Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
“Well that was bloody fantastic,” a broad Aussie accent declared from somewhere behind me at the end of Ravel’s String Quartet in F major. And that’s the thing with the Australian Chamber Orchestra – it’s just that simple. Their concert programmes reliably include all manner of arrangements (the quartet, for example, was a classic Tognetti reworking for string orchestra) and unexpected collisions of repertoire, but strip all the tricks away and get them stuck into a serious bit of music-making and the result is thrilling and entirely unaffected.A carefully curated programme took us from Read more ...
theartsdesk
Lee Hazlewood: A House Safe for TigersGraham RicksonLee Hazlewood’s voice can still invoke awe. It's gravelly, sonorous, rasping, but incredibly affecting – even when he’s scraping around in the depths it always sounds musical. A reissue of a hard-to-find 1975 LP, A House Safe for Tigers was originally the soundtrack to a Swedish TV movie directed by Hazlewood’s friend Torbjörn Axelman. Hazlewood had moved to Sweden in 1970, partly to ensure that his son wouldn’t be drafted to Vietnam. He continued to record and release new material, most of which slipped under the radar.A House Safe Read more ...
geoff brown
Champagne on ice in the private boxes; scarcely any spare seats. This isn’t the normal situation for a concert climaxing in Witold Lutosławski’s Third Symphony, a modernist work whose usual audience is more than two men and a dog but still doesn’t pull in the crowds. What pulled in last night’s Proms crowd, of course, was Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, an orchestra so lustrous that people would pay decent money just to hear them tune up.Indeed, they tuned up beautifully, though still lovelier sounds emerged shortly after as they sank themselves into the work that probably Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's not completely unheard of what Sir Simon Rattle did at the start of last night's Prom, where he elided two familiar works - Ligeti's colouristic classic Atmosphères and the Prelude to Act One of Wagner's Lohengrin - into a seamless whole, beating without stopping from one into the other. But it was still pretty breathtaking. With the Wagner becoming an integral part of, and dreamy payoff to, Ligeti's wheezy Modernist nightmare, the works were transformed. In their place stood one single work: a strange new musical wonder by Ligetiwagner. It was the most magical opening to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Jason Lytle has a “fervent appreciation”, he says, “for bands that don’t exist anymore”. It’s why he’s playing the cover of “Here”, by Pavement, that has become a staple of his band Grandaddy’s live sets on this open-ended reunion tour, although it doesn’t explain why the time is right for a Grandaddy reunion in the first place.Not that any of the caps or plaid shirts under the ABC’s giant disco ball were complaining, of course. While it seems that these days Nineties alternative bands will reunite at the drop of a hat - or a royalty cheque - you would have been hard-pressed to find any Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
A sense of déjà vu strikes from the very first shot. It is a dark and stormy night. A lone man staggers down an empty street through the lashing rain. Once indoors we see he has blood on his hands. A minute has not yet passed but Warren Brown – for it is he – tears his shirt off. Before we can admire the size of the former cage fighter’s guns he produces a real one. Roll titles.They identify the man as a Good Cop. John Paul – never just John – Rocksavage is a clumsy name for a leading character. His creator, Stephen Butchard, wants us to know that the politically correct PC is Catholic, Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Welcome to Lafcadio Academy for Troubled Young Ladies. In this environment of blood-soaked walls, spinning blades, spikes, ghouls and HP Lovecraft references, the curriculum is simple: play if you dare, and survive if you can. They Bleed Pixels, the new game from indie developers Spooky Squid, is a traditional platformer that serves up more splat than a hamster in a microwave. Upon arriving at the school, your character is mysteriously cursed by an evil book, and finds herself transforming into something distinctly crustacean. As you frenetically traverse the 11 platform levels of your Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Eric Whitacre – less a composer or conductor, more a global choral phenomenon. Just the mention of his name in last night’s concert introduction drew whoops and wolf-whistles from the crowd, certainly not a reaction you tend to get for Beethoven, Boulez or Cage (though perhaps the latter gets a silent cheer). Like or loathe the hype that surrounds Whitacre, there’s no denying his role in popularising choral singing, nor the pure American genealogy of his style, which we can trace back through Morten Lauridsen and Randall Thompson to Bernstein and even Copland.Making his Proms debut with the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
John Barrowman's Dallas was a shameless ad for Channel 5's upcoming new series, an updated retread of the American soap opera, but an enjoyable pointer nonetheless to what pleasures await us - the amuse-bouche, if you will, to the meaty main course starting next week.For those old enough to remember the original, the prospect of Ewing family shenanigans starting over is a treat indeed. For those too young to have experienced the Emmy-winning show, which was broadcast on BBC One between 1978 and 1991, let me fill you in. Dallas, with its bombastic theme tune and much copied split-screen Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
There’s no Mars or Arnie, but the new Total Recall has science fiction goodness running through it. A mile of Blade Runner, a yard of Fifth Element, a furlong of Star Wars and an inch of RoboCop make up the distances in Len Wiseman’s glossy, brooding take on Paul Verhoeven’s beloved Nineties hit. Production designer Patrick Tatopoulos must have been up for months watching the best science fiction films and deciding where their memorable bits would fit here. (He’s not left out I, Robot or Minority Report, in case you like those too.) As if to honour the story that inspires it, Total Recall Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Affairs, arguments, accidents. Feminism, marital failure and a fear of ageing. Jumpy has plenty of conflicts and issues, dunked in a wonderful bittersweet humour. But while April de Angelis faces uncomfortable truths, she fails to deal with them with equal courage. This play gnashes its teeth – at the gap in communication between generations and at the eternal pursuit of youth – but it lacks bite.Jumpy, which was first on at the Royal Court last autumn, is worth seeing for Tamsin Greig alone. Greig plays Hilary, a middle-class, middle-aged mother having an identity crisis. As Tilly, her Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Jimmy McGovern’s one-man mission to boost the quota of Scousers seen on the small screen continues in “Stephen’s Story” – the latest bout of button-pushing misery otherwise known as Accused. Seventeen-year-old Stephen Cartwright’s beloved Irish mother is bedridden but this doesn’t stop him table-ending his girlfriend. McGovern and co-writer Danny Brocklehurst thus immediately raise the twin pillars of drama: death and sex.They are embodied – literally – in the pneumatic figure of Charlotte, a palliative care nurse who eases Mrs Cartwright’s passing with morphine and then – with shocking speed Read more ...