Reviews
Robert Beale
Necessity has to be the mother of invention for many operatic enterprises these days – and there are few with such inventive powers as those of Clonter Opera in Cheshire.Its avowed aim is to be a platform for emerging artists and a bridge from conservatoire training to the professional world, and its track record in achieving that for nearly 50 years is impressive. This summer production in the theatre-on-the-farm brought 10 young singers together, bursting with talent, and entertained its audience well.It has to be inventive, of course. The pit in the Clonter theatre requires reduced Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After his death in 1867, it didn’t take long for Charles Baudelaire’s poems to be set to music. Composer Henri Duparc did so in 1870, but Claude Debussy’s late 1880s framing of five of the Symbolist pioneer’s verses confirmed this as more than a one-off fascination for the musical world.Subsequently, Baudelaire’s words have stimulated myriads of performers: Celtic Frost, The Cure, Serge Gainsbourg, Diamanda Galas and Tyler the Creator amongst them. In France, chanson legend Léo Férre devoted three albums to Baudelaire.Now, with the explicitly titled Baudelaire & Orchestra, Norway’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Mark Cousins pulled off a coup for his latest film history documentary, My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, by getting the great director to narrate it. In his catarrhal East London drawl, Hitchcock parses dozens of the brilliant visual techniques he used to elicit emotional responses in his movies' audiences, as Cousins cuts rapidly from one memorable excerpt to another. Quite a feat since Hitchcock died 43 years ago.The conceit mostly works well thanks to the unseen Alistair McGowan’s impersonation of Hitchcock. Insinuating and sardonic (not least in his fleeting observations about the speeded-up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two producers named Martin worked with Buzzcocks and Joy Division. Martin Hannett was in the studio for Buzzcocks’ debut release, the Spiral Scratch EP, issued in January 1977, and also for the bulk of the tracks spread across their last three United Artists singles in 1980. He also shaped every studio recording Joy Division made for Factory Records.Martin Rushent (1948–2011) was teamed with Buzzcocks after they signed with United Artists in August 1977 and continued the relationship with the band’s Pete Shelley following the band's split in 1981. In March 1979, he recorded four tracks with Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The shadow of Grenfell Tower has already produced Nick Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor’s dispassionately forensic but devastating documentary plays based on transcripts from the Grenfell Inquiry. Now comes a companion piece, the National’s Grenfell, a verbatim play using excerpts from the same source, but larded by Gillian Slovo into a wider account of the fire by those who were in it, to equally wrenching effect.The cast of 12 arrive in the National’s small Dorfman space and one by one introduce themselves: first by their own names, then as the main character they will play (all take on a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This powerful, haunting tribute to William Byrd – performed by the HEXAD Collective – was made particularly distinctive by its performance in the resonant, atmospheric setting of the Brunel Tunnel Shaft in Rotherhithe. When Brunel and his father designed this chamber – which sinks 50 feet below ground – it was to create an entrance to the first tunnel beneath the Thames; today, in its post-industrial incarnation, it has one of the most sonorous acoustics in the country.True, that comes with its drawbacks – every Overground train that passes makes its presence felt and more surprisingly you Read more ...
mark.kidel
As a child, Anselm Kiefer tells us, in a bombed out German city, he would play in the rubble, creating life out of ruin and destruction. As an artist who is remarkably consistent, without being predictable, he continues to play in the ruins, breathing new life into the detritus of the world as well as his own collection of found objects, waste materials and other elements from which life appears to have been sucked out by time and history.Kiefer’s latest exhibition at the White Cube Bermondsey, a space with which he’s developed an intimate relationship, is inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Mali’s Tinariwen have been a serious powerhouse in non-Western music since the 2001 release of their first major label album, The Radio Tisdas Sessions. Their sound certainly hasn’t stood still in the last twenty years though. Female backing singers have come and gone, and pedal steel, banjo and fiddles have also made appearances on several of their albums, as Ibrahim Ag Alhabib and his crew have explored the shared sounds of West African desert blues and the rural music of the USA.This week, however, Birmingham was treated to a back-to-basics line-up of the band, that dropped all external Read more ...
Tom Teodorczuk
Plays chronicling the unscrupulous collision of high finance and big tech seem 10 a penny these days. Some writers, such as Joseph Charlton, seem to have built entire careers around telling glossy tech morality tales (for my money the best in this burgeoning genre is Sarah Burgess's Dry Powder staged at Hampstead Theatre in 2018 starring Hayley Atwell).Disruption, which is receiving its world premiere also in North London at Finsbury’s Park Theatre, is yet another slick tech show. Written by Andrew Stein and directed by Hersh Ellis, Disruption tackles the seemingly unstoppable rise of AI. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Channel 4 has been getting a lot of flack on Twitter from people involved in disability for the title of this documentary. Family members protested that "retard" was a word that could not be reclaimed, only to be told that as non-disabled people themselves, their voices had to take a back seat. An interview with its presenter Rosie Jones in The Guardian erupted into online arguments about who had the right to speak for intellectually disabled people. All this controversy won clicks online and ends up with potentially more viewers for this C4 show. It also meant that three Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A full house, and television cameras: rarer events at the Proms than they used to be (or should be). Both lent a sense of occasion to the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s visit to the Royal Albert Hall with their Conductor Laureate, Tadaaki Otaka. The cameras (for a BBC Four broadcast on Friday) had descended not for Cardiff’s long-serving Japanese stalwart – who first led BBC NOW in 1987 – but for Elena Urioste’s performance of the Violin Concerto by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The Proms first hosted this work to considerable acclaim in 1912, just weeks after the African-British composer’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With a track record that includes Memento, Dunkirk, Insomnia and Inception, Christopher Nolan is not a filmmaker who could be accused of a lack of ambition, but even by his standards Oppenheimer is a staggering achievement. Its three-hour running time is a little daunting, but it’s as if Nolan is saying if you want to make the most of this trip, you have to make the commitment. Its historical scope, intellectual depth and sheer cinematic power make Oppenheimer a thing of wonder.Nolan has based his story of the renowned physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the atomic bomb”, Read more ...