Reviews
David Nice
If you were one of the world's top soloists but with a limited concerto stock - as woodwind players' tend to be - wouldn't you find it more rewarding to work as a principal in the orchestral ranks? That's the ideal, surely, but few carry it out in practice. Nicholas Daniel, the beefiest-sounding oboist to appear on the scene since the great Maurice Bourgue, is one who does. Last night he not only shone in the bright ensemble of Beethoven's Second Symphony; he also scored a triumph with a tough new gift to him and the Britten Sinfonia, James MacMillan's latest teeming-with-life concerto.I'm Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Debuting last February at the height of the economic crisis, Jonathan Miller’s freshly minted Bohème was a timely operatic glance in the social mirror. Almost two years on, and the hardships of his young Bohemians seem no less apt. With fiscal collapse so conveniently on the horizon, a lesser director might have succumbed and offered up a “relevant” contemporary treatment. It is to Miller’s credit (and one in the eye to those critics who so routinely deplore his smugness) that he not only avoided this dramatic dead end, but eschewed the self-conscious cleverness of Così or Rigoletto, instead Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s just the one joke with Lee Nelson. When I caught a short slice of him earlier this year the joke more than filled the available slot. Nelson has since been granted his own show on BBC Three. Now that he’s out on tour, the question arises of how much celebration of chavs, benefit cheats, petty tea-leaves and other totally amoral representatives of Broken Britain you can stomach before the grin starts to get a little fixed.In the world view of Lee Nelson, a chirpy south Londoner in a baseball cap and knee-high kecks, women are all happy slags, especially the ones in the front few rows ( Read more ...
fisun.guner
Howard Jacobson, fresh from his Booker Prize triumph, was on an admirable mission last night: to rescue the good name of the Victorians. He wanted us to stop caricaturing our 19th-century forebears as prudish, self-righteous, pompous and hypocritical - you know, the sort of people who were so repressed that they went about covering piano legs in case thoughts should turn to the sensual curve of a lady’s well-turned ankle, but who were also notorious for sexual peccadillos involving underage maidservants, and worse.In other words, so maligned and misunderstood did he think the Victorians had Read more ...
David Nice
Heartfelt birthday salutations to the great pianist first known as plain Stephen Bishop. For a recital in the early 1980s, when he first added the paternal Croatian "Kovacevich", introducing me to late Brahms piano music - Op 117, never more evanescent or troubling since - and the Beethoven Tempest Sonata, an incentive to tackle that work as best I could. For many unbudgeable CDs on the shelves, including the great duo partnership with one-time other half Martha Argerich and late Schubert sonatas. And for having the characteristic modesty, last night, to give a protégée the central spot in a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A journalist’s car breaks down on a mountain road in the middle of nowhere. He’s towed to a tiny hamlet, where small stone houses are overshadowed by huge painted images of the bearded Ayatollah. A woman wearing a black chador insists on speaking to him. "There are things in this village you do not know about," she hisses. Melodramatic, yes, but this powerful, disturbing film is based on a real event in mid-Eighties Iran, which makes it easier - or perhaps harder - to bear.These first words, which she wants no villager to understand, are the only English ones; the rest of the dialogue is in Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There was also a somewhat noisy showing of (but no information about) the Weir film Armida and Other Stories. But the best part of the programme, apart from a couple of other short choral works which the choir managed with aplomb in the driest, most unhelpful acoustic imaginable, was Judith’s short conversation with the festival’s director, Joanna McGregor. They talked only about background matters, about school and university and about how and where they work. But since they are both practising musicians, this was good fly-on-the-wall stuff, and could profitably have been Read more ...
mark.hudson
People love Canaletto, and the title of this exhibition - which puts the setting of the paintings above the artist who did them - gives a good idea why. Venice as a place and an idea is perennially popular, and Canaletto gives us the big views – the Doge’s Palace, the Grand Canal, the Rialto – in painstakingly literal detail. Having tailored his craft to the tastes of British grand tourists, who hoiked his works back to their country piles as a way of saying, "We were there," he became in the 20th century the epitome of dentist-waiting-room art: art for Read more ...
bruce.dessau
There was a rumour floating around the packed Forum last night that David Cameron was in the audience. I did not spot him on my way in, but he did choose The Killers' “All These Things That I've Done” as a desert island disc in 2006 and I imagine that, being a man of firm convictions, Brandon Flowers still floats his prime-ministerial boat. Clean living, passionate, nothing too controversial – just like the PM before he pulled the knife out and started plotting to slash away at the country's finances.Flowers' first solo London show was not that different from a Killers show, except with a Read more ...
graham.rickson
It’s such a pity that the more striking elements in Franz Lehár’s orchestration are heard so fleetingly, such as the tiny glints of cimbalon which give the best parts of the score an authentic bohemian - or Pontevedran - flavour. But too often the relentless parade of waltzes and polkas begins to grate, and you’re about to nod off when suddenly something ear-catching happens – a sequence of gorgeous string portamenti, a languorous violin solo, or stopped horn chords that sound as if they’ve escaped from a Mahler symphony. Then you recall that The Merry Widow was first performed in Vienna in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s an interesting concept that Adam Hills has come up with for his latest show, Mess Around. The ever-smiling and hugely likeable Australian - a longtime sellout hit at the Edinburgh Fringe but who has yet to make a broader breakthrough like his peers - is a past master of audience interaction, so why not ditch the material and make that the show?“Less a show and more of a chat,” he calls it, and I’m sure that when this approach works, on those nights when he mines a seam of comedy gold among his fans, that it can be huge fun. But on the first night of his 10-show run at Soho and despite Read more ...