Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Revisiting Brighton Rock was bound to cause an uproar. A couple of weeks ago, The Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer launched a ferocious assault on Rowan Joffe’s new screen version of Graham Greene's novel, while admitting he hadn’t seen it. Mind you, he had read some hostile comments on the internet. “Well ought to have been left alone,” he decreed.Joffe’s film has little hope of acquiring the mythic status of the 1947 John Boulting version, as he’s doubtless well aware. But Joffe’s line is that he didn’t set out to remake the Boulting film, but to shoot a new interpretation of Greene’s book. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For a while in the 1990s, the NASDAQ of polar exploration knocked Scott off his plinth and installed Shackleton as Britain’s favourite Antarctic hero. To a modern sensibility, survival seemed a more laudable pursuit than sacrifice. Better a live donkey, as Shackleton phlegmatically put it when turning home 90 miles from the South Pole, than a dead lion. For decades Scott has been comprehensively, even vindictively rubbished by the revisionist historian Roland Huntford. He was the one who pointed out that someone would have had to undo those tent ties for Oates to go outside and be some time, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
So Starbucks-like is its reach, so tarnished its modern legacy, it's easy to overlook just how brilliant the ideology of Christianity is. How seductively counterintuitive the idea of a God who was not just a man but a bum of a man must have seemed. Not until the Arab warrior Muhammed came to his calling was Christianity's first strategy seriously challenged. That winning early Christian message, which sought to seize hearts and minds through self-effacement, is what Elgar seems to seek to capture in The Kingdom. It was receiving a rare performance last night at the Barbican. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Revisiting Brighton Rock was bound to cause uproar. A couple of weeks ago, the Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer launched a ferocious assault on Rowan Joffe’s new screen version of Graham Greene's novel, while admitting he hadn’t seen it. Mind you, he had read some hostile comments on the internet. “Well ought to have been left alone,” he decreed.Joffe’s film has little hope of acquiring the same mythic status as the 1947 John Boulting version, as he’s doubtless well aware. But Joffe’s line is that he didn’t set out to remake the Boulting film, but to shoot a new interpretation of Greene’s book Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A midwinter night’s dream at the Barbican. Those who like their pop music performed by chaps with jeans, preferably gazing at their shoes, and are attached to certain ideas of authenticity would have run screaming for the exit. The Irrepressibles were pop as icy spectacle, as dizzying melodrama, while Gabby Young & Other Animals were raiding the musical dressing-up box and emerging with bits of French chanson, German cabaret and slinky tangos, and having a ball doing it.Gabby Young’s band created their own party atmosphere and invited the audience along. Their brand of recession chic Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It was with Mahler’s Opus 1 – folkloric cantata Das klagende lied – that Vladimir Jurowski so memorably launched his role as the LPO’s principal conductor, and it was to this work that he returned last night. Four years on and he asked his audience to consider it within a rather different narrative; in lieu of an arc of Germanic development, moving from Wagner’s Parsifal Prelude to Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, Jurowski instead framed it with Hungarian works from Bartók and Ligeti. While the dialogue between these three exploratory pieces may have been more oblique, Jurowski’s highly Read more ...
graeme.thomson
When the spotlight caught Teddy Thompson in profile last night it seemed to capture the physiology of an old-school country icon: tall and lean, his pale, angular face appeared all the more classically archetypal jutting out from his jet-black clothes. He certainly looked the part. By the end he had proved – to a degree far beyond any evidence presented on his recorded work - that he could sing it, too.This concert proved that if the son of Richard and Linda Thompson has inherited anything at all from his parents it is his father’s sense of crafted professionalism and his mother’s vocal Read more ...
David Nice
Believe it or not, some critics can't get enough of London's superabundant concert scene. I could hardly be sour about not catching Gustavo Dudamel's first Barbican concert on Thursday night, spellbound as I was by his predecessor at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, spinning such insidiously beautiful Bartók with the Philharmonia over on the South Bank. Yesterday lunchtime I caught Dudamel coaching 80 of the city's young musicians in the finale of the Beethoven Seventh I'd missed before he went on that night to conduct Mahler's Ninth, surely the symphonic repertoire's supreme Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Take one venerated living pianist and one venerated epic of the piano canon and what do you get? Two and a half hours of the most inert pianism imaginable.That there was a human with a pulse performing the first book of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier was only confirmed about half an hour in. A flicker of emotion, variety, suppleness, reared its head in the E-flat prelude. Character attempted to creep into proceedings briefly in the Fugue in E major. Any flashes of communication, generosity, warmth, rhythmic lightness or dynamic expression that one encountered were Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Plays these days come not in single spies but in battalions of two, whether you're talking The Master Builder, King Lear or The Cherry Orchard, the last of which closes the visiting Sovremennik Russian theatre troupe's three-play season only to resurface at the National's Olivier in May, with Zoë Wanamaker playing the baleful, vainglorious Ranevskaya at this play's wounded heart. Here, then, is a chance to catch Chekhov's last work presented by his countrymen before the Westerners do their number on him (yet again) come spring. And the result? Wanamaker et al have a hard act to follow, let's Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Christine Brewer singing American song – it’s like Judi Dench in Shakespeare, or an Aaron Sorkin screenplay: it just doesn’t get any better. Forcing the restrained acoustic of the Wigmore to ring as though it were St Paul’s, and persuading a white-haired Friday-night crowd to whoop and clap between numbers until cut off by the next piano introduction, it’s hard to say whether Brewer’s voice or personality carries greater weight. Every bit the equal of the “glad, great-throated nightingale” she sang of, her repertoire may have been from a bygone era but there was nothing dusty about this Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There had been murmurings that his star had dimmed. That Gustavo Dudamel's partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (greeted with such fanfare in 2009) had yet to set the West Coast on fire. Had this Icarus flown too high? Would their debut visit to the Barbican last night resemble Breughel's fall, Latino legs flailing in an orchestral sea? Not a bit of it.Admittedly, we had to wait until the second half for something truly special to happen. The first half didn't really give Dudamel much chance to show off any of his many talents. In the John Adams opener, Slonimsky's Earbox (1995), Read more ...