Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
No self-mutilation or incest, but plenty of daddy issues at the Wigmore Hall last night in a musical glance through the Bach family album. Carefully keeping Johann Sebastian out of the way (presumably lest he show everyone else up and spoil the fun), Richard Egarr guided us through the work of his four composer sons. Spread across Europe from London to Hamburg and Bologna, the differing influences, fashions and character of each becomes quickly evident. Just a shame that – even in his absence – all remain so comprehensively dwarfed by their father.It was with Johann Christian, the “London” Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The great thing about the paucity of Mahler compositions is that, when anniversary time comes, his late-Romantic buddies get to join in. And some of them, like Alexander Zemlinsky in his ravishing Lyric Symphony - being given a rare outing by the London Philharmonic Orchestra last night - sometimes seem to be better at Mahler than Mahler.The Lyric Symphony is cast in the mould of Das lied von der Erde, a symphony with voices, with an Oriental text. There is also a similarity in the musical arc of the two works, both of which begin boldly and end in blissful resignation. Differences, however, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Just to fill in that blank left by the title, how do you know when you’re in love? It’s the question posed by every romantic comedy ever made, satisfactorily answered only by the good ones. James L Brooks, who wrote, produced and directed Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets, has spent a lifetime in film looking at the problem from a variety of Oscar-winning angles. If he doesn’t know how to lead an audience to the promised land, then who the hell does? So it’s good he’s at the helm here, right?Just to fill in that blank left by the title, how do you know when you’re in Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone who's imbibed the common wisdom that Russians play Chekhov for the comedy - one eye wet, the other dry and smiling - might have been alarmed to find the Moscow Sovremennik Theatre's second London offering so doomy and subdued. And the more subdued it got, the more the majority of the company went in for what's become its trademark mumbling. Not even the apocalyptic waltzes and marches of Mieczysław Weinberg's pre-recorded score nor an outstanding joint characterisation of the illicit central love affair could stop the rest of the voices, and ultimately what sympathy we had, from Read more ...
neil.smith
Canadian writer Mordecai Richler’s eclectic contribution to film includes uncredited work on Room at the Top, the screenplay for Fun with Dick and Jane and the original book behind Richard Dreyfuss’s early success The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Like that 1959 novel, his final tome, Barney’s Version, dealt with the colourful history of a Montreal Jew. Where Richler was alive to see the 1974 film of Kravitz, however, his 2001 death makes this adaptation of Barney something of a memorial to an author one suspects would be better known had he been born on the other side of the world’s Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
The spinning roulette wheel, the revolver, the devil’s mask, and above all that lissom semi-naked female gyrating in silhouette against flickering infernal flames: we all remember the opening titles to Tales of the Unexpected, which made its first TV appearance in 1979. Anyone who has also read the stories that spawned the series can vouch for their sublime slipperiness, the wicked, cackling glee that rattles through their understated prose, their winkling out of the awful and the uncanny in what appear socially ordinary situations.Now, in a follow-up to last year’s hit show Ghost Stories – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This month we have some unjustly hyped rubbish electro-pop, some unjustly ignored brilliant eletcro-pop, some postmodern retro-disco, some dubstep, some grime, some sampledelic New York punk, and, at the top of the pile, one of Britain's brightest young actors proves he's equally adept on the microphone. Thomas H Green and Joe Muggs plough loudly through the lot with glee and the odd barbed word.Riz MC All in the Ghetto (Confirm/Ignore)
So actors shouldn't try to become hip-hop MCs, right? Remember Warren Beatty in Bulworth? Riz Ahmed, however, was an MC long before he made his name with a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The second play in this venue’s ambitious Schools mini-season is the first drama to tackle the currently contentious subject of Free Schools. While the earlier play, John Donnelly’s The Knowledge, was a powerful account of how a young teacher is blooded in her encounters with a group of unruly kids, the second, by Steve Waters, focuses more on parents, and shows how a fortysomething teacher, Rachel, joins a group of middle-class west Londoners in order to set up a Free School.Rachel is under stress. Martin, her ex, has a new lover, and so he wants to leave London and move into the countryside Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
For us Ramistes the brilliance came as no surprise. But did the genius come across to the uninitiated? This new production of Castor et Pollux, one of Rameau's finest tragédie en musique, was the Baroque composer's Austrian stage premiere. Would the Theater an der Wien's audience look past the oddities and archaisms and unfamiliarities of Rameau's 300-year-old musical and dramatic language and embrace the radical nature of his leggy recitatives and proto-Romantic ebb and flow? No question. This was the theatre that embraced the premieres of Beethoven's Third and Fifth Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Club music has always been hard to keep track of, and never more so than in the current climate of constant genre meltdown and cross-fertilisation. Which is why the DJ's art is more important than ever, particularly in the case of scene figureheads like the indefatigable Gilles Peterson – known for over 20 years as a patron of all things jazzy, but lately proving brilliantly adept at reaching all corners of what he refers to as “left-field dance music”. Shows like his are ideal – necessary, even – for nurturing, contextualising and showcasing new generation genre-agnostic talents like Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The puppets appearing in LIMF this year are by no means all child-friendly - after the mild kiddy-horror of Teatro Corsario and their hand-manipulated Bunraku creatures, the return of the much more disturbing imagination of Patrick Sims, founder and governing mad scientist of Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes, was my most-looked-for event. The unhinged strangeness of Armature of the Absolute and of Shellachrymellaecum still rattles discomfitingly around in the darker corners of my memory from time to time, scratchy, dusty flutterings of skeletal critters, tiny fairy babies sobbing in jars of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s stunning, painfully sincere - if somewhat laborious - latest is a heartfelt paean to fatherhood, built around an agonising escalation of misery. It is bolstered by a mesmerising performance from Javier Bardem as a terminally ill man experiencing physical deterioration alongside spiritual elevation, who bridges the gap between this life and the next.Biutiful is set in Santa Coloma, a deprived district of Barcelona populated primarily by those on society’s fringes. Javier Bardem plays Uxbal, the father of two young children and one of the cogs in a criminal machine Read more ...