Reviews
David Nice
There’s life in the old overture-concerto-symphony format yet – especially if the conductor not only shapes every phrase but takes care over the number of string players needed for each work, the soloist lives every bar of a concerto you thought you knew inside out, and the symphony is a relatively rare neighbour to another regularly on concert programmes.It would be foolhardy to claim that Prokofiev’s Sixth, his symphony of suffering, is better than the ever-fascinating Fifth, no straightforward warhorse, but it’s certainly more consistently dark and deep. The London Symphony Orchestra has Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s a chance – a slim one – that you haven’t seen Noises Off, Michael Frayn’s farce about a farce that, as legend has it with The Rocky Horror Show, must surely be going up somewhere in the world every day.If you’re in that minority, its origin story tells of Frayn observing the chaos backstage at one of his shows in 1970 and realising that things were a lot funnier there as actors desperately worked to get every entrance just right, than it was sitting in the stalls watching the shiny professionalism that emerged for the audience's amusement. The challenge for director, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Seventy-eight years ago, on January 27,1945, Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army. The iconic images of the ovens with charred skulls and emaciated survivors peering through barbed wire were filmed by Russian cameramen over the following weeks and not on the day itself. And from the very beginning, there was a degree of staging in what the world was shown.The troupe of children who marched between the electrified fences were dressed for the camera in the striped uniforms of adult prisoners, which they had never worn under the Nazis. The emotional power of those images – Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Imagine what would have happened if the young Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel were cabin-mates on a transatlantic liner. The Told by an Idiot company did just that, and the result is this show, a return visitor to the International Mime Festival, now bearing awards. This trip actually took place, in 1910, when Chaplin was hoping to break through in North America and Laurel (then known as Stanley Jefferson) was his understudy. The promoter of their show was Fred Krona, and it is he (played by Nick Haverson) we encounter first, an older man chewing on a cigar, in braces and boots, Read more ...
David Nice
The Castalian String Quartet is half what I remember, but only literally: while viola-player Charlotte Bonneton and cellist Christopher Graves may have departed, their replacements, Ruth Gibson and Steffan Morris, more than earned their laurels in last night’s stunning programme.There's another instance where half is just as good. The Castalians' Britten mini-series only highlights how we wish Britten had written twice as many numbered string quartets as he did – Bartók's half dozen allow for a bigger spead across a season – but who’s complaining when all three are masterpieces, and No Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A sprawling French-made drama set in the early days of the First World War in 1914, Women at War tells the stories of a quartet of female protagonists as they struggle to make sense of the mayhem which suddenly engulfs them. The series – its French title is Les Combattantes – was filmed in the photogenic Vosges region of eastern France and is set around the town of Saint-Paulin (also the name of a semi-soft French cheese, as it happens), which finds itself perilously close to the front line as the Germans invade.Fans of top French cop show Spiral will be delighted to see the flame-haired Read more ...
Alastair Davey
Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum & Library are displayed as a monumental survey of Spanish art from Antiquity to the 20th century. The new exhibition stands as testament to the extraordinary vision of its founder, Archer M Huntington.Son of the American industrialist and railroad magnate Collis P Huntington, Archer accompanied his parents’ trips to the continent, finding sanctuary in European museums from the age of 12. He wrote of his visit to the Louvre in 1882, "I knew nothing about pictures, but I knew instinctively that I was in a new world." His interest soon outgrew just Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
In full force again for 2023, Scotland’s premier folk music festival Celtic Connections is back with its signature strand of blending and sharing musical traditions. On Saturday, emerging Scottish folk cellist Juliette Lemoine gave a superb early evening recital in Glasgow City Hall’s intimate recital room for what was the official launch of her debut album Soaring.Her band comprised pianist Fergus McCreadie – who was recently nominated for the Mercury Music Prize with his jazz album Forest Floor – saxophonist Matt Carmichael and award-winning fiddler and jazz bassist Charlie Stewart on Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
At the arthouse end of contemporary dance no one expects a packed house, still less serial packed houses for more than a week. Yet Sadler’s Wells was fully confident when it invited the dancer-choreographer Jules Cunningham – one of its New Wave Associates – to premiere a new work on its main stage.The special draw was that Cunningham’s company of three included the artist formerly known as Mel C, extending her Sporty Spice credentials to a bid to be seen as a serious exponent of pared-down, glacially cool art-dance. Happy to report, she acquits herself extremely well in a work that pays no Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The 1997 release of Time Out of Mind was the resurrection of an artist who appeared to have wandered off the reservation some years before, lost in transit on his Never Ending Tour, trailed by an army of "Bobcats" who followed him for show after grinding show. “How can you stand it?” he once asked of a woman who told him she’d seen dozens of NET gigs.While set lists shifted like tidal sands from night to night, the performances ranged from the ragged and wildly unfamiliar to the singular and revelatory. After attending one of 1991’s woeful run of shows at Hammersmith Odeon during a bitter Read more ...
peter.quinn
Recorded in 2019, released in 2020, and winner of Album of the Year at the 2021 Parliamentary Jazz Awards, it was a delight to finally witness the launch of Callum Au and Claire Martin’s spectacular album of jazz standards and American Songbook classics, Songs and Stories, albeit three years later than planned.Written by Au especially for this concert, the swirling, shape-shifting counterpoint of orchestral opener “Murmurations” featured the first of a number of towering solos from saxist Nadim Teimoori (playing soprano here), with string harmonics and a tintinnabulating celeste emerging out Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
I can’t help enjoying the continuing elevation of the jazz pianist Oscar Peterson (1925-2007) to national monument status in Canada. A park or a square here (Montreal), a boulevard there (Mississauga), a school, a concert hall, a statue, a commemorative one-dollar coin. Now Barry Avrich’s 2021 documentary Oscar Peterson: Black + White, which is being released on DVD.It tells Peterson's story well. A wide range of archival footage, notably several interviews with the pianist, has been trawled, carefully assembled, and juxtaposed with new interviews and specially commissioned Read more ...