Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
What a way to open. Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony is exactly the kind of work that the BBC Proms and the Royal Albert Hall were made for, and as the surging, over-generous music and Walt Whitman’s ecstatic poetry ring out across the space it’s hard not to feel just a little bit of heart-swell. Add to that conductor Sakari Oramo making his debut as Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and you have a First Night to rival the excitement of the Last Night.What a shame then that it was such an uneven evening of music. Like Britten and Vaughan Williams’s stormy seas, the highs and lows Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It is nearly 50 years since Martha Argerich played in Manchester. She performed with the Hallé Orchestra and the conductor was Claudio Abbado, making his UK debut. That was in 1965 and a year later they repeated their double act. Thanks to the Manchester International Festival and her special working relationship with conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy, music director of the Manchester Camerata, she bridged that gap last night.I must admit to a sense of some disappointment when she decided to replace the work advertised, Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto, with Beethoven’s First. However, she gave Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With site-specific shows it’s a natural urge to start by reviewing the location. And I’m not strong enough to resist this temptation. So here goes. This new piece by American playwright Annie Baker takes place at the Rose Lipman building in Haggerston, north London. This is a community centre, and first impressions are not encouraging: duck-egg blue walls, dirty windows, faded carpet squares, discoloured ceiling tiles, encrusted neon strips, cluttered notice boards. Don’t go if you feel depressed.But, as the play begins, you soon realise that this community centre is a perfect setting. In a Read more ...
peter.quinn
The great jazz singers are also the great storytellers. Last night, listening to Cassandra Wilson sing “Wichita Lineman”, that single, devastating couplet - "And I need you more than want you/And I want you for all time" - conjured up an individual's entire life story. Seamlessly traversing genres in fresh and creative ways, performing a set that juxtaposed Cesária Évora's “Angola” with a completely impromptu “A Foggy Day”, the Jackson, Mississippi vocalist, musician, songwriter and producer confirmed her own compelling storytelling gift.When Wilson took to the stage after a scene-setting Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When a person is happy in his work, he does his best. So best ignore what Sergei Polunin says on the page of a newspaper and look at what he does on stage. Now there’s a happy boy. Polunin is the one reason to see the Stanislavsky Ballet at the Coliseum on this short visit, though it's always a pleasure to hear Delibes’s divine score to which Roland Petit created a short, pert, thin and very French version of Coppélia, chockful with kisses.A fairground organ wheezes out Swanilda’s lilting waltz, and the curtains part on a pleasing pale grey marble courtyard. It is a weird story, under Read more ...
Simon Munk
Among gamers, suggesting that Nintendo is not a publisher of brilliant games is tantamount to heresy. Yet here it is: Mario & Luigi: Dream Team Bros. would, if it were not published by Nintendo, receive a far worse critical reaction than it's likely to get.Dream Team Bros. sees the iconic videogaming duo, nominally plumbers by trade, apparently Italian by stereotypical accent, navigating a sleepy island beset by dreams and nightmares. What follows is in turn exploration, simplistic role-playing turn-based strategy, with a timing element and dreamlike platform gaming. And it's only the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As a capsule description of Pacific Rim, "giant monsters versus giant robots" will do nicely. It tells the fantastical story of mankind's battle for survival against a bunch of enormous killer reptiles from outer space, known manga-ishly as "Kaiju", which now live in a "dimensional rift" at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.These things keep lumbering ashore and laying waste to cities around the eponymous Pacific Rim, and though they're not quite indestructible, conventional tanks and planes can't get the job done. Thus the earthlings fight back by building vast fighting machines the size of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some plays have such historic significance that it is surprising that they are not revived more often. I blame the obsession with novelty that characterises our culture. So it’s great to see this venue, under its ever-enterprising supremo Neil McPherson, stepping up to the plate and offering us the late Pam Gems’s 1976 feminist classic, Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, a play that is more often found hidden in the history books than out in the open on stage.This is a flatshare drama, and it’s very much a character piece. We are in the London apartment of Fish, an upper-crust femintern activist who is Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Some artists seem to need a reality check. The Spirit of Utopia is billed as a show of artists “who speculate on alternative futures for society, the economy and the environment”; but anyone anticipating cogent analysis or visionary ideas will be disappointed. The exhibition consists of a bunch of dreamers who imagine that an art context gives social significance to weak or wacky ideas. It doesn’t.Theaster Gates believes a gallery “should be an open space that questions modes of production, systems of power, and access to the imagination for everyone” – a laudable goal that should inspire Read more ...
David Nice
As good old Catullus put it, I hate and love, you may ask why. No doubt it's my job as a critic to probe such difficult responses to Britten's Canticles. Why am I so repelled by the sickly-sweet lullaby Isaac sings just before daddy's about to put him to the sword in Canticle II, then so haunted by the sombre war requiem of Britten's Edith Sitwell setting, Canticle III? Ambivalence about Ian Bostridge's weird dominating presence and Neil Bartlett's marshalling of five responses to the five very different narratives doesn't make it any easier. Then again, there's no reason why anything should Read more ...
stephen.walsh
André Messager is one of those fringe composers whose music you feel you know something about until you try to think of a specific piece. His ballet Les deux pigeons is still sometimes revived. But to students of French music, he’s actually best known as the conductor who brought Debussy’s Pelléas to the stage and conducted its first performance. Of his own operas and operettas, Fortunio seems to have been the most successful in its day (1907); but I confess I’d heard never a note of it until this new production at Grange Park by Daniel Slater.It’s a work which reminds us that French operetta Read more ...
David Nice
"Britten or Poulenc?" The question may seem a fatuous one, geared to the 100th anniversary of the Englishman's birth and 50 years since the Frenchman's death. Yet it certainly livens up what would otherwise be the usual dreary artists' biographies, presented with typical elan in this year's Cheltenham Music Festival programme book. "Has anyone said Poulenc in response to this?" asks pianist James Rhodes. Well, yes - no less than 13 of the performers, including doyenne of both composers Felicity Lott, as against 21 for Britten, with six "I couldn't possibly chooses" in the middle.Festival Read more ...