Reviews
mark.kidel
Sabine Devieilhe, as with many other great sopranos, elicits much fan worship, with no less than three encores at her recent Wigmore Hall recital. In her native France, and in the rest of Europe, she has gathered ecstatic reviews for her performance and recording of a range of repertoire that stretches from the Baroque and Mozart to Richard Strauss, Debussy and Poulenc.Accompanied by Mathieu Pordoy, she offered the rapt audience at the Wigmore an artfully designed programme of Mozart and Strauss, weaving her way through surprising segues and contrasts with seamless ease. On the face of it, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In A History of the World in 47 Borders, Jonn Elledge takes an ostensibly dry subject – how maps and boundaries have shaped our world – and makes from it a diverting and informative read. It is light and conversational in tone, covering topics that range from the clearly important to the niche, showing Elledge’s eye for an entertaining story and an ability to pick up political hot potatoes without burning his fingers.The 47 chapters are each about five pages long (none outstay their welcome) divided into three tranches: “Histories” (how the map of the world changed over time from the earliest Read more ...
Robert Beale
Billed as a “Viennese Whirl”, this programme showed that there are different kinds of music that may be known to the orchestral canon as coming from Vienna.For a start, there’s the classical tradition of Mozart, Beethoven and those who aimed to be their successors. Then there are the 19th century dance creations and operettas of Johann Strauss II and his contemporaries. And there’s also the “Second Viennese School” … and conductor Anja Bihlmaier (pictured below) offered all three.The last was represented by Berg’s Violin Concerto, probably the most endearing and enduring of works written Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
What would happen if a notorious misogynist actually fell in love? With a glacial Danish librarian? And decided his best means of getting this woman’s attention was to ask his worst enemy, a leading feminist academic, for help?These probably aren’t questions most people would prioritise, but the Australian playwright Van Badham did and then fashioned her answers into a satirical comedy, Banging Denmark. It fills the little Finborough space very adequately, though it recedes in the memory somewhat once its excellent cast have taken a bow.The piece opens with a young man at home in his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Three years ago, the release of Till Another Time 1988-1996 generated a thumbs up. A compilation of recordings by the Baltimore and/or New York-based Linda Smith it was, according to this column, “stunning” and “significant.” Until this point, knowledge of Smith had “largely been the province of the do-it-yourself world of music.”Now, two Linda Smith albums are reissued. Nothing Else Matters originally came out on CD-only in 1995. I So Liked Spring was its follow-up, appearing on cassette in 1996. Nothing Else Matters had been preceded by four cassette-only albums which remain un-reissued. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“He do the police in different voices.” If ever one phrase summed up a work of fiction, and the art of its writer, then surely it is this description, by Charles Dickens in his 1865 novel, Our Mutual Friend, of his character Sloppy’s ability to read aloud from a newspaper. Ironically enough the book itself is one of Dickens’s least exuberant performances, written in his maturity, and with enormous and unnecessary detail (800 pages worth).Its complex plot has now been adapted for the National Theatre by Ben Power, with music by PJ Harvey. But is this the best way to tell this story? Dickens’s Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone who’d booked to hear soprano Sally Matthews or to witness the rapid progress of conductor Daniele Rustioni – the initial draw for me – could not have been disappointed in their late-stage replacements. Elizabeth Watts is as much of a national treasure among singers as Matthews, and Jader Bignamini, music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, negotiated his first Barbican concert with absolute mastery.The short curtain-raiser, Camille Pépin’s Les eaux célestes, immediately gave us a BBC Symphony Orchestra on top form, but there was nothing very freshwater here: pretty textures, Read more ...
Cheri Amour
For most people’s 40th birthday celebrations, they might get a few friends together, rustle up a cake, and toast to another turn around the sun. But when musician Lail Arad realised the stars had aligned with her beloved Joni Mitchell's own 80th birthday, she knew she had to mark the milestone moment with something special.Thus, The Songs of Joni Mitchell was born, an intimate evening celebrating the iconic singer-songwriter as part of this year’s In The Round festival. Mitchell was one of the first women in modern rock to achieve enviable longevity and critical recognition. Her works Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The first photograph was taken nearly 200 years ago in France by Joseph Niépce, and the first picture of a person was taken in Paris by Louis Daguerre in 1838 (main picture). Some 20 years later, in California, Eadweard Muybridge settled a bet – as to whether a galloping horse maintains contact with the ground – by setting up a string of cameras to record the animal galloping past. When he flicked through the resulting sequence of stills, an illusion of movement was created, and film was born.Fantastic Machine is a high octane trawl through the social history of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you don't like sweary comics – Jonathan Pie uses the c-word liberally – then this may not be the show for you. In fact if you're a Tory, ditto, because it is 70 minutes of political invective, taking aim at a rogues' gallery of senior Conservatives present and past. Oh, and the royal family get it in the neck too.But first Pie – the creation of satirist Tom Walker – sashays on to the stage to salsa music, hinting that an offer from Strictly Come Dancing may be in the pipeline, with him fitting in the no-hoper middle-aged bloke role. It's the last bit of bonhomie we'll see all evening.The Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Richard Gadd won an Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2016 with material about being sexually abused by a man, in a set called Monkey See, Monkey Do that he performed on a treadmill with a gorilla at his back. He followed that with another piece of writing about abuse, this time meted out by a female stalker, Baby Reindeer, which he performed at the Fringe and then at the Bush Theatre in 2019. Spliced together, these two traumatic experiences now form his bleak Netflix seven-parter of that same name. "Baby Reindeer" is the nickname given to the object of her obsession by a middle-aged woman Read more ...
David Nice
Virtuosity and a wildly beating heart are compatible in Richard Jones’s finely calibrated production of Renaissance woman Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal. It hits hard as a 1920s mechanical symphony with a lyrical slow movement and words/cliches used like musical refrains. There’s an army of generals at work in the team of 16 actors, led by fearless Rosie Sheehy, and in the genius lighting, movement, sound, design. You rarely see such meticulous, detailed work in the theatre.The polar opposite in scale to Stephen Daldry's 1993 National Theatre production with Fiona Shaw, this one started life in Read more ...