Reviews
emma.simmonds
Some films quite rightly have awards glory etched into their DNA, and when the admirably uncompromising Steve McQueen announced that his next project, focussing on the subject of slavery, would feature that cast, only a fool would have bet against it collecting armfuls of prizes. Moreover, the brutality and societal impact of slavery has seldom been seen on screen; thus in the words of its director, 12 Years a Slave fills "a hole in the canvass of cinema".Based on the memoir by Solomon Northup (as told to David Wilson) and adapted for the screen by John Ridley, 12 Years a Slave sees an Read more ...
David Nice
Now this is what I call an orchestra showing off: you unleash four of your horns on the most insanely difficult yet joyous of sinfoniettas for accompanied horn quartet, Schumann’s Konzertstück, and later let the other four light the brightest of candles on the enormous, rainbow-dyed cake of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. How they battled it out between them for who did what I can't imagine, but both groups covered themselves with glory.It’s also extremely good concert planning when horn-drenched early romantic extroversion, guided with unflagging energy and focus by the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It's a considerable irony that a musician as dedicated and as serious as pianist/conductor Christian Zacharias should suddenly, at the age of 63, gain bragging rights on Youtube (see next page). There wasn't really that much he could do about it. It happened last October. A mobile phone went off as he was directing a Haydn concerto from the keyboard in Sweden. You can see his silent but intense frustration as he stops playing. “Don't answer,” he says. He waits until the loud noise of the moble phone stops, and gets back to playing. Accidents happen, and "Haydn Killed by Cell Phone" has now Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Take two television formats and blend in mixer, then serve on one platter. The Taste is essentially Mastervoice, fusing Masterchef’s wannabe kitchen creatives and The Voice’s blind auditions. An early tasting suggests that the stand-out ingredient is Nigella Lawson in the court of public opinion.The Taste has come along at exactly the right time for Channel 4’s PR department. There’s seemingly always room in the television schedules for yet another show about cooking, but how to stand out in the heat of the kitchen? This latest concoction has enjoyed a massive boost in pre-publicity thanks to Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
There is no point during Bloodshot where you can be entirely sure just what you are watching. At times it seems like a straightforward one-man show, with sole cast member Simon Slater charging around wildly in his efforts to bring the multiple characters to life. At others, it's a cabaret, as Slater whips out a saxophone and coaxes forth a few achingly good riffs. Then, there's an impromptu magic show, complete with razor blades to be swallowed and cigarettes that appear behind audience members' ears. Finally, encompassing all these seemingly disparate elements is a gripping whodunnit twined Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There are times us northerners watch your typical London-set big-budget BBC drama and think, well, this really is another world. Whether it’s the two-hour commutes or the estate agencies where there is so much business that nobody has time to sit and watch cat videos on YouTube, there’s little about the world of The 7.39 familiar to those of us lacking three-bedroom semi-detached suburbia and a job in the City.That said, there’s probably little about David Nicholls’ vision of London that seems familiar to those who live and work in the capital either. As in the screenwriter’s novel-turned- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The agony of war and of surviving it almost destroyed Eric Lomax. A British POW after the fall of Singapore who was put to work by the Japanese on the Burma Railway, he suffered brutal and prolonged torture, trauma he dealt with in subsequent decades by sealing it inside him, and plotting revenge on his abusers as he fell into troubled sleep. Lomax’s memoir The Railway Man describes this and the reconciliation with one of his captors which finally defined his life.The week after Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Jonathan Teplitzky’s film again shows a man’s extraordinary capacity for forgiveness Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
For a drama as committed to the exploration of the changing role of women in post-war Britain, The Bletchley Circle isn’t above a little sleight of hand. The second series of the critically acclaimed whodunnit began with a flashback to 1943 and to Alice Merren (Hattie Morahan), a bright young codebreaker who quickly solves a puzzle that the menfolk have been bamboozled by for the past two days. It’s a three-character shift in the cypher, she says, noting that even if the enemy were to build the most complicated machine in the world, “it would still be run by people”.It’s people and the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
England is the biggest and richest market for the small privately-run company Moscow City Ballet, which stands in a long history of touring companies peddling “authentically” Russian ballet to international audiences. I am forced to admire the business acumen which makes their success possible, given that English National Ballet notoriously makes heavy losses every time it ventures out of London. The strategy of company founder Victor Smirmov-Golovanov (who died earlier this year) and his wife and successor as Artistic Director, Ludmila Neroubaschenko, has three prongs: staging popular Read more ...
David Nice
May this be a New Year sign and a symbol of a revitalized concert scene to come: an eclectic programme of dazzling range to draw in the new pick-and-mix generation, full of segues that worked and executed with the right balance of poetry and in-your-face exuberance by a crack team of young players. The Aurora Orchestra’s American “Road Trip” nearly drove into a ditch with Kentucky singer-songwriter Dawn Landes on board, but even one or two of her numbers were fascinating and in any case the purely instrumental sequences were rich enough to make up a concert in themselves.So let’s get the dips Read more ...
graham.rickson
Middle-period Mahler can be hair-raising enough under normal circumstances. In this performance of the Fifth Symphony, the angst and intensity dials had been turned up to 11. Every orchestral colour shone with greater intensity, and each change in dynamics registered with piercing clarity. Which could only mean that this year's freshly reconstituted National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain were giving their first concert of the season.Half of these musicians have only been playing in the NYO for less than a week. That the quality remains so consistently high each year is remarkable – credit Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Why has Nordic noir been such an addictive novelty? Yes the plots are great, the locations moodily cool, the flat dialogue enigmatic. But in the end it’s all about gender. The detective who is a genius at work but clueless at life – we’ve seen it all before in a suit and tie and a battered mac. What’s different in equal-opportunity Scandinavia is that the dysfunctional crimebusters are beautiful bug-eyed Valkyries. Up north it’s the blokes who are the sidekicks.First there was Sara Lund in The Killing. However much work she needed to do on her empathy skills, Saga Norén of the Malmö police Read more ...