Reviews
Veronica Lee
As any successful entrepreneur will tell you, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” - so the sixth series of both these shows returned with just a few cosmetic changes. The muted opening is in tune with the times, Sir Alan Sugar is now the more ennobled Lord Sugar, the wonderful Margaret Mountford (who has gone back to her papyrology PhD) has been replaced in aide-de-camp duties by businesswoman and West Ham Football Cub executive Karren Brady, and Adrian Chiles (recently departed to ITV) by comic Dara Ó Briain. But in style, format and, most importantly, bombastic cliché by the 16 hopefuls Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I would call them burglars: musicians from the experimental rock, electronica and sound-art traditions who cross the genre divide, sneak into the world of classical music, pillage its more easily pillaged valuables, thieve its respectability, filch its original ideas, and sprint back breathlessly to their wide-eyed fans to show off this brilliantly clever "new" classical music (much of which is made up of techniques that George Benjamin would have grown out of by the age of six) in double quick time lest someone from classical music pins them down for long enough to inform them how rubbish Read more ...
howard.male
Happy Birthday, Tony! Last night the great Nigerian musician celebrated the fact that he has spent 70 years on the planet, with 52 of those years exploring – as no other drummer has explored – the humble kit drum (or drum kit if you prefer). This standard arrangement of bass drum, snare drum, toms, cymbals and percussion has been the engine behind most popular music for only a couple of decades longer than Tony himself has been bashing away at the things for.A review of a concert which involved some 30 musicians and singers can't possibly be done justice, so I will stick to just mentioning Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Blitz may be about to descend on dance in theatres, but Rambert have the authentic British grit under fire. They truck on into a bleak autumn with the courage to present to the straitened nation a new commission of music and dance, and a new acquisition from an unknown German choreographer. Perhaps most radically, three female choreographers on one bill (and that’s not something I’ve known in my lifetime, at least not at this level).But there is no need to be PC about it. If the commission - Awakenings, by Aletta Collins, based on Dr Oliver Sacks’s celebrated book - doesn’t come to life Read more ...
David Nice
"Well, Kissin's the star of the show," opined the fatuous gentleman who rolled in late to my row after the first piece on the programme. Possibly not, I wanted to snap back, in the light of that very fine pianist's current erratic form. But in any case this celebrity-hunter had just missed one of the great conductors working effortless miracles of charm on Josef Suk's Scherzo fantastique, the extended lollipop lilt of which could quickly pall in lesser hands.
In any case, effortlessness and charm are hardly Yevgeny Kissin's strong suits, and both are needed if Chopin's early Second Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When, earlier this year, Edward Hall took the reins at the Hampstead Theatre, some eyebrows were raised. It’s meant to be a new-writing theatre and Hall has had much more experience directing Shakespeare than in tackling new plays. On the other hand, this venue needed a clean sweep and Hall is certainly able to wield a new broom vigorously. His first show, Shelagh Stephenson’s thrilling play about the disappearance of a gap-year student, opened last night — and it’s an excellent debut.The first act is a textbook piece of exposition: Adam, a 20-year-old student, has gone traveling but has Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A Town Called Panic is a charming, giddily funny dose of anarchy from a pair of benign Belgian punks, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar. The first stop-motion animation to be selected at Cannes, it stars Horse, Cowboy and Indian, dysfunctional plastic toy housemates in a papier-mâché world. UK viewers will recognise the style from the Cravendale milk TV ads. Those mad cows only hint at the bizarre pleasures here.It’s Horse’s birthday, by the end of which Cowboy’s accidental ordering of 5 million bricks that he and Indian then hide in the loft has reduced their home to rubble. Rebuilt with Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Mitsuko Uchida’s playing is a glorious collusion of intellect and fantasy. Her recitals are meticulously planned but seemingly unexpected with chosen pieces impacting upon each other in ways one might not have imagined. Three keyboard giants – Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin – were the meat of this recital with not an incidental or superfluous note to be found anywhere. No time off for good behaviour, no fillers, no jolly encores, just bags of unsettling subtext and moments of devastating introspection. Nobody does introspection quite like Uchida, nobody shrinks the Festival Hall quite like Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Theatrical conceits, much like London buses, seem these days to come in threes. Or so it is suggested by the Neil Bartlett/Handspring collaboration Or You Could Kiss Me, the third Cottesloe production this year to peer into the future, albeit only as far as 2036, whereas Mike Bartlett's Earthquakes in London leapt forward to 2525. (Completing the trifecta: Tamsin Oglesby's Really Old, Like Forty Five, set a comparatively imminent 40 years ahead.) And while Oglesby's play featured a robotic nurse, this latest opening puts some very singular puppets centre-stage, alongside a vision of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Nico Muhly at the piano, Stephen Petronio in a false beard, a storm-at-sea theme derived from The Tempest - how hip is that? I Drink the Air Before Me, a new work for the Stephen Petronio Company as the opening night of this year’s Dance Umbrella (the annual international modern dance fest that packs London’s venues for the month), had promise. The young composer delivered, the theme had its moments, but the picture above is a fiction - it’s a wish-list, as so many publicity stills for dance are, fine tailfeathers for dull birds. A couple of hours later I grope for my notebook to remember the Read more ...
fisun.guner
There may be some who feel this year’s shortlist for the Turner Prize has done little to forge ahead with anything new, innovative and different. And then there may be others who will welcome the rather more established artists on this year’s list, that is those who have continued to steadily develop their practice for well over a decade, with no great surprises, such as Angela de La Cruz and Dexter Dalwood.With the obvious proviso that, old or new, the work must be interesting, engaging and intelligent, I see no problem in tending towards the latter camp. In any case, a relentless drive Read more ...
joe.muggs
Its authenticity was helped no end by a torrential downpour leaking through the brickwork and creating puddles in various parts of the uneven floor – and by the rousing mix of hyperkinetic Nineties jungle beats cut up with seemingly humanly impossible dexterity over a dazzlingly crisp soundsystem by Japanese man-machine DJ Kentaro (pictured below) who was playing as we entered.Rather less rough and ready was the preponderance of expensive specs on punters everywhere you looked, indicating a disproportionate number of designers in the crowd. But that's Ninja Tune for you – since its foundation Read more ...