Reviews
Matt Wolf
You gotta love Diane Keaton all the way from Annie Hall to Something's Gotta Give, but even her natural effervescence can't enliven The Big Wedding, a starry celluloid venture that is landing in cinemas briefly on its way presumably to an airplane near you. An in-flight video might in fact minimise the overriding coarseness of a venture whose brazen impulses don't hold up well to large-screen scrutiny. Whatever the context, Keaton's ageless charms are worth pondering, as is a film industry that increasingly seems not to know what to do with any of its senior crop of actresses, with the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Three hundred years ago we danced and ate to art music. Before that we worshipped to it. In the 19th century we began to sit and stare at it. The immersive music movement of the past decade has moved things along again. Today we are encouraged to swim through performances, sniffing the music out, hunting it down. The latest ensemble to free themselves from the sit-and-stare model are the enterprising outfit, the London Contemporary Orchestra (LCO). For their concert on Friday we had to go down 200-odd steps into the labyrinths of the disused station at Aldwych. It was well worth the effort. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Byzantium is a vampire flick which in look and tone seems fashioned to resemble Tomas Alfredson's magnificently humane (if that's the right expression when speaking of the undead) Let the Right One In. Wonderfully, unlike most pictures of its ilk, the focus is almost entirely on the fairer sex, with its bloodsucking protagonists, played by Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan, out to prove the female of the species more deadly than the male. It's the latest film from Irish director Neil Jordan, best known for The Crying Game and - more appositely here - Interview with the Vampire, with a Read more ...
Miles Ellingham
Totnes indie-folk band Matthew and Me took the stage at Notting Hill Arts Club fresh from a stint at the legendary Rockfield. Like many other bands to have recorded at the Welsh studio (which has hosted everyone from Black Sabbath to Coldplay), they seemed energised by the experience, their melodies injected with a passion and confidence, and an overall sound that carries a hint of Sigur Ros with its swirling keyboards, guitars and vocal harmonies. They are a confident, highly musicianly bunch: two women (keyboards and drums) and three guys (guitars and bass), with a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
For all the video projections and pyrotechnics that accompanied it, Muse’s entrance onto the Emirates stage last night was disappointingly anticlimactic. This was partly because there was still so much daylight in the stadium but, mainly, it was down to there being so many empty seats. Maybe earlycomers had been driven to the bar by support act Dizzee Rascal’s constant refrains of "let's go fucking mental." Or possibly it was just a bad day on the tube. Whatever the truth, the stadium felt horribly devoid of any kind of atmosphere. It was going to be an uphill job to conquer it.Muse responded Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Picking five creatively significant years was quite a smart way of tackling the huge career of David Bowie, though you could argue forever about whether producer/director Francis Whately had chosen the right ones. What about 1969 and the Space Oddity album, or 1970 and The Man Who Sold the World? How about a really bad year like 1987, which gave us Never Let Me Down and the egregious Glass Spider tour?But the film is what it is rather than what it isn't, and most of what we got was fascinating, and often terrific. In an opening collage of quotes from Bowie, Whately banged home the point that Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Michelangelo evidently regarded drawing as the foundation of not only painting and sculpture but of “architecture and of every other kind of painting and the root of all science”. His all-encompassing claim is subtly demonstrated in this captivating exhibition of five centuries of western European drawing. The anthology sweeps through the years from the old masters to 20th-century stars, concentrating indeed on mastery. The unifying factor is that all the work on view is concerned with elements from the observable world: landscapes, portraits, domesticities, fantasies set in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Rodion G.A.: The Lost TapesInitially, under Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s borders were open: Blood Sweat & Tears, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong played there. But the regime tightened its grip after the dictator’s 1971 visit to North Korea and China. Ceaușescu fostered a personality cult, the world outside was largely shut out and Romania’s citizens had few chances to flourish artistically. Absolute censorship was imposed and the Securitate were the eyes and ears of the regime. Yet somehow, music was made, some of it released on the state-run Electrecord label. Rodion Roşca only had Read more ...
David Nice
In 1980, an orchestra and conductor then hardly known in Britain came to the Royal Festival Hall. I went to hear Elisabeth Söderström in Strauss’s Four Last Songs; I left stunned by an unorthodox Sibelius Second Symphony and above all by one of the encores, Cantus to the Memory of Benjamin Britten by one Arvo Pärt. Thirty three years later Neeme Järvi, now indisputably one of the great master conductors and at the helm of a Swiss orchestra rather than the Swedes he’d then conducted (the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra), not only began with a work by fellow Estonian Pärt but also ended Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Neko Case wasn't about to launch a Yeah Yeah Yeahs-style pre-emptive strike aimed at the Village Underground's amateur camera-wielders. She doesn't mind the odd photograph, she said; just don't try to film her. It makes her feel a little uncomfortable. Didn't we all use to just remember?She's 23 now, with the sort of voice that can instantly hush the chattiest Shoreditch crowdAly Spaltro (below right), the songwriter better known as Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, remembers. It's in her songs, and in her stories: being 20 years old and getting refused entry to an over-21s Neko Case show in her Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Ballet is telling stories again. Last night Wayne McGregor’s debut as a narrator followed hot on the heels of Cathy Marston’s Witch-Hunt for Bern Ballett, both in the Royal Opera House complex, and Northern Ballet’s visit to London with David Nixon’s new The Great Gatsby. (To say nothing of David Bintley's Aladdin and even less of Peter Schaufuss's Midnight Express.)Nixon is known as a straight narrative man, Marston a more expressionistic type, McGregor all abstract and kinetic, theory. Seeing the three works during the current orbit of Kenneth MacMillan’s eyepopping Mayerling at Covent Read more ...
graham.rickson
Frank Martin: Das Märchen vom Aschenbrödel Orchestre de la Haute École de Musique de Genève/Gábor Takács-Nagy (Claves)Prokofiev’s three-act Cinderella ballet score remains one of his greatest creations. It’s so impressive that you’re incredulous to learn that there exists another account – written by the Swiss composer Frank Martin in 1942. It was successfully performed in Basel in 1942, conducted by the great Paul Sacher, before slipping into total obscurity. Martin based his scenario on the Grimm brothers’ darker Aschenputtel rather than the more familiar Charles Perrault version. It’ Read more ...