Reviews
fisun.guner
There are two films in the Turner Prize exhibition and taken together and watched end-to-end they last just under three hours. That sounds gruelling for an art exhibition, but they’re from the strongest two candidates on this year’s shortlist. And since neither is one of those poorly filmed and edited pieces that are best viewed as moving wallpaper as you drift in and out of the gallery, both are worth devoting time to.The first is by Elizabeth Price, which is 20-minutes long. The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (image below left) is a beautifully constructed and rather captivating, as well as Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
You could say that the Titanic has been done to death, and that any new show would really need to say something different, something so far unknown, unearth a new angle, find new facts. To some extent, Treasured does that. Who’s ever heard of Mouser, the Titanic cat, who is supposed to have carried all six of her new-born kittens off the ship in Southampton? Allegedly her feline prescience sensed impending doom.White Star had also, it seems, wanted to build the ship in Liverpool – for which read Birkenhead on the other side of the Mersey – but the contract went to Harland and Wolff in Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Manu Chao is “backstage” in a little makeshift tent on the green outside Brixton’s St Matthews Church (that’s the one opposite the Ritzy Cinema) and he’s certainly more at home than in some of the more conventional rock star places I’ve seen him in. Like Glastonbury, where he hated being in the VVIP area of the main stage with Amy Winehouse and Jay Z – all the fences and passes made him think of Palestine and he looked bored and dejected.This event is more Manu’s speed – befitting its name, the inaugural Brixton Come Together Festival was a small, friendly, positive community event that is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The screenwriter Peter Bowker won over viewers of all stripes with his wonderfully clever, musical serial Blackpool and sealed the deal with the chunky post-Iraq War drama Occupation. He demonstrated a deft narrative touch, an expert ability to spin a yarn and the right level of unpredictability to give him a reputation as something of a televisual auteur. Ah, but before all that he used to write for Casualty, and it is to those days he returns with Monroe, the second series of which began last night, and which bears a strong resemblance to the BBC’s hospital soap warhorse.Dr Gabriel Monroe Read more ...
garth.cartwright
The Barbican Centre’s Transcender Festival celebrated its fourth anniversary in 2012 and deserves to be recognised as one of the UK’s most culturally radical and engaging music events. Transcender grew out of the Barbican’s previous festival Ramadan Nights and aims to explore a similarly rich vein of music that is rooted both in Islamic trance music of Asia and the Middle East and Western improvised music that shares a similar sense of free exploration and wonder. Transcender 2012 – and, yes, the word "transcender" was invented by the Barbican to explain this bringing together of very Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There's no guaranteed route to success with contemporary opera but, ever since Nixon in China, topicality and realism have become the most favoured and trusted paths to some kind of favourable outcome. Two chamber operas, receiving their English premiere at the Linbury Studio Theatre on the weekend, joined this ever-expanding modern school of verismo. Huw Watkins, who moonlights as one of the finest young pianists of his generation, delivered the first, In the Locked Room. This 50-minute work, scored in a very reserved, very English way, offers us a simple domestic melodrama shot through Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Wagner was not averse to highlights being plucked from the mighty Ring, even though it is an all-encompassing drive-through drama. Perhaps it’s as well, since the bicentenary celebrations of his birth are getting up steam and concert planners are at pains to pull out a few plums. After all, we can’t wallow in the whole of the cycle all of the time.For the start of his second season as Chief Conductor of the BBC Phil, Juanjo Mena (pronounced Huanho Mayna, he being a proud Basque) chose favourite dramatic excerpts from Götterdämmerung. Not a choice for the fainthearted, featuring the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kevin Bridges, an affable young Glaswegian, has had a meteoric rise in comedy. He started gigging at 17, made his solo Edinburgh Fringe debut in 2009, where he played in a 50-seater and earned an Edinburgh Comedy Awards newcomer nomination, and returned the following year to a sold-out run in a 700-seat theatre.But his real breakthrough was being booked on the BBC's Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow in 2009, which brought him to an audience of millions. His early television success means that much of his material is TV-friendly, but his live shows include more uncompromising material. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sting, Debbie Harry, the Pet Shop Boys, Brahms, Mozart, Schumann. This is the kind of thing an average year throws up for the Gateshead-based Northern Sinfonia. Their visits to London are mostly to provide a backing track for the top pop acts. Which is not only perverse but verging on the criminal. Because, as so many have noticed before, the Northern Sinfonia aren't simply another middle-of-the-road band of freelancers, they may well be the finest chamber ensemble working in the country today. That's certainly the conclusion I came to at their opening concert of the season Read more ...
David Nice
What, another review of an LPO/Jurowski concert in less than a week? Reasoning the need, it only has to be said that other orchestras may kick off their seasons by mixing the unfamiliar with core repertoire, but none would dare launch with not one but two programmes featuring this only-connect kind of singularity (and more to come in the “War and Peace” series next week). Last night the known quantity of Rachmaninov’s masterly choral symphony The Bells looked back to less familiar fare which shared two of its themes: the sounds of some very unorthodox tintinnabulations and the Russification Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And so to the third series of HBO's panorama of the Prohibition era, where we joined the denizens of Atlantic City as they prepared to celebrate New Year's Day, 1923. In the finale of series two, we'd seen our chief protagonist, Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), tying off some loose ends as he prepared to take the plunge into full-scale gangsterhood. These included persuading Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald) to marry him so she couldn't testify against him in court, and despatching his weak and treacherous brother Eli (Shea Whigham) to jail.Both of these are back on board for series three ( Read more ...
theartsdesk
A.R. Kane: Complete Singles CollectionJoe MuggsIn my early teens, circa 1988, certain records would appear on The Chart Show indie chart countdown on a Saturday morning, records that hinted disquietingly at something far beyond the standard categories of rock, dance, indie and the rest. “Birthday” by The Sugarcubes, for example, or “You Made me Realise” by My Bloody Valentine. Perhaps the one that haunted me most, though, was “Baby Milk Snatcher” by A.R. Kane, a narcotic fog of blurred guitars, dub echoes and an insistent, insinuating vocal that obeyed only its own idiosyncratic rules of Read more ...