Reviews
mark.hudson
The National Gallery is on a roll. Having enjoyed the surprise hit of the autumn with The Sacred Made Real, an exhibition of 17th-century Spanish religious art, the gallery now makes its first foray into installation art with by far the grungiest work ever to cross its portals: The Hoerengracht, a walk-through portrayal of Amsterdam’s red light district by the American sculptors Ed and Nancy Kienholz.Entering the Sunley Room – a space normally reserved for rather prim art-historical displays – you find yourself amid clapboard back alleys littered with dead leaves and beer cans. Read more ...
fisun.guner
Nottingham Contemporary is Britain’s newest art gallery. Built deep into a sandstone cliff in the city’s oldest site, its sturdy, squat exterior is clad in scalloped gold and pale green panels. Resembling your granny’s old net curtains, the green pre-cast concrete is moulded with a pattern of 19th-century lace, paying homage to the city’s Victorian traditional industry.Inside, the four gallery spaces are irregular in shape: only one is in the shape of a modernist white cube, the others have angled walls, their forms following the site’s natural geography. Two of the galleries are devoted to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It sounded a dry subject and a dry title for Alan Bennett’s first play for five years - a fictional meeting between composer Benjamin Britten and poet W H Auden 25 years after they fell out, two old buggers, one furtive, the other extrovert. But at last night's premiere The Habit of Art proved an excruciatingly funny play, ribald, merciless, and as much about the bad habit of Theatre as that of the higher-toned Art. Nicholas Hytner has given it a wildly enjoyable production at the National Theatre that fields some epic comic performances in a bravura script.Wystan Auden was “in the imperative Read more ...
peter.quinn
As acts of musical funambulism go, a solo gig by a jazz singer ranks pretty high in the fearless stakes. Listening to Ian Shaw in the intimate surroundings of Pizza Express Jazz Club, without the safety net of bass or drums, you suddenly remember how thrilling it can be to hear songs that have long been absorbed into your consciousness being recast entirely anew.Shaw has never been one to plough a narrow artistic furrow, favouring instead an inclusiveness that draws from several stylistic wells. A superbly paced first set embraced everything from Joni Mitchell's limpid “River” to “Blues in Read more ...
Anonymous
Slender limbs, intense eyes, and dressed entirely in black: if it wasn’t for the straightened blonde hair, Carla Bley could pass for a jazz Patti Smith. She is also, of course, one of the genre’s most acclaimed composer-arrangers, and her return to London is much anticipated. Before she plays a note, the septuagenarian Californian walks awkwardly, defiantly, to a microphone at the front of the stage.“We’re going to play something very simple,” she announces, before heading to the piano and picking out a melody: "Three Blind Mice". “You’ll hear all this in this next piece,” she continues, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This odyssey of party-goer and interior designer Nicky Haslam frequently resembled a Private Eye diary by Craig Brown, who’s always at his best when lacerating narcissistic name-dropping diarists from earlier generations. We watched Haslam swapping anecdotes about Picasso with the painter’s biographer John Richardson, reminiscing about how Mae West used to sleep with two monkeys on her bed, and pointing out where Marilyn Monroe and Tallulah Bankhead used to live in New York.He’d give us their exact house numbers, he said, but he’d left his compendious address book behind. The sense of parody Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Reviving rarely performed plays is a high-risk strategy. On the one hand, there’s the chance of discovering a forgotten gem; on the other, there may be good reasons for the play being rarely performed. Nigel Dennis’s The Making of Moo was first staged at the Royal Court in 1957 with a cast that included Joan Plowright, John Osborne and George Devine, and provoked accusations of blasphemy. How has this satire on religion stood the test of time?Well, you can’t accuse it of being irrelevant. Set in an African state, the play shows what happens when Frederick Compton, a British civil engineer, Read more ...
robert.sandall
As a curtain raiser for the most ambitious album of her career to date, Natalie Merchant’s concert last night at London’s Conway Hall was an entertaining but strangely low-key affair. Merchant has spent the past six years recording dozens of songs based on poems themed around childhood, 28 of which she plans to release on two CDs early next year.
To accomplish this project she has reportedly worked with a total of 130 musicians across many roots and world genres including blues, bluegrass, Dixeland jazz, Celtic folk and Balkan dance tunes. Her collaborators have ranged from the Wynton Read more ...
Ismene Brown
What do you call a dancer with a fractured shoulder and only half a show to offer, who nevertheless takes you to the outer reaches of dance nirvana? It can only be Akram Khan. Now fêted as a (reasonable) contemporary choreographer, the favourite of Kylie, Juliette Binoche, Sylvie Guillem, Khan is too little celebrated for what he does at a level beyond anything most of us are ever likely to see, which is dancing in his magnificent, complex, disturbing traditional Indian form of Kathak.Four weeks ago he was intending to prepare for Sadler’s Wells a new contemporary dance premiere, Gnosis, to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Has somebody got it in for poor Matthew Macfadyen? In the recent series of Criminal Justice he didn’t even make it to the end of episode one before he was fatally stabbed by Maxine Peake. Now here he was as Enid Blyton’s adoring and supportive first husband Hugh Pollock, books editor at the George Newnes publishing house, only to find himself on the wrong end of Ms Blyton’s brutally self-centred drive for success at any price. For heaven’s sake, was this any way to treat a man who’d given you your big break in publishing and even bought you a new typewriter?Eventually he was driven to drink Read more ...
David Nice
Whether or not you rate Vladimir Jurowski among the top 10 hardest-working, most inspirational conductors in the business – I do – you have to award him the palm for enterprise. His passionate involvement in youth projects of various kinds, and a quest for innovative programming that would send most concert managements running, combined in the launch of his latest festival centred around the work of a single composer.He could have begun his exploration of Alfred Schnittke, Russia’s greatest maverick composer after Shostakovich, with full pomp in the Royal Festival Hall with the orchestra he Read more ...
Anonymous
There’s something of a Polish theme to the London Jazz Festival 2009, part of the “Polska! year” celebration of that nation’s art and culture. Trumpeter Tomasz Stańko is by some margin the strand’s biggest name. The man who once explained the mournful, meditative tone of his (and his country’s) music in terms of the “melancholy light” he’d known since birth took to the stage in appropriately sombre attire: suit, shirt and hat alike in any colour as long as it was black.Much of the playing was similarly noirish, in keeping with both the moody shadows of Stańko’s current publicity shots and the Read more ...