Reviews
David Nice
Sir Simon Rattle's clever programming struck again last night, showing us that musical neoclassicism - for want of a better word, which would be something like neo-everything - didn't begin with Stravinsky, whose Apollo ballet is surely his most elevated set of gestures to the past. Tchaikovsky, the rococo twiddles of whose complete Nutcracker this team seems to have enjoyed so much on a recent recording, would probably take the palm, though Mahler, of all composers, will do, too. At least, his Fourth Symphony begins that way. And soon there was more music not of this world to match Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This month's Singles & Downloads leads off with a new one from an absolute kingpin of US pop and hip hop. However, the focus is equally on the backwaters and curious places where other lively varieties of music dwell. From dancehall raucousness to erudite indie, from ranty punk to funk reinterpretations of American minimalist composition, all pop life is here and keenly assessed by Thomas H Green and Joe Muggs.Kanye West, All of the Lights (Def Jam)
It is a preposterous notion, trying to cram vocals from Elton John, Alicia Keys, Fergie, John Legend, and Elly Jackson of La Roux all onto Read more ...
fisun.guner
Ross Kemp won a Bafta for his documentary about being on the frontline in Afghanistan, so perhaps I should begin by saying all due respect, and all that, but how much can you ratchet up the hardman image before it threatens to dissolve into self-parody? And with a title like Ross Kemp: Extreme World showing on Sky 1, well, where else could we be heading?For this new series we’ll see him talking to child soldiers and victims of mutilations and rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he’ll be sniffing out bloody turf wars in Mexico, and then he’ll be back on home turf with sex trafficking Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It’s the convention to review concerts on the first night of a tour rather than the last, but in this case it transpired it was rather wise to make an exception. These two groups may make very different kinds of music, but in their questing desire to escape classification last night they seemed to share a certain esprit de corps which added to the sense of occasion.Their jaunt around the UK was a joint headline tour, requiring each group to alternate top billing. It fell to Portico Quartet to open last night, which meant a shorter set that perhaps didn’t allow them time to settle in and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It takes a certain something to make a roomful of white people get their funk on. I feel I have dispensation to make that ridiculous generalisation because Lenny Henry, famously born in Dudley to immigrant Jamaican parents, addresses the whiteness of the room the minute he comes on stage at Bromley’s Churchill Theatre, and by the end of this biographical show - part comedy, part music - the entire audience is on their feet, strutting their stuff to “Sex Machine” and “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”.Henry’s ethnicity plays a big part in Cradle to Rave: A Musical Journey, as well, of course, his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You can see why the BBC's drama gurus wanted to have a go at remaking South Riding, which last came around in 1974's hit version from Yorkshire Television. It has drama, romance, social conflict, lofty ideals and looks a bit like a parable for our cash-strapped times. Processed through the screenwriting circuitry of Andrew Davies, TV's novel-adapter par excellence, it has emerged as a superior soap tailored with mercenary expertise for that demographic sweet spot that is 9pm on a Sunday night.Winifred Holtby's 1936 novel, which was published the year after its author's death, is a story of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Anything anyone else can do, we can do better, seemed the mantra last night. It's probably a bit churlish to accuse the finest orchestra in the world of arrogance - surely that's their job? But the first night of the Berlin Philharmonic's four-day stay in London (yesterday, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, tonight and tomorrow, the Barbican), in which three of the four pieces required conductorless chamber ensembles, did seem decidedly show-offy. Can these very fine orchestral members really rattle off a quartet as well as a symphony? Not without Simon Rattle, they can't.That's not to say that Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There's nobody who plays Ashton Kutcher quite like Ashton Kutcher and, in this pleasant and undemanding romcom, he plays another cute guy whom all the girls (and boys of course) swoon over. This time he’s Adam, the sweet and rather vulnerable twentysomething son of Kevin Kline’s rascally-old-devil father, who's three-times divorced, still doing drugs, and chasing young women as his 60th birthday looms.In fact, it’s that paternal girl-chasing on which this initially episodic film turns after we have met Adam and Emma (Natalie Portman) at several points in their lives - first as teenagers Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are gifted dancers and there are creatures of the stage. You know the difference immediately. The latter have something shamanic about them, ageless at any age, almost eccentric in their power. Eva Yerbabuena is one of those very rare creatures, to whom I succumb as helplessly as a rabbit in front of a cobra.At Sadler’s Wells in an intensely emotional new production this weekend inspired by the Spanish Civil War, Cuando yo era (When I Was…) she exhibits her trademark adamantine sombreness, dressed inevitably like a granny (she did so when she was 20, she does so now she’s 40), frowning Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Forked lightning glimpsed through an aeroplane window, a silken dancer spilling stars in a snow-filled sky, a dragon tattoo etched on a man’s back: we’ve grown to expect seductive alchemy of images from the work of Quebecois master of visual theatre Robert Lepage, and in his latest show he doesn’t disappoint.For all that, The Blue Dragon – which picks up the action of director, writer and actor Lepage’s Eighties breakthrough The Dragons' Trilogy 25 years on, and is co-written with a collaborator on that piece, Marie Michaud – is a comparatively distilled piece for a theatre-maker who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When Treme debuted on HBO in the States, some excitable critics watched the pilot episode and instantly proclaimed it a masterpiece superior even to The Wire. David Simon, who created both shows, may have been delighted. Or on the other hand, he might have wondered how anybody could assess a complex, long-term portrayal of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina so categorically on so brief an acquaintance.Now Treme is here, though at the moment sadly confined to the elite mini-monde of Sky Atlantic. Having watched the pilot, I felt ill equipped to deliver a definitive judgment of Read more ...
David Nice
Too many column inches have been devoted to Percy Grainger’s sado-masochistic sexplay and celebration of blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon supremacy, but it’s his music I love. And have done ever since they celestially sounded the wineglasses for Tribute to Foster, his fantasia on "Camptown Races", at the 1982 Aldeburgh Festival (Britten had been an adoring fan). None of our main orchestras has yet taken up a similar gauntlet on the 50th anniversary of the Australian-born one-off’s death. So hurrah, in principle, for the smaller-scale enterprise of Kings Place’s four-day festival devised by pianist and Read more ...