Reviews
Justine Elias
It's hard to criticise a movie that opens with a shot of an Allied G.I. spitting and urinating on a Nazi insignia, but that moment of smug satisfaction (Nazi punks must die!) is fleeting. Nuremberg, written and directed by James Vanderbilt, has more on its mind than self-congratulation.
Drawing on Jack El-Hai's book "The Nazi and the Psychiatrist" and other biographies and autobiographies, Nuremberg focuses on the complex prosecution of Hitler's second in command, Herman Goering, and 21 other top Nazi officials.
Where its esteemed predecessor, Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Read more ...
aleks.sierz
New writing for the theatre is good at taking us into the darkest of places – and there are few more painful environments than prisons and mental institutions. Places where agony radiates off the walls, and anguish is in the air we breathe. So it’s a real challenge for Sophia Griffin, in her debut play, After Sunday, at the Bush theatre, to takes us on just such a journey into an unforgiving world of distress, disappointment and despair. If the result is not completely successful, it does have an excellent cast who deliver some powerfully moving moments.
Set in a secure unit, basically a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Mozart’s unfinished C Minor mass lacks a canonical completion of the sort that Süssmayr so famously – and still contentiously – imposed on the Requiem. Even without its Agnus Dei and chunks of the Credo, however, the showpiece mass planned for the Salzburg abbey in 1783 remains a mighty and stirring piece whose choral and solo peaks more than match the later work. At St Martin’s, David Bates, his group La Nuova Musica, and the Schola Cantorum of Oxford, brought to it not just passages of period-sensitive refinement but a full-bodied, big-boned weight and depth of sound.
With almost 30 Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The title of Joy Gregory’s Whitechapel exhibition is inspired by a proverb her mother used to quote – “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar” – and her aim is to seduce rather than harangue the viewer.
It’s a good stratagem, especially if you are pointing to things your audience may prefer not to consider. And Gregory’s images can be beautiful (the seduction); but in order to avoid a diatribe, she often approaches her subject obliquely and quietens her voice to a whisper, requiring the viewer to pay close attention and hone in on the message.
If most photographers use the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Hamilton may have helped the West End recover from The Covid Years, but it carries its share of blame too. Perhaps that’s not strictly fair on some of its spawn, but do we get Coven without that musical behemoth? If not, this one’s on you Lin-Manuel.
We’re back in the early 1600s, though not in music and speech, natch. Shakespeare had written the (literally) bewitching A Midsummer Night’s Dream 15 years earlier and The Tempest, with a necromancer as its protagonist, two years prior, but, in 1612 and again in 1633, children were denouncing their families for witchcraft. Of course, as is the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
As a proposition, this production raises the immediate questions how, and why? While Suzanne Collins’s young adult series of books were logically and successfully adapted for the screen, a futuristic tale involving glittering cities and gladiatorial battles across vast natural terrain hardly seems possible, or even necessary for theatre.
Director Matthew Dunster and his superb production team answer the "how" with dazzling aplomb. Utilising the new, purpose-built Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre to excellent effect, they have created a show that is a marvel of set and lighting design, Read more ...
David Nice
At least two facts stare us unflinchingly in the face here. For all the programme’s harping on how “everyone has their own view about the death penalty,” I don’t think there was any doubt in the audience’s mind about the horror of its Old Testament vengeance. And I also doubt if anyone was ultimately left unmoved or stunned by the hard-hitting performances of a perfect cast. This is music-theatre at its riveting best.
Jake Heggie’s work, premiered 25 years ago and staged 80 times around the world to date, isn’t perfect. It starts with a haunting, lopsided flow not a million miles away from Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Regarded as one of Denmark’s most important artists, Anna Ancher is virtually unknown here, so this overview of her paintings is a revelation as well as a delight.
At roughly the same time, in the 1880s, that Gauguin quit Paris for the remote village of Pont-Aven in Brittany, other artists began moving to Skagen, a fishing village at the northernmost tip of Denmark, attracted by the light and the unspoiled beaches, dunes and heathland. Among the incomers was Michael Ancher, whom Anna married, and who liked to paint the local fishermen heroically battling the elements.
Anna was the only Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I have always been a bit ambivalent about the music of Arvo Pärt, recognising his achievement in crafting a new kind of choral music, while often finding it hard to love, especially in large doses. Which is why I welcomed the approach of the Carice Singers (with Christopher Bowers-Broadbent on the organ) and George Parris in making this concert, one of a series marking Pärt’s 90th birthday, also a celebration of a much younger Estonian composer whose music, although very different, made for an intriguing point of comparison.
Evelin Seppar (b.1986) (pictured below by by Sade-triis Read more ...
Tim Cumming
If you want a peek into a lost world of rock n roll degeneracy and decadence, you won’t find a better glory hole than the grubby, outlandish view offered by the video for “Hey Negrita” from the Rolling Stones’ 1976 album, Black & Blue.
It’s on the band’s YouTube channel, Jagger flouncing about in some lime green Latina blouse, vocally molesting pianist Billy Preston on the breakdown, and Keith and new boy Ronnie posing about in shades, their battered guitars locking in to that song’s unspeakably brilliant, filthy, sleazy groove.
Black & Blue is not high in the canon of Great Rolling Read more ...
David Nice
Britten was less in the Weekend than the annual title suggested, however significant and striking the works: a singular song cycle, an anguished early viola solo transcribed for cello and a minute-long final sketch. His influence was strong, it’s true, in unforgettable inspirations by Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Philip Moore. Their texts, by Ian McMillan and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, declared the real connection in two of the finest small-scale concerts I’ve heard this year: remembrance.
Because it was this, white-poppied as well as red, which threaded the deep thinking and feeling, and brought Read more ...
Robert Beale
Elena Schwarz was back in Manchester to conduct the BBC Philharmonic only just over two weeks since her visit to the Hallé, and again conducting some mainstream heavyweight works in which her clarity of beat and fresh approach brought rich rewards.She showed in her debut concert with the Philharmonic in 2021 and a repeat visit the following year that she can handle new music with equal assurance, and the central work in this programme was a relatively novel one: Dani Howard’s Trombone Concerto, written for and again this time performed by Peter Moore. Written during the Covid shut-down, it Read more ...