Reviews
Mark Valencia
Although worlds away from festive mangers and mince pies, the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s pre-Christmas offering spread good cheer aplenty thanks to an absorbing programme of Austro-German repertoire that explored the outer reaches of Romanticism without ever quite leaving its orbit. The about-to-be-born Second Viennese School would circle a different sun from the one at the centre of Edward Gardner’s sumptuous programme – a lure that would soon draw in both Berg and Webern (though never Richard Strauss), but not quite yet.Gardner’s decision to present Wagner as the father of modernism was Read more ...
graham.rickson
Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake (complete ballet) Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/Neeme Järvi, with James Ehnes (violin) (Chandos)This team's Swan Lake is every bit as revelatory as last year's complete Sleeping Beauty. As you'd expect, four acts, uncut, are comfortably squeezed onto a pair of CDs. Some conductors slow down with age. Neeme Järvi demonstrates again that he's speeding up, though you suspect that the extra zip in this performance also stems from not having to accommodate the demands of exhausted dancers. Swan Lake is still regularly performed in a version prepared by Riccardo Drigo, Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Boing! shows that for a successful dance theatre production for children, you don't need very much. In fact, all that's required is a simple bed frame centre stage and a particularly bouncy mattress.Travelling Light and Bristol Old Vic teamed up with children's theatre specialist Sally Cookson to create this 45-minute show, which plays out to a young audience perfectly, with just the right amount of narrative, clowning, slapstick comedy and break-dance.It's the night before Christmas but you can forget about creatures stirring – the two boys here, Wilkie and Joel, are hardly nestled up Read more ...
Heather Neill
Rhys Ifans enters as a rough sleeper who has wandered in off the street, his sleeping bag over his shoulders, beany hat pulled low over unwashed hair, muttering to himself. For a moment he's hardly noticed by the audience, ignored as such people often are, but then he launches into Tim Price's monologue. He is Danny, an alcoholic. He had been sleeping on the steps of St Paul's for seven years when his routine was disrupted in 2011 by the Occupy Movement's arrival, the establishment of the tent city and their subsequent stand-off with cathedral authorities. It's a neat reversal of the old Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Most people know the basics of making a cocktail. Take two ingredients: one palatable and widely consumed, to make up the body of the concoction; the other, pungent and often bitter, to cause the lips to pucker and the throat to flinch. So it was that BBC Two set about this festive aperitif of a programme, with Alexander Armstrong, serial guest chair of Have I Got News for You and presenter of Pointless, as the part that slips down nicely, while Giles Coren, knowledgeable about food and drink, and at his best very witty, but not everyone’s glass of duty-free Advocaat, was the racy counterpart Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
This Christmas, it is probably worth remembering that you should never re-heat turkey. You could run the risk of food poisoning and a grim Boxing Day. This advice should also apply to other birds and.. well, you can probably see where I am going with this.Rovio have launched another addition to the Angry Birds franchise - already extruded into cartoons, toys, clothing and the odd game - and this time around the furious fowl are taking on the wacky racing subgenre exemplified by Nintendo's Mario Kart games. The result is a mixed bag of ok game paired with some gouging in-app purchases.The game Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In his later life Shakespeare, who never ducked ways to define a hero, offered the public a challenge: Coriolanus is a professional warrior, deaf to reason, patrician hater of people power. To beat all, this man’s man’s a mother’s boy. In a world trying to be newborn in democracy and a big society, Coriolanus sticks out like a sore thumb.The play’s action is hectic, wracked by war and famine, and the shining simplicities of the sword contrast with the writhing difficulties of words to fashion slow consensus and agreements between people of sharply different motives. Josie Rourke’s production Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A rare thing indeed. A British singer/pianist duo has had the patience, and also been given the opportunities over a number of years, to own and to inhabit a thoroughly individual and intelligent interpretation of Schubert's Winterreise.Tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Anna Tilbrook were in recital at Temple Church last night as part of the Temple Winter Festival, their performance also broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. They were at their best when giving a reminder of quite how much beauty, balance, subtlety and variety there is in the songs of Schubert's winter journey. Comparing last night's Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The first Royal Opera House production to transfer to the West End stage, and Tony Robinson’s first theatre role in 16 years, is a dance-drama version of a children’s book about animals and features a man in a car costume being chased by comedy coppers during the interval. Dumbing down, do I hear you cry? Not a bit of it.Personally, I think one of the best things about the Christmas season is the effort made by purveyors of “high” culture to be more accessible to children: see The Nutcracker, Britten’s St Nicolas, Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. Like these august efforts, Will Tuckett’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We've already been casting a revisionary eye over Lord Lucan, the Cold War, the Kennedy assassination and the Profumo affair. Last year Sheridan Smith portrayed Mrs Ronnie Biggs for ITV, but what took them so long to get around to the Great Train Robbery itself? Just hours too long for the real Ronnie Biggs, as it happened.Scripted by Chris Chibnall, a man basking in bankability following his bustin' hit series Broadchurch for ITV, this two-part voyage round the GTR is stylish, well cast and easy to watch, but adds nothing much to the existing information-mountain about the crime. You'd get Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The exquisitely eclectic David O. Russell is fast becoming the go-to director for Oscar hungry actors. His last two films, 2010's The Fighter and 2012's Silver Linings Playbook, garnered their respective casts an astonishing seven Academy Awards nominations between them, including three wins. His latest, American Hustle, combines key cast members from those two films, creating an awards monolith (the New York Film Critics Circle would agree - they named it Best Picture earlier this month). But if the cast might make it seem impossibly worthy, the best thing about American Hustle is that it's Read more ...
judith.flanders
It has been said that Mozart, so prodigiously talented so young, seemed to be merely a vessel through which God, or the music of the spheres, or whichever higher being one chooses, channelled the sounds of heaven. So, too, sometimes, does Balanchine appear to be a vessel through which music is channelled, to take solid form in front of our eyes. And never more so when the music in question is Tchaikovsky.Jewels can be a tricky piece to get right. In less than 90 minutes, it covers 150 years of dance in three plotless acts: mid-19th century French Romanticism, via Fauré, for Emeralds; American Read more ...