Reviews
David Nice
So we glide between seasons from one communicative diva giving her all in a vast space to another casting spells in intimate surroundings. While Joyce DiDonato, not perhaps one of the world’s great voices but certainly a great performer, was captivating the Proms multitudes on Saturday night, the Wigmore Hall’s concert year sidled in with Bryn Terfel and Simon Keenlyside, no low-key singers. But then nor is Anne Schwanewilms, the finest of Strauss sopranos onstage and the most nuanced of Lieder singers, here on a flying visit – and airborne it was - for a BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert.Lieder Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the remarkably meagre annals of Formula One movies, there are only two scores to beat, to wit: John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (from 1966), a fictional story which used oodles of real racing footage, and Asif Kapadia's spellbinding documentary Senna (2010). Ron Howard's Rush slots in somewhere between them, being derived from the true-life Seventies rivalry of Niki Lauda and James Hunt but consciously shot and written like a drama.Hunt v Lauda is one of motorsport's great fables, and many fans felt a queasy premonition of disaster on hearing about Howard's project, but it's pleasing to Read more ...
edward.seckerson
As it came to pass, Marin Alsop’s nationality was rather more of a factor than her gender on this historic Last Night of the Proms – but her deft put-down of remarks made only the week before (pace Petrenko) suggested that it might take a little more time (it’s only 2013, for heaven’s sake) for that glass ceiling truly to come crashing down and for her and others like her to be regarded as simply “conductors”.As she said in her speech, the really shocking fact is that these issues should still be making headlines at all. This lady’s not for turning or burning. After the interval, the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The last time Mr E toured these shores he looked as if he might be heralding the end of the world. Dressed all in white with a Moses beard and gangsta bandana, his songs were about inner struggle and personal redemption. Between songs he remained mute and mysterious. How things have changed. This year the band is touring the much fuzzier Wonderful, Glorious and last night Mark Everett hardly shut up.The change in mood was evident even before the band had taken to the stage. As I arrived “The Candy Man” from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory was playing over the PA and there was a jolly Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“Let the florid music praise,” sing Britten and Auden in their On This Island cycle; and I suppose we must do as we’re told, though aesthetic duty can be a hard taskmaster. For me it cracks its whip in the three Donizetti operas that, inexplicably, comprise almost the entire autumn repertoire of WNO, while other companies are, ironically enough, celebrating Britten’s centenary. The Welsh have just done, it’s true, an admirable Paul Bunyan, Britten’s first opera. Anna Bolena was not Donizetti’s first, but his thirtieth; and – though it has its moments – it still leaves me hoping nobody revives Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Roky Erickson & the Aliens: The Evil One Roky Erickson: Don’t Slander Me, Gremlins Have PicturesRoky Erickson is usually depicted as America’s Syd Barrett: the leader of a pioneering psychedelic-era band who took too many drugs, had mental health issues and then dropped off the face of the earth. But unlike Barrett, or even his American contemporary Skip Spence, Erickson returned from the abyss.In 1980 he pulled off the remarkable coup of releasing an album on the British major label CBS. That first solo album – untitled in the UK (but usually referred to as Five Symbols due to Read more ...
geoff brown
Tradition used to decree that the last Friday Prom would be devoted to worshipping Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. Not so today. Anything deemed serious and big occupies the slot, and if Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony isn’t serious and big, what do you want? A 40-tonne truck?The Proms programming had been warming up to this epic blast for just over a week. First we had Bruckner's Seventh conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, then the Fourth under the loose-tongued Vasily Petrenko – neither of them fellows who really suit the repertoire. Salonen treated the Seventh to “I have a plane to catch” speeds, so Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
We learn from the front titles of Pieta that it’s Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, and it won the Korean director the Golden Lion award at last year’s Venice film festival, against strong competition. Viewers may be asking themselves a rather different question, however, namely how much do we actually look forward to a new movie from Kim? We’re a decade on from one of his masterpieces, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, with its meditative visual beauty, but that one was very much the exception in the director’s oeuvre to date.Almost all Kim's other films have been marked by varying degrees Read more ...
graham.rickson
Goldmark: Rustic Wedding Symphony, Symphony No 2 Singapore Symphony Orchestra/Lan Shui (BIS)Root around in enough second-hand LP shops and you’ll probably find at least one scratchy vinyl copy of Karl Goldmark’s 1875 Rustic Wedding Symphony. The piece was once a repertoire staple - Bernstein and Beecham recorded it. It’s now an exotic rarity. Why? It’s sublimely orchestrated and the tunes are fabulous. It’s perfectly proportioned. Goldmark’s contemporary Brahms described it as “clear-cut and faultless… it sprang into being a finished thing”. Presumably it went out of fashion through Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s hard to imagine much upstaging Martyn Jacques, the indomitable falsetto frontman of the Tiger Lillies. The gaping mouth of an enormous mythical fish that seems to have swum straight from the canvases of Hieronymus Bosch, projected right across the stage in their new show Rime of the the Ancient Mariner, comes close. The show is a glorious visual cabinet of curiosities that enthrals on all its surreal fronts, a version of madness that matches the lonely voice of Coleridge’s mariner with the sadness of Jacques’ lyrics and music – and the lyrical dominates here over the raw fury that the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
How we look at and value art, the stuff we accumulate around us, and our daily surroundings; how we look at and communicate with each other (or avoid doing so in the digital age); and if we do or don't see: these are some of the themes explored in Museum Hours, an immersive docufiction made in Vienna by the experimental, socially progressive Brooklyn filmmaker Jem Cohen.Just as João Rui Guerra da Mata and João Pedro Rodrigues's The Last Time I Saw Macao investigates the former Portuguese colony via a thin neo-noir tale about a search for a gang-targeted drag queen, Museum Hours deploys a Read more ...
David Nice
It’s not because I lament the annual end of a love-hate relationship with the Albert Hall that the last few days of Proms feel rather melancholy. A bittersweetness lies rather in the drawing-in of evenings, however hot it is, so late night Schubert for one and then two pianos seemed like an appropriately introspective way of saying farewell this year.Imogen Cooper – why on earth she’s not a dame is a big mystery, though perhaps not if you look at the honours set-up – can always be relied upon to draw you in to the light-fading of late Schubert. Sure enough, after the startling summons Read more ...