Reviews
graham.rickson
Bach: Christmas Oratorio Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/Stephen Layton (Hyperion)A flurry of timpani and a pair of trilling flutes kick things off nicely. The OAE's oboes and trumpets are also in fine form, but what really makes this Bach recording a joy is the weight and richness of the choral sound. So many period performances have just one or two voices per part, so hearing close to 40 singers chirping away is an unexpected treat. Choruses and chorales alike proceed with plenty of bounce, and Layton never lets the narrative grind to a halt. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In her role as host of this 20th-anniversary celebration, Dannii Minogue was not afraid to ask the tough questions that fans of Ireland’s greatest - or possibly other greatest - boy band wanted to know. “It’s the elephant in the room,” admitted Keith Duffy (the handsome one, not that you would have been caught dead admitting it in the Nineties, who later went on to appear in Coronation Street) with a nervous laugh.You’d be forgiven for wondering which elephant Duffy was alluding to: could it be the inter-band tension that led to Ronan Keating announcing the band’s dissolution to a shocked Read more ...
David Nice
In 1995 a new avian species with unfamiliar markings, the Bourne swan, drew unexpectedly large crowds to a run-down old Islington theatre. I remember it well: seats in the gods were being worn so tight then that feet attached to long legs couldn't be placed on the ground and, negotiating a tolerable view downstairs at the box office, I missed 10 minutes of the display. Since then the very masculine Cygnus bourniensis has been sighted in unlikely places all over the worldand has now returned to overwinter in a more spacious and comfortable Sadler’s Wells. Rapid evolution over nearly two Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Richard II arrives in London after a highly successful Stratford run and while the glow of David Tennant’s Hamlet resides still in the memory. Surprisingly, the pleasure of the production lies not so much in dazzle as solidity. This doesn’t give a bold new reading but a robust interpretation; it is not a star vehicle (so often with the star surrounded by mediocre support) but one of the strongest company performances of Shakespeare that I’ve seen for many a year.Though Richard II can easily be seen as a stand-alone play, it’s actually the first of a tetralogy that includes the Henry IVs and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s now twenty five years since the release of the Waterboys’ most popular album, Fisherman’s Blues. To mark this auspicious occasion, Mike Scott has persuaded EMI to release a six-CD expanded version, Fisherman’s Box, which has 120-odd tracks of the type of music that, let’s not forget, did not receive universal acclaim in 1988 but has significantly grown in stature since then. He’s also called in the guys who recorded these folk, gospel, country and bluegrass flavoured tunes and has hit the road for a proper celebration of their “raggle-taggle gypsy” years.The Birmingham leg of the tour Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Unless Peter Jackson and his team decide to mine The Silmarillion for three more J.R.R. Tolkien adaptations, their films of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit will, by this time next year, comprise a complete hexalogy – or, at least, two consecutive triptychs. Setting aside for the moment the crass exploitation of the 317-page The Hobbit, which is being stretched thinner than Gollum's hair over eight hours, it would have been hoped that the entire gargantuan undertaking would be yielding a consistent vision that honours the author's conception of an alternative English myth.
This is not Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Among the multiple achievements of American Psycho, any one of which might be enough to make Rupert Goold's long-awaited Almeida season-opener the banner musical of a notably busy year for the form, a particular paradox deserves mention up front. Here's a piece steeped in material (the Bret Easton Ellis novel from 1991 and its film version nine years later) that fetishises surfaces and wallows in emptiness and that - a grand hurrah! - turns out itself to have a lot to say.I had feared in advance that the show might devolve into a blank celebration of late-Eighties blankness as per the book Read more ...
Simon Munk
As ever with videogames, one great success can lead to many failures. The success in this case was the breakout "sandbox" genius of Minecraft. On its surface, Minecraft is essentially a faithfully blocky attempt to bring Lego bricks into games. But unlocking both the power of collaborative working and the sheer size and scale of Minecraft's possibilities has allowed people to build all sorts of insanely grandiose designs within their virtual worlds. Of course, where Minecraft led, others followed – more's the pity...Minecraft begat Terraria – an amiable sci-fi side-scrolling half platform Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The disappearance of Lord “Lucky” Lucan in 1974 remains one of the most teasing enigmas of recent-ish history. Following the collapse of his marriage and a bitter battle with his wife Veronica for custody of their three children, the gambling addict Lucan is presumed to have battered the children’s nanny to death, attacked his wife, then fled the country by boat from Newhaven. Elvis-like sightings of the disgraced peer have poured in from around the world ever since.This TV version of the story (it concludes next week), adapted by Jeff Pope from John Pearson’s book The Gamblers, uses the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
This production of Nutcracker, the 10th in English National Ballet's 60-year history, has come in for some stick in the three years since its première. Wayne Eagling, the company’s then director, produced the choreography in rather too much of a hurry, as anyone will remember who watched the third episode of Agony and Ecstasy, the BBC’s 2011 documentary about the company, in which the birth of Nutcracker was definitely filed under agony.There has been ample time since for polishing, but no amount of polishing can fix structural flaws, and this ballet Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The film too often comes over as a prettily decorated edition of a sick spinster’s diary” was how the Monthly Film Bulletin concluded their review of The Innocents in January 1962. After seeing Jack Clayton’s intense adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw more than 50 years on, the impression left now isn’t so much of an attractively presented chronicle of a breakdown, but a film which paints little of its substance in so clear-cut a fashion. As it is with the literary source, the audience is left to draw their own conclusions as to what is real, what is unreal, and what is Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The words “breathe, breathe, pray, breathe” were written in 10-inch letters at her feet. She wore sunglasses to help with her shyness. But if O’Connor was struggling with the pressure of being up on stage it didn’t show in her performance. Off-stage she may continue to suffer with her emotional well-being, but, on stage, she’s on the form of her life. Last night, her dense, swirling thoughts were projected through a combination of intensity, humour and vulnerability. It made for a superb evening.O'Connor arrived on stage in combat trousers, a green army top and bobble hat. The tattoos on her Read more ...