Reviews
Adam Sweeting
This new series proposes to examine the individual roles played by the members of successful rock groups, but you could tell there was trouble in store from the narrator's opening question: "What is the DNA of a great rock'n'roll band?" Like the rest of this first programme, which tried to draw up a job description for lead singers, the question didn't quite make sense. Shouldn't it have been "What is in the DNA"? And were we about to see a Horizon-style scientific analysis of chromasomes and double-helix molecules, or did it just mean: "What kind of people join rock'n'roll bands?"It turned Read more ...
David Nice
"Madness! Madness! Everywhere madness!" The unsung words of cobbler-philosopher Hans Sachs in the third-act prelude to Wagner's Die Meistersinger might seem like an odd opening manifesto for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra's annual May Day ceremonial concert this morning, hosted this year by Oxford in the gorgeous venue where the Berliners had last played under Karajan a very long time ago. But there was method in it. Whether or not Oxford's traditional May Day eve revels last night had any drunken brawl as threatening as the one which set Sachs meditating on human folly there was certainly Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The first time I saw Katy Brand was at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2005, where she was performing Celebrities Are Gods in a tiny, windowless basement late at night. Hers was the last show in the room, which by now was a fetid sweatbox, and only a few hardy souls had turned up. But it was a memorable evening, not only because Brand’s talent was plain to see, but also because, undaunted by the circs, she performed with the confidence of an old pro even though she was only 26.And a trouper she was again when I saw her perform her latest show, Katy Brand’s Big Ass Tour, in what might have been Read more ...
bruce.dessau
For a band that was initially created as a conceptual cartoon, Gorillaz is a pretty formidable live band. At a heaving Roundhouse last night, Damon Albarn and a galaxy of guests put on a show that is an easy contender for gig of the year, complete with visuals from co-founder and cartoonist Jamie Hewlett and sailors' hats all round. From Admiral Snoop Dogg opening proceedings on a giant video screen to Albarn fronting an all-hands-on-deck climax of early hit “Clint Eastwood”, the virtual band was virtually perfect.When you've got two former members of The Clash on guitar and bass, of course, Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It didn’t take long for memories of Anatoly Liadov’s The Enchanted Lake to fade in the dramatic shift Stateside which dominated Antonio Pappano’s latest outing with the London Symphony Orchestra. Every tone fleetingly shimmered as Liadov’s dreamy miniature hinted at an evening full of Eastern promise. A touch of Scriabinesque harmonic ripeness in the middle of the piece suggested the possibility of an effulgent climax. But none was forthcoming. Silky playing from the muted LSO strings rarely rose above mezzo forte. And then we were crossing not a lake but an ocean; the shores of the USA came Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mamma mia! The last Leaders' Debate has come and gone, so what on earth are we going to do on Thursday evenings now? I was half expecting an announcement at the end of the show telling us that the Debates will be coming back for a new series in the autumn. Next Thursday of course is the election itself, which will be a straggly, bleary-eyed, long-drawn-out affair. How much nicer if it could be compressed into a crisp 90 minutes and then decided on a viewers' poll.But I'm just wallowing in the Neverland aura which has shrouded this entire election campaign. It has been a phony war waged in a Read more ...
David Nice
Let me confess immediately: Debbie Reynolds didn't mean a great deal to me beyond Singin' in the Rain, warbling "Tammy" and Being Princess Leia's Mother (and believe me, she gets plenty of comic mileage out of the Carrie Fisher connection). But I knew she had a fabulous Hollywood history, and having been smitten by old troupers Elaine Stritch and Barbara Cook in London, I wondered if she could match them. Half-sashaying, half-tittupping on to deliver her own abbreviated, adapted version of Sondheim's "I'm Still Here", she immediately provoked the comparison. Did she compare? Nowhere Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Let's get straight to the fellatio, shall we. The blow job - and its Polaroid rendition - that led to the 1960s divorce trial of the dissolute Duchess of Argyll forms the centrepiece aria (an aria that "begins with words and ends with humming") in Thomas Adès's opera Powder Her Face. And how good we were: as silent as a row of Trappists. There was none of the outrage, laughter, consternation that this staged blowy could once summon up and that once led Classic FM to ban the work. Sex, when dealt with correctly - as in Carlos Wagner's revival production - is never really scandalous. It's Read more ...
David Nice
For many of us, this was bound to be an emotional evening. Noëlle Mann, doyenne of all things Prokofievian on the editorial, archival, teaching and performing fronts, died peacefully at home last Friday, and it was to her that Vladimir Jurowski dedicated a typically bold programme of Prokofiev's late epic for cello and orchestra, the Symphony-Concerto, and a big but rather less focused symphony by his closest composer-friend Nikolay Myaskovsky. Perhaps it's presumptuous to speak for the departed; but I could hear Noëlle responding vitally to her master's voice, applauding Jurowski for Read more ...
fisun.guner
Last year, visitors to Tate Modern’s Artists’ Rooms could see a room dedicated to Jannis Kounellis. It was filled with some of his most resonant work: a door filled up with drystone walling; burlap sacks of grain, rice, pulses; metal bells. For a founder-member of the Arte Povera movement, it was surprisingly bucolic.Now, in the bowels of the University of Westminster, past a car park and in what was probably once a series of machine rooms, the other side of Kounellis is on view. As always, he is working with everyday materials, but these are now industrialised – coal, metal, steel, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a stone-faced analysis of the political and historiographical connotations of action hero films, the Guardian’s Film Blog found Iron Man 2 to be “a throwback to a Cold War sensibility,” as well as “the first post-Bush superhero movie.” However, a reader known as Corrective suggested that, au contraire, “perhaps it’s just something dumb to look at while you munch your popcorn.”As I munched my popcorn, I saw Iron Man 2 becoming dumb and dumber before my eyes. It presents the grim symptoms of Sequel Bloat, where a successful first outing of a potential franchise is hosed down with even more Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Peruvian Claudia Llosa's debut, Madeinusa, took place in a remote Andean village, whose religiously fervent inhabitants had an unusual spin on the festivities: during their tiempo santo, God was deemed dead, and all could sin with impunity before Easter Sunday. Unhappily, one girl's loathsome father intended to use this "free pass" to take her virginity. A village girl tormented by superstition is also at the heart of Llosa's sophomore film, The Milk of Sorrow, but this time she's struggling in the capital, Lima. Thus the writer-director broadens her gaze, while demonstrating that Read more ...