Reviews
Zsuzsanna Ardó
Cornelia Parker came to prominence with various acts of destruction/resurrection. Some of the most famous examples include a blown-up garden shed in Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991, the charred remains of churches in Mass (Colder Darker Matter),1997 and Anti-Mass, 2005, and pearls fired through a shotgun in Suit, Shot by a Pearl Necklace, 1995. But within the ambiguity of creation by destruction, there is also the artist as archeologist.These angular pieces of urban archeology are hovering above the ground as if frozen in spaceIn Subconscious of a Monument, 2005, shown at the Royal Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Burt Bacharach: The Art of the Songwriter - Anyone Who Had a HeartSometimes, greatness takes a while to surface. Tommy Sands’s 1961 single “Love In A Goldfish Bowl” didn’t return the hopeful teen idol to the charts. He’d had his day in 1957 with "Teen-age Crush", a slice of ersatz Elvis which rose to number two in the US. “…Goldfish Bowl” was hokum of the highest order, written by Burt Bacharach and lyricist Hal David for the film of the same name. “It’s love in a goldfish bowl” hiccups Nancy Sinatra’s then-husband. But it was less silly and less fun than 1958’s “The Blob”, by The Five Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The last two years have seen the Tiger Lillies hit a prolific peak of activity, to be found as often on the theatrical as the concert stage, drawing on plenty of influences from outside the UK to boot. Mike Pickering came on board last year in place of drummer Adrian Huge, who’d been part of the trio’s line-up from its founding back in 1989, but there was no let-up in levels of intensity last night from lead performer Martyn Jacques, who gave his all to a 90-minute set drawn from numbers from their last four albums, from 2011’s Woyzeck & the Tiger Lillies through to this year’s Either Or. Read more ...
bruce.dessau
When the Stone Roses first made a splash with their eponymous debut album in 1989 they were almost perfect. The only mistake was a brief flirtation with flared trousers. Nearly a quarter of a century on in north London the strides were strictly straight-legged. The only flares were the red ones some clot in the audience kept lighting. I don't envy his prospects if health and safety ever get hold of him.As for the music, this show, the first of two nights in the capital, certainly burnt brightly, but only in places. At times Ian Brown's vocals sounded flatter than the sozzled audience Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
In sunshineand bright blue skies there can be few places more green and pleasant than Wormsley Park. Garsington Opera has found a happy home there, with this being its third season in its sleekly rectilinear big top at the Getty family’s Buckinghamshire estate.Daniel Slater, the director of this production of Die Entführung, has taken all sorts of witty liberties with the libretto – at least the spoken part – and brought the story right up to date. Selim is an expatriate Russian oligarch and proud owner of a football club. Osmin is his black-suited chief henchman. Pedrillo is a cockney Read more ...
fisun.guner
It’s the centenary of the birth of William Scott, once considered to be in the pantheon of British postwar artists. But where’s the hoopla and fanfare? Like so many British painters who had their glory years in the Fifties – before the explosion of Pop art and all that – his name no longer carries much weight. Having represented Britain in the Venice Biennale of 1958, he was left out of the Royal Academy’s ambitious survey British Art of the 20th Century some 30 years later. To what do we owe so much neglect?From the two earlier artists he took a distilled sense of domestic space and intense Read more ...
edward.seckerson
In Bergen’s Grieg Hall (one is tempted to say the Hall of the Mountain King) the 2013 Bergen Festival concludes with the mournful tolling of bells. A consonant “Amen”, like a healing benediction, is the last word and with it comes perhaps a glimmer of hope. But the mood is sombre not celebratory. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, for all its theatricality, would be an unlikely choice to close a festival in any year but this - Britten's hundredth anniversary. Its effect on an audience has been tried and tested the world over and those who have vilified it (they still do) for being overly emotive Read more ...
David Nice
There are two dances to unheard music in Howard Brenton’s pithy Strindberg reduction. One spells trouble for the interloper between the vampire couple who suck the blood of others to sustain their 30-year hell of a marriage; the other, in the rarely-performed Second Part, is a prelude to both liberation and death. The symmetries and the differences are cleanly underlined in Tom Littler’s production and the degrees of light admitted in to Jerwood Young Designer James Perkins’s sets. And in a performing space even smaller than Strindberg’s Intimate Theatre of the early 1900s, Michael Pennington Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Those who knew the composer Jonathan Harvey, who died of motor neurone disease last December, will remember him as the least demonstrative, least theatrical of men. His presence was gentle, soft-spoken, essentially inward – the physical image of the Buddhism that came to dominate his spiritual consciousness in the latter half of his life. That so intensely pure-minded and modest a musician should have been fascinated by a genius as ostentatious and self-advertising as Wagner is one of those attractions of opposites that are the stuff of art. Whether or not Wagner Dream, Harvey’s final Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The first image in Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) shows clusters of mist hovering over the darkened Andes. Mirroring the implacability of the terrain, Popol Vuh’s synth score evokes a celestial choir hymning the mountains' numinous might, worried though the music is by faint high-pitched vibrations. In a short series of downward tilt shots, the camera – unseen, but a “felt” presence throughout, as drops of moisture on the lens later testify – picks out insect-like figures tentatively making their way in single file down a narrow path hundreds of feet above the Amazon.Much nearer, the men that Read more ...
Simon Munk
Memory is fertile ground for dystopian science fiction. After all, if you can't remember the past properly, if your memories are fake, implanted, then you can't trust your own beliefs or the history that you are being told informs the current political discourse.Charlie Brooker's excellent Black Mirror series looked at this with "The Entire History Of You" episode and science fiction writer (and paranoid schizophrenic) Philip K Dick was a master of memory games ‑ see both Total Recall and Bladerunner. At the core of Remember Me is a brilliant, interactive take on implanted memories.Nilin is Read more ...
Ismene Brown
So last night the Royal Ballet’s first couple, at shockingly short notice, gave their last performance with the company, in MacMillan’s Mayerling, a terrifying, piteous experience that I know I’ll never see surpassed. Johan Kobborg and Alina Cojocaru have blessed this millennium, both artists who used the lightness of their natural physical abilities to tear into dark emotional places, and who last night tore the Royal Opera House’s sell-out crowd apart. Kobborg the Light-of-foot, Cojocaru the Light-of-heart, dancing away in the blackest, bleakest ballet of all.Mayerling’s demands on the Read more ...