An evening of Mozart favourites in a landmark church on a sunny evening: that might suggest a perfect recipe for gently soporific tourist entertainment. Thankfully, not in the hands of Kristian Bezuidenhout and the English Concert. At St Martin-in-the-Fields, the South African-born Australian virtuoso of the period keyboard joined the Baroque orchestral powerhouse with which he collaborates as principal guest. Together, they stripped the varnish, and shook the dust, from two treasures whose sheer familiarity can render them in some way inaudible. The Jupiter Symphony, prefaced by the piano Read more ...

With apocalyptic floods pouring through the Kakhovka dam, and millions of Ukrainians displaced or bereaved, it doesn’t feel decent to be laughing at a witty black comedy about his rise from nonentity to full-blown tyrant. On the other hand, how can you not laugh when an oligarch injured in an assassination attempt sees it as a great way to get noticed in a crazed post-Soviet Kremlin?A year ago, premiering in the first months of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Peter Morgan’s crackling drama about Russia’s rich and powerful felt bang on topic. Now, watching the monstrous oligarch Boris Berezovsky Read more ...

There was a youthful tinge to the jubilant chorus of “here we, here we, here we f****** go” that greeted Le Tigre arriving on stage. The band may have not released any new material in well over a decade, but the Glasgow crowd gathered for this reunion show was not simply those who remembered the first time but an all ages mixture, which is a reflection on both the power of the trio’s music and a depressing indictment of the cultural and political issues that still imbue the group’s tunes with relevance.The latter factor did, at least, have a musical benefit, as at no point did this gig ever Read more ...

Miles Malleson, known as an inter-war character actor who popped up in numerous small roles on stage and screen, was also a surprisingly prolific writer and adaptor. Mint Theatre Company of New York love truffling out work like his Yours Unfaithfully, a 1933 play on a topic that still resonates today, even if the social milieu of the piece doesn’t.The Jermyn Street Theatre is an ideal venue for this comedy of new manners. With deft touches, its pocket-sized stage can still suggest the era and class setting on show: genteel suburbia with intellectual ambitions, hence the artists’ busts and Read more ...

Union Jacks could be stowed away, and EU ones figuratively, furtively flourished: this was a concert of celebratory music for a Hanoverian king by a Saxon composer, by then recently become a British citizen, performed by a French ensemble in a Roman Catholic church which once served the Spanish Embassy. The present King, having already made a start repairing Britain’s damaged reputation on the continent by speaking German in Berlin, surely approved.How do I know? Because there he was, as we all suspected he would be because of tight security, enjoying among other things a more relaxed Read more ...

It’s been more than 20 years since the premiere of The Shape of Things, Neil LaBute’s prickly drama about couples and friends and the ways we change each other. And boy, does it show. Director Nicky Allpress and a talented young cast try their best with a script that, though updated for this version at the Park Theatre, still feels behind the times.Evelyn (Amber Anderson) meets Adam (Luke Newton, of Bridgerton fame) at work. His work, that is – he’s a security guard at an art gallery, she’s an art student with a can of spray paint she eventually uses to draw a penis on a sculpture. She gives Read more ...

If you cannot even step into the same river twice, how to take the measure of the ocean? Dipping your toes at the beach is irresistible, but uninformative. Sampling stuff out at sea helps more, but you have to get serious. Consider the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR), a device designed in the 1930s for recovering plankton from the open ocean. They are cruising along, tethered unobtrusively behind cargo ships and hauled in from time to time to assess their microscopic catch.By 2021, Helen Czerski tells us, CPRs had been towed for 7 million nautical miles, which would take them 326 times Read more ...

Do we really need instrumental Shostakovich with lighting, movement, costumes and video projection? I might have said no before having seen what the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra could do with former leader Terje Tønnesen, performing the Chamber Symphony by heart in dramatic style. It seemed likely that memorizing even more music under new Artistic Director Pekka Kuusisto, and performing it in an insanely demanding dramatic framework, with no word spoken, could work.It does, beyond anyone's wildest imaginings. This collaboration is with a visionary Danish team: director Mikkel Harder Munck- Read more ...

There are few contemporary journalists whose names are instantly familiar – and usually it’s for the wrong reasons. Polly Toynbee occupies a special place in the hearts and minds of all those on the left. To those on the right, she is among the most offensive of “the wokerati”, though I doubt she’s mad about tofu. The Daily Express has called her “the high priestess of leftism”.Her columns, for the Observer, the Independent (ah, those long-gone halcyon days) and the Guardian, are essential reading for all those on the Labour/Lib Dem spectrum and reviled by Conservatives, who like to paint her Read more ...

“It takes a real effort to sound this small, this timid; to resist the effort to rock out and kick pedal. Singer ‘Amelia’ (oh yeah, I bet that’s her name) has spent her entire adult life pretending she doesn't menstruate. The rest of her band, too, look like the sort of fanzine autistics who still wear dungarees at 30”.In his Melody Maker review of Heavenly’s June 1992 second album Le Jardin de Heavenly (its predecessor was a mini LP), Simon Price went on to say it “recreates only the most stylised clichés of childhood. The lyrics are emotionally retarded in the extreme, and the music veers Read more ...

The actress Sydney Sweeney’s face in the harrowing docudrama Reality is an ever-evolving map, its contours and pallor altering as it gradually dawns on her character, the real-life American whistleblower Reality Winner, that her conscience has put paid to her freedom for the forseeable future.Sweeney’s eyes are big to begin with but they seem to expand as Winner agonizingly bleeds out the truth of the unauthorised action she took to protect democracy during Donald Trump’s presidency; the eyes of Wallace Taylor (Marchánt Davis), one of the two FBI agents grilling Winner, never blink, his stare Read more ...

The inspirations for the directing debut of Benjamin Millepied, choreographer and dancer in Black Swan, are cited as Merimée’s novella Carmen and Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies, the former better known as an opera guaranteed to raise the emotional temperature. Millepied has employed the brilliant Succession composer Nicholas Britell for some of the music; and, in the kind of tender-hearted beefcake role he has shown he can play so effectively, he has Paul Mescal. So why doesn’t this Carmen knock it out of the park?It seems to have taken three writers to craft the Read more ...