Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Back in 1979, Koko operated as The Music Machine. As such, the Camden Town venue lent its name to the film Music Machine, marketed as the British equivalent of Saturday Night Fever. Buying into this vision of the North London setting as a hot-bed of dance-floor action required a suspension of belief: at the time, the then-grubby Music Machine’s staple bookings were metal, punk, post-punk and the emerging Two-Tone bands. This was no disco.Flash forward to 2024, and the New York-based Say She She are headlining the recently refurbished Koko. With their roots in late Sixties soul, mid-Seventies Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, about the key role caste systems play in subjugating whole racial groups, was a runaway success in the US in 2020. Here, the Pultizer-Prize winning black journalist is not so well known. Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of her book aims to change that.DuVernay has all the tools for creating a passionate polemic. She has already made a hard-hitting documentary, 13th, about egregious injustices in the US prison system that penalise blacks, as well as the TV series When They See Us, about the miscarriage of justice surrounding the Read more ...
James Saynor
Filmmakers of note make long movies for different reasons. Sometimes they may want the viewer to be so immersed in the movie they become “kidnapped” by it, to borrow an idea from Susan Sontag. (Epics by auteurs like Greece’s Theo Angelopoulis or Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan may be in this bracket.)Sometimes – whisper it softly – directors such as Martin Scorsese may not always have the full measure of a story’s pacing. And sometimes filmmakers are just bonkers trash-art weirdos who want to annoy the hell out of everyone, audiences and movie financiers alike. Such appears to be the case with Read more ...
David Nice
Chances are few enough to catch Polish composer Szymanowski’s densely brilliant 1920s score for a ballet about love in the Tatra mountains. Harnasie (Robbers) is so little known that we need a clear line through action and sung text. That all went out of the window in the projections of renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor and visual artist Ben Cullen Williams. It was the final nail in the coffin of an evening where excellent work from Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra was sabotaged at every turn.The beautiful bodies of three dancers from Company Wayne McGregor made a good Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The notion of prison as a pressure cooker of human behaviour and emotions is hardly a new one, but it can provide formidable fuel for drama. It does so here in this ferociously gripping Danish series, which hails from the same production company as The Killing and The Bridge. It also boasts a forceful roster of acting talent, not least Sofie Gråbøl (aka Sarah Lund from The Killing) and David Dencik (from Chernobyl and McMafia, among other things).Both of them play prison guards at an establishment known as the House ("Huset" in Danish), where they and their fellow-warders are enmeshed in Read more ...
The Art of Fugue, Schiff, Nosrati, Wigmore Hall review - rarity and quality in music and performance
Ed Vulliamy
At the start of his 75-minute pre-concert lecture on Sunday, the incomparable András Schiff staked quite a claim for the piece he was about to perform: Bach’s The Art of Fugue was, he said: “the greatest work by the greatest composer who ever lived”.And a wise one: this concert was only the second time he would ever play it, the first having been in Berlin last January. Because, he said: “I’ve waited 70 years to play this work… You cannot climb Mount Everest immediately… this is the climax.”He continued with a poetic clarity akin to that of the piece itself. On the fact that it is unfinished Read more ...
David Nice
“All discord without this circumference,” the Duchess of Malfi tells the good man she’s just asked to be her husband, “is only to be pitied and not feared”. Perhaps the villains should be more feared and less pitied in the imbalanced casting of Rachel Bagshaw’s clear and yet still atmospheric new production of Webster’s supposed shocker.It’s to Bagshaw’s credit and the riveting performances of Francesca Mills as the Duchess, Oliver Huband as her beloved Antonio and Shazia Nicholls as her faithful Cariola that good resonates more powerfully than evil here, even if two of them end up strangled Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It takes a talented comic to turn a horrible life experience into comedy, but Miles Jupp is nothing if not talented. Add in a bit of self-depreciation, a smidgen of philosophical musing and a dollop of ruderies about bodily functions and you have On I Bang, which charts the comic's diagnosis with – and, thankfully, recovery from – a benign brain tumour.Jupp starts at the beginning: August 2021 and the Jupp family are on holiday. As with much of the comic's material, it anecdotally describes the everydayness of most people's lives, and, more specifically, the daily frustrations of being Miles Read more ...
David Nice
How lucky those of us were who grew up musically with the young Simon Rattle’s highly original programming in the 1980s. He’s still doing it at a time when diminishing resources can dictate more careful repertoire, and last night’s Americana proved spectacularly original. Four of the five works gave a different perspective on the decade and a half in which Shostakovich’s very different Fourth Symphony, LSO triumph of the earlier part of the week, failed to reach public performance.Did the sequence work? Not entirely. Bookending a John Adams premiere, an unfamiliar expansion of Gershwin’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHMito y Comadre Guajirando (ZZK)Mito y Comadre are Guillermo Lares and Shana Comadre, a Bogota-based pair of Venezuelans whose debut album is produced by Christian Castagno (a man who’s more likely to be found helming outings by Iggy Pop, Arcade Fire and others). The duo are deep-dipped in their heritage, embracing an array of traditional instruments that I can’t even locate by name via Google (the quichimba, the macizón, etc). Such ignorance is no hindrance to adoring this music, heavily lathered and danceable funk and lively upbeat spirit, with electronic twiddlings and Read more ...
David Nice
Light and grace must flood the concert hall in Haydn’s The Creation, after a striking-for-its time evocation of Chaos, and periwigged creatures skip around the Genesis picture. With Edward Gardner keeping the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus on their dancing toes, as ever, and three fine soloists carrying the creatures’ share of the beauties, it was a good time for happy creativity.Happily, too, Haydn inclines more in this often intimate oratorio to the instrumental originality of his symphonies than to the strangely vacuous world of his operas. You still sometimes feel that the arias Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dennis Villeneuve’s Dune sequel is a sombre science-fiction spectacle that insists on the scale of cinema: erupting sandworms are Cecil B. DeMille colossal, the sound design centred on Hans Zimmer’s score thunderously enveloping. In a genre once jokingly called space opera, its grand aristocratic dynasties and passions justify the term.It also treats its 1965 Frank Herbert source as a classic novel, teasing out abiding themes from its proto-hippie era. Vietnam-style aerial gunships hover, and atomic warfare, religious faith and extremism, ecology and colonialism give the narrative sinew.We Read more ...