Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
Why so many empty seats at last night’s Prom? Bringing together several choruses, a percussion-augmented orchestra, dancers, actors, rock-band and children’s choir, Leonard Bernstein’s Mass is surely a Proms dream – a genuinely eclectic work with something for just about everybody. But even as some 11 different Welsh ensembles sung, jived, clapped and shouted for our entertainment yesterday, there was no getting away from the issues with Bernstein’s ageing, mongrel score.Part oratorio, part music-theatre, part liturgical rite, Mass is an awkward work to assimilate, let alone stage. Unlike the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Camille O'Sullivan: Changeling, Assembly Rooms *****The Assembly Rooms may have reopened for this year's Fringe following a very swanky refurb, but someone obviously forgot to put sufficient thought into the practicalities of getting people in and out during the festival. The opening night of Camille O’Sullivan’s brief sold-out run started 40 minutes late after a chaotic queuing system apparently devised in tribute to MC Escher left much of the crowd – which, thrillingly, included Les Dennis – more than a little testy.It’s testament to O’Sullivan’s charisma and gifts as a performer that Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Ravel composed only two operas, both one-acters, widely separated in time, superficially very different, but both in a way about the same thing: naughtiness. In L’Heure espagnole (1911), the clockmaker’s wife, Conceptión, entertains a succession of would-be lovers in her husband’s absence. In L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1924), the little boy who won’t do his homework, who smashes the teapot, pulls the cat’s tail and rips the wallpaper, suddenly finds his victims coming to life and scaring him to death.Naughtiness, rather than wickedness: Torquemada, the clockmaker, turns a blind eye on his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Trojan Presents Freedom Sounds, a Celebration of Jamaican MusicKieron TylerThree-and-a-half minutes in, a heavily reverbed drum suddenly rattles and the track heads off into outer space. Morse-code bass dominates, the hi-hat swishes and odd bits of the full instrumental track waft in and out. Something like a home fire alarm bleeps. “None Shall Escape the Judgement” begins normally enough, a mid-tempo two-step reggae shuffler with a swooning, devotional vocal from Johnny Clarke. But really, it's two songs in one, that second half the creation of sonic auteur King Tubby and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Elgar: Enigma Variations, Cockaigne Overture, Pomp and Circumstance Marches 1-5 Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Barry Wordsworth (RPO)Never underestimate the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Less generously funded than the other major London orchestras, most of their concerts are now given in the lovely Cadogan Hall near Sloane Square and not the Festival Hall. They soared under the directorship of Daniele Gatti, and are currently led by Charles Dutoit. And while their string sound is occasionally less refulgent than that of the LSO or Philharmonia, their brass and winds are consistently Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a lot of sport about at the minute, and those of us who get off on it are filling our boots. So it’s perhaps not the ideal moment to release a sporting documentary, however rousing, however laudable, especially one about that most unOlympic of team games, US football. If Undefeated makes a legitimate claim on the attention, it’s because it is all about legacy, that ubiquitous buzz word of London 2012.The drama of this improving documentary unfolds in a working-class area of North Memphis, Tennessee, which has entered a downward spiral after the closure of the local industrial plant. Read more ...
charlotte.gardner
What better work for Harry Bicket and The English Concert to perform at the Proms than Bach's joyous Mass in B Minor. Joyous firstly because of the music itself, with its vast stylistic and emotional range. Joyous secondly because, despite the intense scholarship to which Bach and his music have been subjected over the years, its genesis remains unusually shrouded in mystery for such a major work.While it seems likely that Bach viewed the work as a summation and climax of his life's music, that's about as much as we can guess. There's no evidence to suggest that he performed it as a whole Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Julien Temple’s new documentary is a timely accompaniment to the London Olympics. While the Games casts a spotlight on the capital, the film offers a wondrously dense and evocative, warts-and-all portrait of the city.And oddly enough, it has echoes of the Olympic opening ceremony. Just as Danny Boyle used live spectacle, clips and music to celebrate the city’s enviable cosmopolitanism, so Temple draws on a treasure trove of archive material and his own deep familiarity with British music to present the complex story behind that multiculturalism.In essence, this is a history of London from the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
When Complicite conceived their beautiful A Disappearing Number they gave maths energy, drama, and above all watchability, but they never quite brought the heart. In Simon Stephens’s new adaptation, A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has it in abundance (as well of course as a dead bee, a live rat, three beer cans and 20-odd metres of model train-track). When you can persuade an audience to stay behind after the curtain-call for a mini maths tutorial you’re doing something right; when you can reduce them to tears with it you’re doing something miraculous.Christopher (Luke Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Plenty of great films have been made about old age, about the humiliations, emotions, fragilities and joys of the end of life. Wild Strawberries, Harold and Maude, Venus, Driving Miss Daisy, even Pixar’s Up probably has a claim on this category, but Asia, with its regard for the elderly, has always had a special cinematic affinity for the subject. Following in the path of Kurosawa’s Ikiru, A Simple Life explores and exposes with infinite delicacy the relationship between an ageing Hong Kong servant and her employer.Ah Tao (Deanie Ip) has worked for the same family for 40 years, bringing up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What do you do after nine series celebrating the cooking and eating of food? You make another, charting the effort to lose some of the weight gained. This time out, the bike-riding Si King and David Myers are still eating and travelling, but trying to adjust what they put in their mouths, to make it less calorie-tastic. Some exercise was on the menu too. As was selling copies of the tie-in book.King and Myers are agreeable enough in small doses – and ought to know how to be after their careers in TV and film production which preceded their transformation into the Hairy Bikers. Their banter is Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Diamanda Galas is a woman who once wrote a book called Sh*t of God and whose avant-garde screeching on subjects like AIDS and schizophrenia frequently takes gothic into an area where it could scare bats. Her CV includes stints as a research scientist, prostitute and drug addict. Unsurprisingly, she isn’t normally seen in context. But then there aren’t many line-ups quite like Antony Hegerty’s 2012 Meltdown, where for a month dissident singers rub shoulders with twilight artists. In fact, on a bill also including the likes of Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and Marc Almond, Galas seems amongst peers Read more ...