Reviews
Bernard Hughes
The recently re-branded National Youth Choir was founded in 1983 as a single choir of about 100 voices, and in those 40 years has grown to be a family of four, ranging from the nine-year-olds at the bottom of the boys’ and girls’ choirs to the 25-year-olds at the top of the NYC proper.Several hundred young singers in total, further augmented at the Royal Albert Hall last night by an alumni choir and even, in the last number, by the entire audience. In a time of unremitting bad news in the classical music world it was a much-needed tonic, a truly heart-warming celebration of singing and its Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei has created an extremely beautiful installation at the Design Museum in which the disparate elements play their part in creating a powerful overall message. On one level the exhibition is about design, but it also invites you to consider far more serious issues than are normally addressed in this temple to consumerism.A deep sense of loss permeates the exhibition. In fact, the longer I stayed the more I was reminded of the terrible photographs taken at Auschwitz that record the mounds of hair and piles of shoes collected from those killed in the camp’s gas Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
It is temping to wonder what path the Orielles would have gone down in a world where the coronavirus never occurred. The Halifax trio had just released their second album, Disco Volador when the pandemic struck, and wiped out any hope of touring the record. Instead they reworked material from the record for use scoring a film, and have now returned with last year’s Tableau album as a significantly different beast.That was evident all throughout this set in Glasgow, the final night of their UK tour. When they finally played a track from their first record Silver Dollar Moment, dropping in Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Whether grinding or eerie, bellicose or plaintive, the exquisite jazz- and classical-infused prog rock dirges disgorged by King Crimson over the last 54 years stand apart from the more accessible sounds made by their illustrious peers, including Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, Curved Air, and ELP. Given the discomfiting aesthetic of Crimson’s music – a fulminating anti-panacea, relentlessly modernistic – is it any wonder there was much misery in its making?Watching Toby Amies’s documentary In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 is an enthralling and often amusing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With Magpie Murders currently airing on BBC One, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? is another gem from the BritBox stable, where it made its debut last year. Its secret weapon is Hugh Laurie, who’s all over it as screenwriter, director and actor.Wisely, he has steered clear of the well-worked territory of Poirot and Miss Marple, and instead has adapted a Christie novel from 1934 which introduces us to a pair of amateur sleuths, Bobby Jones and Lady Francis Derwent (familiarly known as Frankie). However, Christie completists will doubtless already know that a previous ITV version of the story from Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Just before the encore, the crowd is finally warmed up and dancing. It took a while, but hands are now in the air, middle-aged bodies are shifting about, muscle memory of MDMA nights in the last century.The Hartnoll brothers are also jigging onstage silhouettes. The song, “Impact (The Earth is Burning)”, is from their second album, The Brown Album, as it’s known (because their first couple are just called Orbital). It’s come into its own in our age of environmental concern. Their backdrop film shows footage of our planet’s detritus floating in space… a triceratops… a shopping trolley. Greta Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Together or separately, British psychedelia and 1967’s related music have been ceaselessly looked at. There cannot be an awful lot more to say. Nonetheless, the law of diminishing returns is there for ignoring so herewith the follow-up to the 2016 box set Let’s Go Down & Blow Our Minds.Too Much Sun Will Burn - The British Psychedelic Sounds Of 1967 Volume 2 is – in keeping with its predecessor – a 79-track, four-hour clamshell set. Despite the crowded market, it's a great listen. Should an introduction to the territory be needed, the diligent Too Much Sun Will Burn does a mighty fine job. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Finding a fresh twist on the traditional detective mystery is virtually impossible, but Anthony Horowitz has made a bold stab at it with Magpie Murders. This TV adaptation (which appeared on the BritBox streaming platform last year) has been masterminded by Horowitz from his 2016 bestseller, which ingeniously features two interlocking stories, one set in the present day and one in the 1950s.Conleth Hill stars as bestselling crime novelist Alan Conway, a staggeringly wealthy but bitter and disappointed man. He struck it rich with his series of novels featuring the detective Atticus Pünd – Pünd Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The turbulence and agitation of betrayal could be felt from the word go in this galvanising performance of the St John Passion, which administered a jolting urgency to Bach’s radical portrayal of the Easter story. The work will be 300 years old next year, yet this Polyphony Good Friday performance – a fixture at St John’s Smith Square for slightly fewer years – delivered a version as fresh and discomfiting as if the crucifixion had taken place yesterday.That was in no small part due to Nick Pritchard (pictured below), who as the Evangelist narrated the story with a vibrancy that suggested he Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Eugene O’Hare’s The Dry House is the kind of spare but oddly lyrical three-hander that would have made a good Wednesday Play back in the day. For Conor McPherson fans, it will seem like familiar terrain, with all the ingredients for an unusual domestic drama. Think, one interior, probably a humble home or a pub, where a small cast sit and drink, talk, confess, drink some more. Some of them are dead. Here there are two earthbound characters, Chrissy (Mairead McKinley) and her sister Claire (Kathy Kiera Clarke of Derry Girls fame). Also popping in regularly is Chrissy’s late daughter Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Iceland’s soul lies in its interior, a forbidding heartland which overwhelms 19th century Danish priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) on his ill-considered posting to this colonial backwater.Director Hlynur Pálmason showed his talent for snapping unbending male psyches in a country of physical extremes in A White, White Day, a film as visceral as Scorsese in its riven machismo, Malick-like in its vaporous, uncanny landscapes, and wholly Icelandic in its saga-resembling trials and consequences.Simmering masculine conflict sharpens the brew here too, though both films are laced with humour. The Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
All the best sports movies are about more than just sport: the core might be friendship, romance, the battle against discrimination, the importance of following your dreams, of self-realisation and fulfilment, of fighting the corporate machine, of David v Goliath. Admirable themes, all. So, Air is a little different. While it may be mistaken for a sports movie – after all, it touches on the early years of legendary basketball player Michael Jordan – it actually isn’t. At the heart of Air, is money. Money is even more important in Air than it is in Moneyball Read more ...