Reviews
Veronica Lee
Rhod GIlbert is, I suppose, what one would call a contrarian. Much that he comes up against in life appears to confound him and, perhaps as a consequence, a lot of things seem to go wrong (often at the same time), which causes him yet more rilement. Even the title of this show, Rhod Gilbert & The Cat That Looked Like Nicholas Lyndhurst, which I saw at the Leicester Comedy Festival, is in response to an annoying fan who brings the comic gifts of things that have been mentioned in previous show titles, such as grapes and mince pies. “I thought, I’ll show him,” says Gilbert. “There’s no way Read more ...
edward.seckerson
18th-century manners, 21st-century instruments - the best of both worlds or a clear conflict of purpose? One would hardly expect a period specialist of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s calibre and London’s most dynamic orchestra, the LSO, to be citing irreconcilable differences – and last night they didn’t. Their accounts of Beethoven’s first and last symphonies were, to say the least, explosive. But they were a good deal more, too, and the Ninth Symphony might well have startled, certainly thrilled, even Beethoven.It’s strange, even unsettling, now to hear a modern violin section find beauty in Read more ...
fisun.guner
Modernist art movements are a lot like totalitarian regimes. They produce their declaratory manifestos, send forth their declamatory edicts, and, before you know it, a Year Zero mentality prevails: the past must be declared null and void. Seeking to overturn 1,000 years of Western civilisation with a universal aesthetic utopia of brightly coloured squares and boldly delineated lines, a confident Theo van Doesburg, founding member and chief theorist of the Dutch movement De Stijl, wrote, “What the Cross represented to the early Christians, the square represents to us all. The square will Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
To find a single completely successful piece in a contemporary music programme is rare enough. The sieve of time has yet to separate the wheat from the chaff. But to find complete satisfaction in all five pieces programmed, and for all five pieces programmed to be by the same composer, is a testament to one thing: that George Benjamin is a total genius. I am not the first to have noticed this. The six-year-old Benjamin was Messiaen's favourite pupil. They are pictured above; a white-haired Messiaen is sat in the middle next to a bashfully bushy-haired Benjamin.At 20, while still a student, he Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Tucked away down a sleepy residential back alley in suburban Tokyo, Studio Ghibli, the headquarters of Hayao Miyazaki, is designed - by the visionary animator himself - in the shape of a boat. When I visited it five years ago, just before the release of his last film, Howl's Moving Castle, the team of young animators all had bowls of fish and terrapins on their desks. The result, Ponyo, is at last about to open in Britain: Miyazaki is a famously slow worker, and the delay has been compounded by a hold-up with distribution. But this irresistible marine fairy-tale is worth the wait.Some of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
John Bishop, who is from Liverpool, used to sell drugs for a living (insert own joke here). Actually the former sales and marketing executive for a pharmaceutical firm gets there first and makes a reference to the kids he grew up with: “Some of them ended up in the same industry, but they didn’t have Bupa.The line is typical Bishop: subtle, sardonic and self-referential. Actually this show is incredibly self-referential, sometimes almost Pooterish in its detail about the comedy career he started after giving up the day job, life with his teenage sons and his love in roughly equal measure for Read more ...
joe.muggs
Around February, following a full month of “sound of next year” articles and programmes, surveys and round-ups, one starts to tire of getting told time and again what The! New! Thing! is. So for the HMV Next Big Thing concerts to be launching right now risks running up against jadedness – doubly so when all the acts on a bill to one degree or another are laden with 1980s pop references like virtually every other new band on the circuit right now.Both the support bands at the Garage – sorry, the Relentless Garage, for the venerable spit'n'sawdust indie venue is now all new and shiny after an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Dan Snow’s four-part history of the Royal Navy has been in many ways a marvellous thing, and a timely reminder of one of the central planks of our island story. At a moment when various brass hats are openly discussing the possibility of one of the UK’s armed services being dispensed with (and it won’t be the Army), Snow’s efforts may yet take on a greater significance than he imagined.All that being said, the final instalment was something of a puzzlement. More specifically, it looked as if some bean counter had axed part five at short notice, forcing Snow to end with a lecture to camera Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Me and the Pope have had our disagreements – on condoms in Africa, gay rights and his frankly appalling Christmas album. He’s keener on the Tridentine Mass than me. But I had some sympathy with him about Maciejewski’s Requiem, which received its British premiere last night as part of the Polska! year of Polish culture. When he was merely Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he wrote to the composer’s brother Wojciech in 2001, “It speaks directly to the heart, without demanding, as contemporary music often does, any learned intermediary”. Such intermediaries have usually not been kind to the Read more ...
howard.male
What’s in a band’s name? Usually very little, other than perhaps a banally surreal juxtaposition of a couple of words that don’t normally hang out together (see: Cold – Play, Joy – Division, Sex – Pistols) or the borrowed kudos from some other art form such as a novel or film (there’s a new folk band called Belleville Rendezvous, God help us.) But this North Carolina trio’s name made me gasp with admiration.“Chocolate drop” may well be one of the gentler terms of racial abuse from our recent past (if any racial abuse can be described as gentle) but to hear it resurrected by those who would Read more ...
graham.rickson
The plot of this rarely performed Gilbert and Sullivan spoof melodrama is gloriously amusing. The male heirs of the Murgatroyd family suffer under a witch’s curse which forces them to commit a crime each day, or suffer an agonising death. Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd has fled the ancestral home and now lives under a pseudonym, meaning that his younger brother Despard has had to assume both the baronetcy and the duty to commit the daily crime. Unlike his older brother's dastardly penchant for stealing babies and robbing banks, he finds it hard to progress beyond forging cheques and fiddling expenses Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Marcus Brigstocke, like God, is everywhere. No, strike that - the star of (and I may be missing a few here) Argumental, The Now Show, I’ve Never Seen Star Wars, Giles Wemmbley-Hogg Goes Off and The Late Edition is currently performing God Collar, a show about rational atheism, so let’s drop the deity assumption. Whether God exists depends on your personal faith choices, but we know Brigstocke absolutely does exist because at any given time he is appearing on television and radio, sometimes on several channels at once.Not that I mind his ubiquity, as Brigstocke is a very bright man who clearly Read more ...