Reviews
Russ Coffey
For about an hour in Hammersmith last October it seemed that all 2011's new music had coagulated into some kind of supernova and was exploding on stage. There were two drum kits, nine musicians, and a nerdy, lanky man singing like an alien. The support act had told us to expect something special and was it ever: Bon Iver’s extraordinary live reimagining of their bucolic, eponymous album took in folk, prog, soul, metal and avant garde. It also pretty much embodied my review year.Decibel for decibel Justin Vernon's folkies were now up there with Queens of the Stone Age who'd brought the Read more ...
graham.rickson
The most memorable evening I spent in 2011 was as a paying punter, not a critic, listening to incendiary readings of Sibelius’s Tapiola and Mahler’s sprawling Symphony no 7, given by an augmented Orchestra of Opera North in Leeds Town Hall last March. Conducted by Jac van Steen, the symphony sounded terrific, but couldn’t help seeming baggy and long-winded after a chilling performance of Sibelius's unsettling late masterpiece. I enjoyed Opera North’s flamboyant, ketchup-splattered Carmen, which director Daniel Kramer transposed to a trashy American trailer park. The company’s semi-staged, Read more ...
peter.quinn
2011 can only be described as a banner year for vocal jazz. Gretchen Parlato is blessed with one of the most mellifluous timbres in jazz, but it's her highly developed rhythmic concept that really marks her out. Like some of the great Brazilian singers, Parlato can make the bar line disappear. It helps that she's got a killing band, and together on The Lost and Found they perform the subtlest metrical shifts in the blink of an eye.Gretchen Parlato performs "How We Love" (excerpt) from The Lost and FoundTwo world-class UK singers, Ian Shaw and Liane Carroll, both released career-best Read more ...
judith.flanders
Highlights of the year are always interesting. Things you loved at the time do, sometimes surprisingly, fade very quickly. I really enjoyed the Gabriel Orozco retrospective at the Tate: I thought it inventive and exciting. But now I have hardly any memory of it, and can no longer visualise what enthused me. (Well, apart from the sweet photos of two scooters flirting with each other. But that’s really not enough.)By contrast, the Wellcome’s show of ex-voto panels from Mexico (main picture, above), the small thanks-offerings painted to record miraculous intercessions from the saints in the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
My Top 10 movies of 2011, in order, are: Mysteries of Lisbon, Melancholia, Meek’s Cutoff, A Dangerous Method, Aurora, Hugo, The Princess of Montpensier, City of Life and Death, The Descendants, Midnight in Paris.While I couldn't sneak a British title onto that list, it seems to me that UK film is flourishing for the first time since the false dawn of the 1980s. It would be folly to suggest a renaissance is afoot, but it's clearly an exciting time. Lynne Ramsey, who should be making a movie annually, returned after a nine-year hiatus with Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It took a relatively little-noticed television documentary, Vlad’s Army, broadcast in Channel 4’s Unreported World strand to confirm that theartsdesk has a readership in Russia. Peter Oborne’s film (the presenter pictured below) caught the pro-Kremlin youth movement, the Nashi, with its defences down, and the result depicted, no holds barred, how politics works there today. Recent events hint, somewhat unexpectedly, that political change in the country is in the air; at the least what had seemed a depressingly predictable certainty before December’s elections now at least now looks up for Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's interesting to consider at what point in someone's career does he or she become a national treasure - as Alan Bennett once so scathingly remarked, “If you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel prize” - but there can surely be no debate about whether Dame Judi Dench deserves her status.Geoffrey Palmer said of his co-star for several years on the BBC sitcom As Time Goes By, “She's everything that everyone says about her” - and what they had to say about her in Charlie Stuart's The Many Faces of Dame Judi Dench was overwhelmingly nice Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The year’s best arts story was not the cuts (which isn’t art, it’s politics), but the appearance in Edinburgh of a mysterious series of 10 magical little paper sculptures, smuggled into the city’s libraries by a booklover. No name, no Simon Cowell contract - it proved the innocent gloriousness of the human impulse to make art, a joy that has no expectation of reward but without which no existence is possible.An incredible cornucopia of ballerina artistry showed that the interpretation of existing work is just as necessary to the soul as the surprise of new creation. Alina Cojocaru, Sylvie Read more ...
bruce.dessau
I have always fought hard to resist nostalgia, but 2011 was the year when I succumbed. Maybe the present – and the future – was just too awful to contemplate, but I found myself constantly looking back. Whether it was onstage, onscreen or on a hand-held device the past seemed to provide the requisite cultural comfort food. Dessau Towers remains a dubstep-free zone.The tipping point was one weekend in July when Morrissey pitched up in a Kent field and delivered a sublime greatest hits set. Like many middle-aged people he went through a phase of rejecting his youthful outbursts, but now he is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
My highlight was the sudden, last-gasp chance to see Mark Rylance as Johnny Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, on its unexpected return to the West End. A cheap weekday matinee ticket found me in the front row, Rylance looming over me from the high stage, spewing alcohol; an unsteady, limping Lord of Misrule and, if he only could pull himself together, of a new Peasant’s Revolt against the unjust times we’re suffering. It seemed unbelievable he’d go through the whole thing again that night. Like Dominic West as McNulty in The Wire, I don’t want to spoil the spell by seeing him as anyone Read more ...
emma.simmonds
One of film’s most inspiring artists, Walt Disney, once said, “Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.” With the seemingly anachronistic The Artist, French director Michel Hazanavicius proves this to be as true as ever - even in this technologically adventurous age with its all too frequent bombastic sound. Hazanavicius boldly strips cinema back to its wordless, monochrome days and, boy, does the end result sparkle.More than 50 years after the French New Wave both celebrated and defied the Hollywood filmic formula, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
We have, thankfully, long since moved beyond the point where there's any need to delineate or categorise works of art according to gender. However, looking back at 2011 it's hard to escape the conclusion that the most compelling music emerged from the mouths and minds of women.Mara Carlyle’s Floreat is simply a triumph. Her songs depart from points as varied as John Dowland and Hot Chip to encompass music hall, jazz, classical and peppy electronic pop, all strung together to create something unified and entirely her own. There’s nothing clever-clever about any of it, and while at times deeply Read more ...