Reviews
Ismene Brown
There’s something beyond detailed and attentive musicianship that’s needed in Schubert’s last, most desolate song-cycle, Winterreise (“Winter’s journey”). It’s a dramatic arc that unites these 24 songs into a journey, the number of breaths in time and miles in distance that elapse from the first poem to the 24th, and bring you a sense of contact with the person undergoing this terrible suffering. Someone who is not Schubert, the composer, or Müller, the poet, but a third person.How much biography should we read into it? Schubert was dying slowly from years of syphilis, at the ridiculously Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There are many ways of being orchestral. About as many ways, in fact, as there are of organising the body politic. At one extreme there are the fascist orchestral states with their Kim Il-sung-emulating conductor-tyrants (Fritz Reiner's Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for example). At the other you have the right-on, conductorless cooperatives of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. The Camerata Salzburg takes up an Enlightenment middle way, fostering gentlemanly camaraderie and a rotating leadership of the wise. Last night, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, it was the turn of the Greek violinist-cum- Read more ...
David Nice
Eliot's "time future contained in time past" has been conductor Vladimir Jurowski's unofficial motto throughout a festival which has had to take itself very seriously, and managed miraculously to carry a surprisingly large, loyal audience of all ages and persuasions along with it. Such stringent conditions could hardly be otherwise given the focal point of an uncompromising genius.Alfred Schnittke started out by making the whole of musical history his own frenetic stamping ground, earnest in jest and deadly serious even at his most sarcastic. He was no different Read more ...
ian.palmer
Peter Wright’s superlative production of The Nutcracker has returned to Birmingham Royal Ballet's repertory for Christmas, a production he created for the company in 1990 and to my mind superior to any other presented in the UK today. Magic, the awesomeness of the Tchaikovsky score, are realised upon the stage and shown in its dances with a childlike sense of fantasy. The Christmas tree rises, the rats play, the snow-goose flies - and the audience gasps.John F Macfarlane’s designs begin with the rich ochre-red colours of the Stahlbaums’ interior (silk-lined walls, velvet curtains) and its Read more ...
josh.spero
The battleground: beauty. What’s at stake: our souls. At least on these two things philosophy don Roger Scruton (presenter of Why Beauty Matters) and art critic Waldemar Januszczak (presenter of Ugly Beauty) were agreed in the Modern Beauty season. For despite very different ideas of beauty, they both reached the same conclusion: it is there to nourish the soul.Which is why it may seem odd that their programmes consider the same examples and yet reach very different conclusions. Jeff Koons to one is shallow and materialistic, to the other a source of self-knowledge. Scruton finds Damien Hirst Read more ...
glyn.brown
It’s girls’ night out. Walk in, the waves of scent and hairspray go right up your nose. And now here’s Lily, sloping on with a half-blonde half-black hairdo like a cross between Nancy Sinatra, an Afghan hound and a very pretty Jimmy Savile. As she crosses the Vegas-style stage, there’s even a touch of Wendy Richard about the high-pitched squeak and bum-wiggling dance. She’s wearing a tiny black sequined number and suggestive seams, and after a lame "Hello London! Is it Friday night or what?", she apologises because her tights are falling down. But it’s not until halfway through the set that Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Akram Khan and Nitin Sawhney are too famous to need defining in terms of racial culture, and yet they make a lot of it in the spiel about their offering Confluence, closing the two-week Svapnagata festival at Sadler’s Wells this weekend. When both of them last night were using their contemporary and classical roots with such unselfconscious richness, it was a jolt to read programme notes ponderously attacking “purists” as if the music and dance world were full of Nick Griffins burning to send them home somewhere.Such special pleading taints the actual art they’re giving, because no defence is Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
There are so many ways a dramatic production of Messiah can go wrong it is almost unbearable to think about it. Certainly, there was a palpable buzz of nervousness in the Coliseum about last night’s audience as they took their seats. Did English National Opera really think it could pull it off? Could it avoid the pitfalls into triteness that surely lurk at every corner? How would the chorus manage it? And please God, let it be better than Glyndebourne’s 2007 St Matthew Passion.How do you go about staging Messiah anyway? It hardly provides a rip-roaring narrative stream, and there’s a danger Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Let’s be kind to Eddie Izzard. The guy has not long finished running 43 marathons in 51 days in aid of Sport Relief and the undeniably noble effort would take the puff out of anyone. And just the day before this show, he had run a half marathon further along the South Coast from Eastbourne to his childhood home town of Bexhill-on-Sea to reopen their refurbished museum. So maybe the lacklustre performance I saw at the cavernous Brighton Centre was one-off and he’ll be back on form for the rest of his tour.Izzard’s trademark comedy (“bollocks with more bollocks on top”, as he calls it) is Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
That queen of solipsism, Katie Price, hasn’t been the only person on TV this week seeking “closure” (loved the short but savage Graham Norton spoof of Price on Monday night's show, by the way), and a new documentary series, We Are Family, is offering four collections of relatives the chance to settle their differences on camera. And no need to dine on wichetty grubs either. In fact the opening clan, the Minchews, was put up in a country-house hotel as its members patched up their feuds and prepared to embrace the sentiment of the eponymous Sister Sledge ditty.The eight Minchew siblings, or Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Thank God for Les Arts Florissants. Without the assiduous efforts of this pretty, chic French ensemble and its expat American conductor William Christie, one of the great periods in musical history, that of the French high baroque, would still be shrouded in darkness. What would we now know of the Debussy of the 18th century, Jean-Philippe Rameau, or of the silky solemnity of Henry Desmarest, or of the festive André Campra, or of that arse-licker par excellence Jean-Baptiste Lully? Virtually nothing. And my ears for one would be the poorer.Last night we received portraits of each of these Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When is enough? The template usually cited as the perfectly proportioned lifetime for sitcom is Fawlty Towers. It ran for two series, 12 episodes - in and out, no mucking about. The Office deliberately kept the same hours, give or take the odd Christmas special and an entire American remake. Disappearing off the other end of the scale was Only Fools and Horses, which adopted the opposite tack of keeping faith with its characters as the contours of their lives changed. Gavin and Stacey, whose creators Ruth Jones and James Corden are knowledgeable students of the genre, has always had the look Read more ...