Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Love, Poetry and RevolutionThe subtitle “A Journey Through the British Psychedelic and Underground Scenes” – with “A” as the operative word – suggests this box set isn’t going to tell a familiar story. Most of the bands were and still are barely heard of. Twenty-four of the 65 tracks compiled were not originally issued.The opening shot is “Pretty Colours”, by obscure West Midlands band Deep Feeling which included future Traffic member Jim Capaldi. Although unreleased at the time of its October 1966 recording, The Animals’ Eric Burdon cocked an ear and declared it “ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ramon Humet – Niwa - Chamber Works London Sinfonietta/Nicholas Collon (Neu Records)Ramon Humet's Four Zen Gardens opens this arresting compilation; nine short movements for three percussionists. A solitary rainstick adds a splash of aqueous colour to the metallic textures, dominated by vibraphone and gongs. The music feels static, ritualistic, recalling John Cage's Ryoanji. You're curious about how it's been notated, the effect seeming both improvised and carefully structured. The quiet fade is haunting. Humet was born in Barcelona in 1968 but it's no surprise to read that he now lives in an Read more ...
peter.quinn
In jazz, 2013 belonged to Wayne Shorter. In recognition of a remarkable six-decade career as a saxophonist, educator and composer, Shorter, who turned 80 in August last year, received a lifetime achievement award from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz – only the second time in the Institute’s history that it has bestowed such an honour (Quincy Jones being the first recipient in 1996). There were yet more awards from the Jazz Journalists Association: Lifetime Achievement in Jazz, Soprano Saxophonist of the Year, and Small Ensemble of the Year. Then there were the numerous headline Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
History has been told in many ways on film, but Rithy Panh achieves something new, something unique and unsettling, in The Missing Picture. It’s the story of his native Cambodia, specifically the years from 1975, when the Khmer Rouge occupied the country's capital Pnomh Penh: driven by an ideology (a mixture of Marx and Rousseau, as it's described here) that sought to exterminate individuality in society, they created Democratic Kampuchea, an attempt at a new classless world that tried to do away with everything from the past, and killed a large part of the population in the process. It’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In our big-bang globalised environment, Sherlock Holmes is now more like a Marvel Comics superhero than a mere "consulting detective". We take it for granted that his deductive powers can peel open the physical and psychological secrets of a complete stranger within milliseconds, while the scope of his ambitions has advanced from solving quaint Edwardian mysteries to unpicking global conspiracies and phantasmagorical terror threats. The game is afoot, but now it's in fibre optic HD 3D with 7.1 surround sound and added social networking.Happily, Mark Gatiss (who wrote this series three opener Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It took the last 16 years of Nelson Mandela’s life, almost to the day, to bring his autobiography to the screen. South African producer Anant Singh eventually handed Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom to British director Justin Chadwick and screenwriter William Nicholson to make a film for international audiences. The iconic weight of a violent rebel who became a living saint can’t wholly be thrown off in this authorised (though freely made) biopic. It does, though, remind you that Nelson Mandela was very far from Mother Teresa. Rough and earthy struggle preceded his Robben Island refinement into Read more ...
David Benedict
The great Marilyn Horne used to joke that she was going to release an album entitled “Chestnuts for Chest Nuts”. She never did, but that leaves the door wide open for Sonia Prina whose dark, thrillingly low sound marks her out as the real deal, a genuine contralto. But the excitement of Prina in performance isn’t just about her extraordinary skill at using her unusual range. Throughout this frankly dazzling recital of music Handel wrote for the superstar castrato Senesino, she wasn’t merely singing in front of the eight-strong Ensemble Claudiana, she was truly making music with them.Recently Read more ...
David Benedict
“Her most devastating surprise ever.” Thus spake The Guardian, a quote happily slapped across the cover of the first paperback edition of Agatha Christie’s 1967 thriller Endless Night. While I wouldn’t go quite that far – that honour goes to her still startling, genre-busting The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) – it’s a compelling little chiller. Small wonder that ITV wanted it for their franchise. Just one tiny problem: it’s a crime novel without a detective. Step forward screenwriter Kevin Elyot who, like an invisible mender, has satisfyingly woven Julia McKenzie’s Miss Marple into Christie’ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Hollywood’s sexism and obsession with youth half-hobble this lunge for the grey dollar. In a cast seemingly assembled by birth certificate more than likely chemistry, 69-year-old Michael Douglas is playboy businessman Billy, whose Vegas stag weekend before marriage to a thirtyish beauty requires the presence of childhood pals Paddy (Robert De Niro, 70), Archie (Morgan Freeman, 76) and Sam (Kevin Kline, 66, pictured below).The four have mixed feelings as they ready their creaking bones for Sin City debauchery, and inevitable life lessons. Bored Kline’s wife sends him off with a condom and her Read more ...
Simon Munk
Like some kind of slow-witted zombie, mainstream games (on console, mainly) have been decapitated, disemboweled and run flat over, but don't quite know it yet.The year that saw the establishing of a new wave of game-specific hardware including home consoles the Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox One should have been a major one for mainstream, big budget games. But most people who play games now do so on phones, tablets or their computer, not dedicated devices. And mainstream games makers seem content to chase after an increasingly narrow demographic of "hardcore" gamers.The "hardcore" are fed on Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Playgoers could be forgiven for thinking that they were seeing double during much of 2013. No sooner had you sat through Ian Rickson's dazzling revival of Old Times once before you returned again to watch its peerless pair of actresses, Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams, swap roles. Similarly, Ben Whishaw had barely shed his Peter Pan-related persona as the male half of John Logan's Peter and Alice before lending his whiplash authority to the revival of Jez Butterworth's Mojo. There were multiple Ghosts, Midsummer Night's Dreams and Macbeths, slices of O'Neill esoterica and Read more ...
David Nice
There were two strong reasons, I reckoned, for struggling to the Wigmore Hall during the interstitial last week of the year. One was an ascetic wish to be harrowed by a mind and soul of winter, both within and without, in Prokofiev’s towering D minor Violin Sonata, after so much Christmas sweetness and light. The other was the memory of Ukrainian-Israeli violinist Vadim Gluzman’s 2008 Tchaikovsky Concerto performance with Neeme Järvi and the London Philharmonic Orchestra – not just a great performance, of which there are plenty every year, but a great partnership, one of half a dozen that Read more ...