of Strindberg. Justice has been done but the smiles on faces in the Malmö police station at the end of episode nine had been wiped an hour later. We can’t talk about why or the spoiler police will stick us in prison and pay us periodic visits with gifts of designer coffee. Let’s just say it wasn’t a good night for Danish law enforcement.But what an ending. If you didn’t feel quite the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Helen Frankenthaler is often presented as being both a stepping stone between art movements and as an artist who fell – because such things matter in the tidy narratives of art history – between the cracks of various American isms. Frankenthaler, who made her name in the fertile New York art scene of the early Fifties and who died in 2011, found success and fame early, but then had the possible misfortune to be seen as a “transitional figure”. Since she created a bridge between Abstract Expressionism (specifically Pollock, with his drip technique) and later Color Field Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Seeds: Raw & Alive / The Dream Syndicate: The Day Before Wine and RosesTwo live albums. Both by bands rooted in psychedelia and based in Los Angeles. Each recorded in a studio rather than on stage. One, by The Seeds, from 1968. The other, by The Dream Syndicate, from 1982. The links between these two releases – coincidentally issued a week apart – are about more than the circumstances of their creation, geography and musical style. Both bands had brushes with the mainstream and in the form captured here both proved too raw, too unstable and too wilful to last the course.As 1968 Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Last night Lloyd Cole arrived on stage with a similar suede-and-corduroy air to that of his Eighties college-rock hits. Yet something was different. Over the last few years he has developed a real gravitas. It showed in the lines on his face and gunmetal hair; and it's this depth that critics have perceived on his recent album, Standards. Yet despite the critical acclaim the old troubadour is still not happy with how he’s “ disappearing into a niche”. In fact, he says, if this tour is a flop, he might give up music altogether.Whatever concerns Cole might have about his career, he didn’t bring Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
As a generalist (or dilettante) who writes about world, jazz, pop and classical music, I have no doubt that 10 years ago Andreas Scholl was one of the great voices of the planet alongside names like Abida Parveen from Pakistan and Caetano Veloso from Brazil, a vocal Sun King. From an early age he had had success upon success, audiences gave him huge standing ovations, women swooned over him (OK – slightly older women like my mum, who followed him around Europe).And all this singing in a countertenor, castrato, feminine high register. In pop music, of course, this was par for the course; you Read more ...
graham.rickson
Roxanna Panufnik: Tallinn Mass - Dance of Life Patricia Rozario, Jaak Johanson, Tallinn Chamber Orchestra/Mihhail Gerts (Warner)Roxanna Panufnik's Tallinn Mass is an occasional piece, written to celebrate the city's spell as European Capital of Culture in 2011. Panufnik was asked to combine a conventional Latin mass setting with contemporary poems by a pair of leading Estonian poets, their texts inspired by a 15th century painting entitled Dance of Death on display in a Tallinn church. Britten's War Requiem must have been a model, though Panufnik's work is a breezier, less oppressive Read more ...
edward.seckerson
There were, it seemed, enough trumpets to serve Gabriel throughout eternity - and, as fanfares go, this one was stretching a point and then some. LSO On Track had commissioned it from Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and, true to the spirit of this enterprise seeking to field young musicians of mixed abilities alongside players from the London Symphony Orchestra, Fanfare: Her Majesty’s Welcome commandeered its battalions of extra wind from the nearby Guildhall School and gave “Her Majesty”, and us, an earful - the kind of public racket that would easily be heard all the way over in Buckingham Palace Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Two years, nearly to the day, since its first London outing, Ivan Putrov’s all-male ballet showcase, Men in Motion, is back in town. Does the damning of that 2012 première as too slight still sting Putrov? Men in Motion III seems designed to forestall any such criticism, with an ambitious programme spanning two hours, 11 dancers, and 14 pieces from the last 100 years of choreography.How to sum up this sort of sprawling mixed bill? I’d love to make one of those imaginary Tube maps that are all the rage nowadays. There would be a line for Hot Germans, and another for Nijinsky Classics ( Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Young Irish actress and comic Aisling Bea made a tremendous debut with C'est la Bea at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, where she was deservedly nominated for best newcomer in the Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Awards. Now she is performing a short run at the Soho Theatre and, on second view, it's still a joyously funny show.You may know Bea from various acting roles (The Town, Dead Boss) but you will surely be seeing her on your screens a lot more from now on, as she's an accomplished actress (a Rada graduate), here using a range of accents and even throwing in an impersonation of Sir David Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Handel’s “little opera”, as he called Acis and Galatea when he was composing it in 1718, probably survived while his true, full-length operas vanished from sight precisely because it was little, compact and manageable, like Purcell’s Dido or Pergolesi’s Serva padrona. But little isn’t the same as easy; and these days a production like the one with which Mid Wales Opera is celebrating its 25th anniversary can find itself asking more questions than it can readily answerOn the face of it it’s an utterly competent, workable, musicianly show, perfectly adapted to the touring that is MWO’s chief Read more ...
Simon Munk
You are staring at your computer screen; you are literally you. And now, through the wonder of modern technology, you can jump into the mind of, and take over, the security head of a near-future corporation's flying fortress. You control his speech, movements, decisions. That's how Consortium starts.You jump into Bishop 6's head just as he wakes up for his first shift on the Zenlil plane/fortress of the global Consortium security force. The game uses Bishop 6's status as new kid, and your status as new kid inside Bishop 6, to toy with you throughout.Other staff onboard regularly ask you Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The programme blurb says: “Dan Snow looks back at 90 years of the Winter Olympics and shows how the political upheaval of the 20th and 21st centuries has impacted on the Games". Instead we got a mish-mash of archive clips, a potted history of the Games, a nod to some of the politics surrounding them, and a tale of how one chap's derring-do impacted on them.The programme went all over the place – as did Snow, who travelled to several countries, most of them unnecessarily, to tell his story. The rugged historian, an amenable presenter, was, as ever, keen to show his action-man credentials by Read more ...