Reviews
Adam Sweeting
It’s been a very good year for Beatlemania, with all the albums re-repackaged and the group going virtual in Rock Band. The BBC lobbed in their own Beatles season-ette, and one of the more striking images from their riot of documentary footage was of John Lennon escorting his Aunt Mimi up the steps onto the plane taking them to America, with her handbag and Sunday-best hat.That surely settles any debate about his real feelings for Mimi. She is depicted in Sam Taylor-Wood's absorbing film about Lennon’s teenage years as a stern exemplar of moral discipline, but driven by honourable motives and Read more ...
paul.bradshaw
As we gathered in St John’s Church in Waterloo last Thursday to hear The London Lucumi Choir perform, on the same day people in their thousands were making the pilgrimage to the Church of San Lazaro in Cuba. In that church, just outside Havana, pilgrims walk or sometime crawl the few miles to the Church, often bearing gifts of rum and cigars as penitence. It is a sign of the times that songs to the orishas – the deities that populate the Yoruba religious pantheon, who all have their own distinctive, trance-inducing rhythms – can also be heard in a Christian church in London. Our Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The term “accompanist” is no longer acceptable, no longer “politically correct” in musical circles, not least Lieder. It’s hard to imagine now that the relationship between a singer and his or her pianist was ever regarded as anything other than an equal partnership. But 26 years ago, when Julius Drake first stepped out on to the Wigmore Hall platform to play Poulenc with “friends”, the rarefied world of chamber music and song was a very different place. Even Gerald Moore, the most venerated of Lieder pianists, called his autobiography Am I Too Loud? – a title more than a little suggestive of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When I saw Gregory Doran’s production of Twelfth Night for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in October, I thought it unsubtle and underpowered, but that it would settle in during its run. Apparently not, as, in its transfer to London’s West End, it has gathered neither pace nor depth. That’s a real shame as there are some terrific performances at its heart.Doran’s handling of the play’s complicated romances has wonderful clarity and in this he is helped by great performances by the four lovers. Jo Stone-Fewings playfully brings out the fevered Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Very few of the staged goings-on in Covent Garden’s revival production of La Bohème this weekend rose above the level of mediocrity. The singing was blighted by illness and Eastern European bad habits. The 1970s set was as fresh as a fridge full of condemned meats. The 1970s vision of 19th century costume was extraordinary, as if the set of Abigail's Party had been emptied over the singers' heads. And yet, what an enjoyable evening. In the pit, the never resting hands of the Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons was whipping this warhorse into some sort of damn appealing shape. Read more ...
sheila.johnston
At last something good on the telly at Christmas, you think. Eleven new short films premiere nightly on Sky over the holiday period starting this evening. All are dialogue-free (though with music and sound effects), all have a seasonal flavour and, cumulatively, assemble a terrific line-up, including the actors Timothy Spall, Natasha McElhone, Bill Nighy, Peter Capaldi, Mackenzie Crook and Ross Kemp and the writers and directors Neil Gaiman, Richard Eyre, William Boyd, Tony Grisoni and Jeremy Brock. You can't really go wrong with all that. Can you?It would be curmudgeonly to carp that the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If James Bond could survive Roger Moore and George Lazenby, there must be grounds for optimism that Sherlock Holmes will eventually recover from this brutal mauling by Robert Downey Jr, under the gaudy directorial eye of Guy Ritchie. Holmesophiles are a doughty bunch, and will probably just carry on watching Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett as if Mr Madonna never happened.It isn’t so much a bad film as just too much of one, and Ritchie could have done all of us a big favour by lopping 20 minutes off the 128 he has over-generously left us with. It’s the familiar saga of Hollywood bloat. Arthur Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a sequence in which a monstrous tree of otherworldly dimensions, its boughs as sturdy as oaks, its twigs as vigorous as saplings, crashes spectacularly to earth in roaring, creaking, shattering, time-expanding slo-mo. In a film that’s full of them, this is very much the premier-cru money shot. Remember the last time the director, deploying the computer-generated forces of a sound-stage deity, downed another very large object? Back then it was a boat. This time it’s a piece of wood. Tiiim-ber-r-rr!!There is no argument, of course. Avatar is an astonishing creation. For sheer Read more ...
glyn.brown
Ray Davies, that old curmudgeon, has said he’s not keen on touring alone since the demise of The Kinks. But he’s sorted that out for the moment by choosing to play alongside 45 new people – the members of the Crouch End Festival Chorus, with whom Davies has decided to reinterpret his hits. You’d think this could be undiluted lift-music hell: the Mike Sammes Singers trample everything you love. But though the album, named The Kinks Choral Collection as if the rest of the band are on it, is occasionally silly, the live result was wildly uplifting.The Chorus didn’t actually appear until the set’ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Joanna MacGregor walks on stage purposefully, clutching a manuscript of paving-slab dimensions, promptly sits down and starts to play, smiling. The opening measures of Messiaen’s Regard du Père steal in gently, and for the next 120 minutes we are transfixed. Until this evening, listening to Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus on disc has always been an unappealing prospect - something I’ve done more in duty than pleasure. Hearing it live for the first time is a revelation.Composed during the liberation of Paris in 1944 for Yvonne Loriod (soon to be the composer’s wife), the Read more ...
fisun.guner
There was a time, not long ago in fact, when contemporary art could seem all too wrapped up in its own juvenile cleverness. It was all about being ironic and irreverent. Certainly a lot of it was achingly self-referential. But we eventually got fed up with all that. What’s more, we now live in less frivolous, more fearful times: recession has hit and the sea waters are rising, ready to flood us out and turn our congested cities into swampy, primitive marshland, like an apocalyptic J G Ballard novel.So now the mood music is sombre, more earnest. Artists have once again turned their attentions Read more ...
Ismene Brown
For a choreographer the moment your work becomes a classic is when the audience tells you that you’re casting it wrong. I’ve seen Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake more than a dozen times for professional reasons since it first took off from Sadler’s Wells nearly 15 years ago, and it’s not Adam Cooper’s blinding image all those years ago that’s telling me the press night cast last night wasn’t delivering what the work is worth. It's because I have come to own this piece in my own imagination.I don't say this is Ibsen with wings, but the potency of Bourne’s rewrite of Swan Lake lies in the true Read more ...