Reviews
geoff brown
Two weeks to go to the Olympics, of course, but the Proms Olympics – 84 concerts in 60 days – have already taken off, with Britain placed first, second, third and fourth. For last night’s First Night concert was one where everything except Canadian singer Gerald Finley was British: the composers, the conductors (all four of them), the orchestra, certainly the weather.There was also something distinctly British about the concert’s failure to be unquenchably festive. The best of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s playing, and some of the BBC Symphony Chorus’s most ravishing sounds, went into Delius’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: War Requiem Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Choir, Netherlands Children’s Choir/Jaap van Zweden and Reinbert de Leeuw (Challenge)One of classical music’s most unlikely popular successes, Britten’s War Requiem was premiered 50 years ago in Coventry Cathedral. The composer taped the work shortly afterwards and the resulting LP became an unexpected bestseller. For this not an easy work to enjoy, let alone love. The relentless greyness can quickly become oppressive, and there are times when you can feel like you’re receiving a lecture. Fortunately, this Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In romantic comedy, the task of the leads is to overcome whatever obstacles are thrown in their way to find true love before the closing credits. In Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, that imperative takes on a particular urgency. A larger obstacle awaits than the mutual antipathy that usually keeps the hero and heroine apart: namely, the eponymously predicted End of Days. An asteroid is heading Earthwards. Humanity has three weeks to put its affairs in order, get its insurance claims in and prepare to meet such Makers as exist.For certain parties that means ducking out of dead-end Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It is sometimes hard to be enthused by midweek gigs. Last night was one of those occasions, at least for the 30 seconds I thought I was going to be watching most of the show on the iPhone screen of the six feet of beard that planked itself in front of me just in time for the music starting. Those are the nights you need, as Sharon van Etten might say, “something that’s hard to describe”. Something that changes your mood, and makes you smile, and doesn’t happen all of the time. Something fun.If you’re at all familiar with Tramp, the third album from Brooklyn-based van Etten which came out at Read more ...
David Nice
Pardon the anomaly of a lightly browned-up Latvian Moor married to a German-Greek beauty. This, after all, is not Shakespeare’s play but Verdi’s opera, for which all too few are born to sing heroic tenor Otello and lyric-dramatic soprano Desdemona. Great singing from Aleksandrs Antonenko and great everything from Anja Harteros vindicate Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano’s decision to give Elijah Moshinsky’s 25-year-old production a proud place in the World Shakespeare Festival and to mix finesse with power in realizing every facet of this astonishing score.The framework still holds Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It’s hardly incredible for a film to focus on teenagers running wild, not least because teens are such reliably enthusiastic cinema-goers. US cinema in particular is riddled with youthful misbehaviour, with suburban kids coming of age whilst living large in films as variable in quality and tone as Thirteen, Youth in Revolt and Project X. In The Giants, from Belgian director Bouli Lanners (Eldorado), three teens go wild but in a very different way: they’re forced to return to nature as a consequence of parental neglect.The Giants presents its bleeding heart in the glossy wrapping of a Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
If your evening regime involves lying on the sofa with a KFC boneless banquet wedged between your knees and a bucket of Fanta, complete with multi-angled drinking straw to prevent unnecessary movement, under your armpit, then you would have been forgiven for avoiding The Men Who Made Us Fat. Who, after all, wants to spend their downtime being made to feel like a self-harming, NHS-crushing lard-arse? If, however, you subsist on twig tea and a diet of dandelions washed in spring water by tiny winged seraphs, you might have felt compelled to watch, if only to reaffirm your disdain for the junk Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The lugubrious soulfulness of Adrien Brody is not to all tastes, and in many cases is wholly inappropriate, but his casting in Tony Kaye's downbeat meditation on education, or the lack of it, is masterly. Brody plays Henry Barthes, a substitute teacher drafted in to plug a temporary gap in a failing school in some unspecified American city. He has a natural gift for teaching, but by never taking up a permanent post he's able to avoid painful emotional attachments. He lingers just long enough to gives some of his pupils a glimpse of what learning actually means before snatching it away again. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I have to be honest - I didn’t go to very much of Nova. Suffice to say I’d put my name down to review it and then fate threw a house move into the mix in the same week. Nevertheless, relatively undaunted, I planned to head down to the Pulborough site in West Sussex, only 20 miles from where I live, taking my two daughters along. Then I lost my driving license. And then it started raining and didn’t stop.While I’ve no truck whatsoever with the British media’s obsession with festivals being a misery of mud, dragging children to them in bad weather can be very unrewarding (especially, I reckoned Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Three paintings by Titian depicting stories from Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses welcome you to the National Gallery’s exhibition Metamorphosis: Titian 2012. Diana and Callisto shows Diana casting out the pregnant nymph Callisto from her company. Diana and Actaeon depicts the young Actaeon out hunting and stumbling into a sacred grotto where Diana and her nymphs are bathing; and in The Death of Actaeon, we see the goddess exacting vengeance on the intruder by turning him into a stag to be torn to pieces by his own hounds.You may remember the public appeals that helped save these splendid paintings Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Stonehenge, the monumental mystery of Britain’s past, decked out like a laundry yard with drying white vests and flowerpots scattered among its gigantic monoliths. It makes a most disconcerting image, and it is the precursive tableau that the public should not miss if they make the trek out to Salisbury Plain tonight or tomorrow for one of the Cultural Olympiad’s stranger installations. Get there before it all starts.For three nights only, the great landmark and treasure of world civilisation becomes the magisterially named Stonehenge Fire Garden, centrepiece of Salisbury Arts Festival, Read more ...
carole.woddis
At the end of The Riots, the Tricycle Theatre’s verbatim response to last year’s upheavals edited by Gillian Slovo and Cressida Brown, a local Muslim whose home was burnt down in Tottenham was asked to give his view on why it had happened. He summed it up with three words: “Just – angry – people.”Richmond’s excellent Orange Tree has now come up with another, even more urgent analysis adding further flesh to those three words, if little consolation. From their young writers group comes 23-year-old Archie W Maddocks’ Mottled Lines, taken from observation, his own life experiences and, as he Read more ...