Reviews
Lucy Thynne
Near the end of My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s prize-winning 2016 novel, a creative writing teacher tells Lucy, ‘you will only have one story […] you’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story.’ The advice might sound reductive – as though every writer is a kind of one-trick pony – but it’s meant to be reassuring, to legitimate a writer as a creature of obsession and habit. Anne Michaels’ third and most recent novel, Held, is not about the Holocaust, as her debut, Fugitive Pieces, was, but in its themes of memory, war, and personal ghosts, we see her Read more ...
David Nice
The only seriously false note about Maestro is its title. Yes, Bernstein was masterly as a conductor, and Bradley Cooper gives it his best shot. But he was no master of his life as a whole. Maybe the title should have been something like Lenny and Felicia (you think of something better).Broadway actor Felicia Montealegre, the woman he married after an on-off four-year relationship, is depicted as the shrewdest, harshest critic of the man rather than the artist, and though the music is brilliantly handled, Carey Mulligan is the real heart and soul of what Cooper as director and co-writer (with Read more ...
James Saynor
“Everything is legal if you have the money,” states the world-weary protagonist of this new film by the Mexican-American director Amat Escalante. And in the wilds of central Mexico, where the movie is set, the comment is unlikely to be questioned. Lost in the Night features characters lost at pretty much any time of the day in a slick, grim, ramifying desert mystery that never quite hits the escape velocity of thriller. At the start, the mother of young labourer Emiliano (Juan Daniel García Treviño) is disappeared by the cops for campaigning against a local mine, and the main Read more ...
Robert Beale
Sir Mark Elder’s zest for exploring fresh territory with the forces of the Hallé is unquenched even in his final season as music director. And who better to introduce the Stabat Mater of Rossini – a late flowering of the operatic wizard’s powers – than he, a champion of the rich and rare from operas past?It is, whatever else may be said, highly operatic in many aspects – and not unique in that respect in 19th century sacred music. Like other examples, it was premiered (in its final version) in a theatre, not a cathedral.For this performance there were both a starry quartet of soloists and the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s a faint whiff of Strictly Ballroom about Sasha Hadden’s Australian indie A Stitch in Time, another tale of people in later life rekindling lost dreams and a long-buried love while nurturing younger folk with the same passions. Here, though, this love is expressed in dressmaking rather than foxtrots and quicksteps. Hadden’s film is smaller-scale in its ambitions than Baz Luhrmann’s, not rising far above the feelgood. Which is a shame as it has an appealing central performance from Maggie Blinco as Liebe (yes, the German word for love), a repressed dressmaker in her seventies. She Read more ...
Heather Neill
Oliver Goldsmith was a literary all-rounder – novelist, poet and playwright – remembered chiefly for one example of each discipline, respectively The Vicar of Wakefield, "The Deserted Village" and, of course, above all, She Stoops to Conquer. This play, Goldsmith wrote, was a return to "laughing comedy" as opposed to the fashionable "sentimental" kind, which exhibited "the virtues of private life" rather than exposing its vices, and focused on the distresses of characters rather than their faults. It is 250 years old this year and regularly revived, its laughter quotient intact Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sir Ridley Scott has taken umbrage at the French critics who weren’t too impressed with his new movie. Not only do they not like his film, but the French “don’t even like themselves”, according to the dyspeptic auteur.But I feel our French cousins may have a point, especially the one who described Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of the fabled emperor as “a sullen boor and a cad with his wife, Joséphine.” Like Steely Dan sang, “I have never met Napoleon”, but one might reasonably expect that a man who masterminded a European empire which stretched from Spain to Poland and temporarily as far as Read more ...
peter.quinn
When a musical jeweller with an imagination of remarkable aural refinement meets a jazz orchestra which combines playing of super-fine precision and warmth with a total commitment to the music’s singular ebb and flow, remarkable things can happen.In the latest edition of Jazzwise magazine marking the 100th anniversary of the formation of the Duke Ellington Jazz Orchestra, composer, arranger, conductor, bandleader, pianist and educator, Nikki Iles, talks about being fascinated by Duke’s compositional process “and the symbiotic nature of his relationship with his band.”On the closing night of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
“But that’s what they’re paying for!” replied my son as we, a little shellshocked by the previous three hours, skirted Trafalgar Square on the way home. I had reservations about some key components of the alchemy that produces great theatre, but none about the spectacle, even more impressive (as we subsequently agreed) than the big Cirque du Soleil extravaganzas that cost a helluva lot more for a seat in Vegas. On its own terms, The Mongol Khan is a five-star show – and I’m already recommending it to friends. Not without reservations of course. As is the case for Grand Opera newbies, one must Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
If nothing else, you couldn’t accuse Greta Van Fleet of short-changing fans when it came to costumes or pyro. It felt like every few minutes the Michigan throwback rockers frontman Josh Kiszka was disappearing offstage, only to reappear in a variety of jumpsuits or robes, while roasting flames regularly shot up from behind the four piece.A shame that the outfit changes represented the most variety in a one-dimensional arena rock show. No matter what garb Kiszka donned, the songs remained the same, which was fantastic news from those wanting to enjoy a Led Zeppelin revival and substantially Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night saw two pieces of late 19th century French choral music – one a hugely popular staple of choral societies around the world, the other a complete novelty, lost for a hundred years – brought together in fascinating juxtaposition by the French period-instrument orchestra Insula, under their founding conductor Laurence Equilbey.The Fauré Requiem and Gounod’s Saint Francois d’Assise shared a radiant contemplation of death in music that is at once highly refined and yet utterly direct. They were both, in their different ways, exquisite.Equilbey is an innovative conductor both as the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Start with the biggest gig of this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival: Angélique Kidjo’s Royal Albert Hall show definitely stays in the mind. Part of the story is the earth-shaking power and resonance of the voice of the "Queen of African music" which transforms the Royal Albert Hall magically into an intimate space.But there is more. Kidjo’s power is also in her advocacy, her activism, her optimism, her message of compassion and of inclusion. She had involved a host of guests (Youssou N’Dour, Ibrahim Maalouf, Laura Mvula) and also Chi-Chi Nwanoku’s Chineke Orchestra. The energy level started Read more ...