Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Vanessa Paradis is a card-carrying icon, but for us Brits the reason why is hard to define. After the hyper-cute “Joe le taxi” hit the charts in 1987 when she was 14, Paradis didn’t carve a musical career here. Being the partner of Johnny Depp is her usual route into the press. As an actress, she attracts attention when her films get a British release. Last night was a rare chance to see whether her music could stand on its own, and make her more than a cipher.In France, she’s not wildly prolific musically: she’s issued 10 albums, the first in 1988. But four were live sets and one a best-of. Read more ...
David Nice
As Mahler symphonies rain down from heaven - or flare up from hell, according to your viewpoint - in this second anniversary year, it's wise to choose carefully. But why earmark Jiří Bělohlávek's performance of the Sixth above the likes of Gergiev, Dudamel, Jurowski or Maazel? Because he's been working his way through the cycle with his BBC orchestra at the careful rate of one a year; because he knows what space to give, and what colours to draw; and above all, because he refuses to batter our hearts too fiercely too soon - crucial for the most insistent tragic chapter in Mahler's symphonic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"We've got a product a fella's got to have," decreed Nucky Thompson, the County Treasurer in Atlantic City the day Prohibition came into force. "Better still, we've got a product he's not allowed to have."For Nucky and his cronies running the garish New Jersey resort, with a brazen criminality that makes our homegrown likes of T Dan Smith look like laughable amateurs in the art of graft, Prohibition was the best business opportunity they were ever going to have. They'd taken judicious steps to guarantee supplies of illegal liquor, either distilled or imported, and now they could add on a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Wigmore Hall, with its laboriously marbled and gilded period interior, doesn’t exactly scream “rebellion”. Yet for the second time in as many months its conservative classical crowd saw recital conventions discarded like the too-tight bow tie that they are. Players strolled on with relaxed ease, discovered a jam session in progress and decided to join in the fun. The guitars may have been of the Baroque variety, the drum kit replaced with tambour and tambourine, and the bass-line provided by a violone, but last night mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená fronted quite the coolest gig in town. Read more ...
judith.flanders
Jardin aux Lilas is one of ABT’s great calling cards, and it was danced with great seriousness of purpose and devotion by an admirably schooled cast. This short ballet, to "Poème" by Chausson (admirably played by a pick-up orchestra), is one of psychology rather than action. In an Edwardian garden, Caroline (the distinguished Julie Kent, as youthful as when she joined the company 25 years ago), is about to marry a man she doesn’t love. She has a brief meeting with the man she does love (Cory Stearns, well cast); in turn, her fiancé, a stuffed shirt, is approached by his now-discarded mistress Read more ...
graham.rickson
Based on a short story by Gogol, Alexander Medvedev’s libretto for Mieczysław Weinberg’s The Portrait was originally conceived for Shostakovich. It was subsequently passed to Weinberg, who finished his opera in 1980. It’s a bleak, Faustian tale of a struggling artist who buys the eponymous painting, after which material success is mirrored by moral collapse.You can’t help making comparisons between Weinberg’s musical style and that of his mentor. It’s audible in the staccato wind writing and angular string lines in the first act. Weinberg’s gift is for suggesting character with the most Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Gang of Four vocalist Jon King remembers the last time he was in Heaven – the venue, not the celestial aftershow party. It was the night of the Great Hurricane of 1987 and as he walked down nearby Villiers Street later that evening two trees blew past him. "It was a gusty night," he recalled onstage with a smile last night. The question was could the latest Gang of Four line-up blow up their very own storm in WC2?The answer is a defiant yes. With a decent first original album in 16 years, Content, under their belts, original members, King and guitarist Andy Gill, plus new boys Mark Heaney on Read more ...
carole.woddis
Back in the early 1960s, anyone with half a curious cultural brain in their heads would take themselves off to small fleapit cinemas like The Academy or the Classic in Oxford Street (now defunct). There you could catch the latest European art film. And at one of these I remember seeing Italian director Antonioni’s La Notte with Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. Such was its impact that neither I nor the flat mates I was with were able to utter a word until we reached home.That, of course, may have been due to the fact that we were confused and not willing to show it; on the other Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Dragon Opera (or Opera’r Ddraig, if you insist: they don’t) is in every sense a young company, founded a mere two years ago, and based at Cardiff’s Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Its singers, directors and orchestral players are nearly all recent or current students at the college, the company is run by recent graduates, and its funding is set up by a student collective called RepCo, run from the RWCMD, and parent also to a couple of student orchestras and a community choir. Even the audience is, for once, not the usual gathering of senior citizens. In terms of arts enterprise, this Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It seems to me that Esben and the Witch would like to perform in absolute darkness. Or perhaps in silhouette behind a screen like an oriental shadowplay. Such a theatrical device might even suit their dark, menacing music. Instead, two of the three band members have to make do with a curtain of hair between themselves and the audience. Young and shy, they deliver their moody, occasionally explosive music with low-key confidence and, in fact, their slight awkwardness in front of a crowd only enhances the edginess of the atmospherics.Outside, the Brighton night is aptly overcome with mist which Read more ...
peter.quinn
As star pianist Gwilym Simcock amusingly recalled during his solo set last night, German efficiency almost scuppered the making of his latest and universally acclaimed release, Good Days at Schloss Elmau. Recorded at the deluxe Alpine spa in just a single day last September, the pianist's Herculean keyboard feats were made against a subliminal backing track of meadows being mown and kitchen deliveries being made. The results, tractors and bratwurst notwithstanding, suggest that the crisp mountain air clearly agreed with him.Launching the album in the slightly less tony environs of Camden Read more ...